When Doctors Became Killers: The Story of Unit 731
I want to start today with a building. Not a famous building. You won’t find it in architecture books or tourist guides. In fact, for most of the twentieth century, the people who built it did everything in their power to make sure you’d never hear about it at all. This building was located on a flat plain near the city of Harbin in what is now northeastern China. It was the size of a small town. It had laboratories, dormitories, an airfield, and a prison block. It employed at its peak up to five thousand people — many of them some of the finest-trained medical scientists in Japan . So what was this place? Officially, it was called the Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army. Sounds almost noble, doesn’t it? Preventing epidemics. Purifying water. But it was a lie. A deliberate, bureaucratic lie. Because what happened inside that compound between 1936 and 1945 was not the prevention of disease. It was the...