Page 91 - Marutas of Unit 731

Chapter 8

Overall Advance from the

Laboratory Creations

In the Ishii Network, effectiveness of vaccines was tested on the plentiful
supply of prisoners on which to per form tests. Japanese researchers chose a

large group of prisoners, vaccinated some of them, infected the whole group

with the corresponding diseases, and obser ved the results, i.e. the death or

severe illness of the control group which was not vaccinated. Most of the

time with these vaccine testing exper iments led to the death of the entire
group. Prior to cremation, the bodies under went pathological and

anatomical inspection. e research continued with a new batch of

prisoners; researchers strongly believed their strateg y re ected proof since

results were based on human exper imentation rather than theoret ical. At the

Khabarovsk Trial, witness Furuichi testi ed about his research exper ience
administering vaccines. As a medical orderly at Branch 643 working in a

research group studying pathogenic germs, he later was captured by the

Soviet Army on August 17, 1945.

In his recollection, “… at the end of 1943. To test the e ectiveness of

vaccines, 50 Chinese and Manchurians were used as exper imental mater ial.
First, these 50 men were given preventive inoculations, but thes e were

differentiated inoculations—some prisoners were given one, others were

given two. Furthermore, different men were inoculated with different

quantities of vaccine and some of the 50 men were not inoculated at all.