21. Getting Away With Mass Murder
Just before the Soviet Red Army conquered Manchuria in August of 1945, Shiro Ishii evacuated Unit 731 back to Japan. He destroyed most traces of his camps, and had all remaining prisoners, plus 600 workers, murdered. The Soviets nonetheless captured some documents, which they used in their own biological warfare program. After the war, American microbiologists deemed Ishii’s work “absolutely invaluable … [it] could never have been obtained in the United States because of scruples attached to experiments on humans“.
So he cut a deal to avoid prosecution, in exchange for sharing the results of his experiments with American biological warfare experts. Although Unit 731’s victims included American POWs, General Douglas MacArthur, who ran the occupation of Japan, officially denied the existence of any Japanese experiments upon Americans. Shiro Ishii lived as a free man, until his death in 1959 from throat cancer.
