The Lethal Activities

There was no conscious, no compassion, no humanity and no sense of ethics in the methods and experiments made by the Unit 731. It was a place were death was routinely met. People used for the experiments were gathered from the surrounding population, and they were usually called "logs".  They took out criminals, anti-Japanese partisans, political prisoners, infants, the elderly, and pregnant women in order to perform their inhuman experiments.

The most common activities performed by Unit 731 were:

Vivisection: First they infected the prisoner with a disease. Once the disease spread throughout the body, scientists performed an invasive surgery while prisoners were still alive, mostly without using anesthesia, in order to analyze how the infection attacked the central organs.  Also, prisoners had their limbs amputated in order to study the blood loss and the effects of untreated gangrene in the body.

Germ Warfare Attacks: Prisoners were infected with venereal diseases such as syphilis and gonorrhea in order to study the effects. What is worse, scientists spread viruses in the surrounding villages in order to study the effects caused by the plagues in the population. Some examples of these viruses are Anthrax and Cholera.

Testing Weapons: They used prisoners as targets in order to test grenades, explosive chemical-bombs, chemical weapons and even flamethrowers.

 There were other not so known-experiments performed by the Unit 731 such as:

- Injecting air into the prisoner's blood stream in order to determine the time it took for the bubble of air to get to the heart and produce a heart attack.

- Injecting horse urine to prisoners' kidneys.

- Depriving prisoners of food and water in order to determine the time it takes for them to die of starvation.

- Placing prisoners in high-pressure chambers until death.

- Exposing prisoners to lethal doses of x-rays.