Page 11 - MaterialsTrial-JapaneseArmy-1950

tested on them.

Accused Karasawa testified:

"... I personally was present on two occasions at the Anta proving ground when the action
of bacteria was tested on human beings under field conditions. The first time I was there
towards the end of 1943. Some ten persons were brought to the proving ground, were tied to
stakes which had been previously driven into the ground five metres apart, and a
fragmentation bomb was exploded by electric current about 50 metres away from them. A
number of the experimentees were injured by bomb splinters and simultaneously, as I
afterwards learned, infected with anthrax, since the bomb was charged with these bacteria. . .
.

"The second time I visited the proving ground was in the spring of 1944; about ten people
were brought there, and, as on the first occasion, tied to stakes. A cylinder filled with plague
germs was then exploded at a distance of roughly ten metres from the experimentees." (Vol.
4, p. 42.)

Accused Nishi Toshihide who took part in similar criminal experiments at the Anta
proving ground, testified:

". . . In January 1945, in my presence, Lieutenant Colonel Ikari, Chief of the 2nd Division
of Detachment 731, and Futaki, a research official of this division, performed an experiment
at the detachment's proving ground near Anta Station in infecting ten Chinese war prisoners
with gas gangrene. The ten Chinese prisoners were tied to stakes from 10 to 20 metres apart,
and a bomb was then exploded by electricity. All ten were injured by shrapnel contaminated
with gas gangrene germs, and within a week they all died in severe torment." (Vol. 7, p. 113.)

The corpses of the victims were burned in a special incinerator which Detachment 731 had
built in close proximity to the prison.

Witnesses interrogated in the case, and the accused themselves, testified to the inhuman
torture, violence and outrages to which all who were sent as "experimental material" to the
torture chamber in the inner prison of Detachment 731 were subjected.

Witness Kurakazu stated:

". . . On each floor trjere were several rooms used as laboratories, and in the middle were
the cells where the experimentees, or 'logs,' as Sergeant Major Tasaka told me they were
called in the detachment, were kept.. .. I remember clearly that, in addition to Chinese, there
were Russians among the prisoners. In one cell I saw Chinese women. . . . All the people kept
in the cells had chains on their legs. . . . Three Chinese had no fingers, and in the case of
others, the finger bones could be seen. . .. Yoshimura told me that this was the result of
freezing experiments which he had been performing. ..." (Vol. 2, p. 371.)

Yamagishi, formerly deputy chief of the Japanese Hogoin camp, who was interrogated as a
witness, testified: "... I do not remember the names of all the people sent to Detachment 731

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