Page 21 - Marutas of Unit 731

ever y year in the detachment, in the coldest months of the year—November,
December, Januar y and Februar y. e exper imental technique was as

follows: the test subjects were taken out into the frost at about 11 o’clock at

night, compelled to dip their hands into a barrel of cold water and forced to

stand with wet hands in the frost for a long time. Alter natively, some were

taken out dressed, but with bare feet and compelled to stand at night in the

frost during the coldest period of the year. When frostbite had developed,
the subjects were taken to a room and forced to put their feet in water of 5

degrees Celsius, aer which the temperature was gradually increased.”

Witness Kurakazu, who was Sergeant Major in Unit 731 from 1940 and

taken prisoner in August 1945 by the Soviet Troop in Harbin, stated on

August 8, 1939 during the Khabarovsk Trial, “I saw exper iments per formed
on living people for the rst time in December 1940. I was shown thes e

st
experiments by researcher Yoshimura, a member of the 1 Division. ese
experiments were performed in the prison laborator y. When I walked into

the prison laborator y, ve Chinese exper imentees were sitting there; two of

these Chinese had no ngers at all, their hands were black; in those of three
others the bones were visible. ey had ngers, but they were only bones.

[12]
Yoshimura told me that this was the result of freezing exper iments.”
According to Major Karasawa during the Khabarovsk Trial, Ishii was

curious about using plague as weapons in war and captured plague infected

mice to test on subjects in the Zhong Ma complex. “Ishii told me that he had
experimented with cholera and plague on the mounted bandits of

Manchuria during 1933-1934 and discovered that the plague was e ective.”

According to Lt. General Endo Saburo’s diar y entr y on November 16,

1933 at the Zhong Ma complex, “ e second squad which was responsible

for poison gas, liquid poison; and the First Squad which was responsible for