I believe that the United Stated government did not do the
right thing. Unit 731 was doing very inhumane things and the United States did
nothing to stop it. Yet they executed Nazis for crimes against humanity. It doesn’t
make any sense that they would punish one group, but not the other. Unit 731
and the Nazis were doing similar things but I think that Unit 731 was even
worse.
Unit
731 was under the control of a man named Shiro Ishii. The Unit tortured their
prisoners with medical experiments, but the person being experimented on was hardly
ever under anesthetics because it was believed that anesthetics would change
the outcome of the experiment. What they did to people was very inhumane and
they seemed to not even care about what they had done and showed almost no
remorse. I don’t understand how anyone could ever torture a human and not feel
like they are doing something wrong or that it is inhumane.
They
called the prisoners “logs” because Unit 731 was supposed to be a lumber mill
from the government’s point of view and to the general public. They did a
plethora of experiments on their prisoners. A few experiments include the
following: hanging the logs upside down and seeing how long it takes for them
to choke to death, injecting horse urine into the log’s kidneys, cut off limbs
to study blood loss, cut off limbs and then stitched them on to the opposite side,
placing the logs into highly pressured rooms until their eyes popped out, and
much more. As you can see, their medical experiments were not humane. The only
thing they did humanely was feed them and keep them exercised.
While
reading the article, I found a few things quite interesting. I found it weird
that when people were talking about what they did to the logs, they didn’t seem
to feel bad or wish they could undo it. They talk about it as though it is
normal. I wonder if any of them wish they could take it back. I also wonder if
they felt bad at the time they were doing all of this or if they really thought
it was okay to treat other humans so poorly. I could never imagine to be doing
that to people, let alone be the person who is getting tortured and/or killed.
I can’t
believe that the United States government let them get away with killing so
many people without punishment and yet put a stop to the Nazis. It really isn’t
fair if you think about it. I mean yes, I am glad that they got rid of the
Nazis, but they shouldn’t have let the Unit 731 people go. I also can’t believe
that I had never known about this until today. Why don’t we learn about it history
books? Why is this subject avoided?
I think
the reason the United States didn’t execute the Unit 731 people was because
they wanted the biological findings for themselves. So instead of destroying
the Unit and executing the people, they got the information for them so that
the United States wouldn’t have to do any experimenting. Now as much as I don’t
think that’s right, I do think it was smart. Besides the fact they let hundreds
of criminals free to live luxurious lives.
Overall,
what Shiro did was definitely not humane and I do not agree with anything he
did to those innocent people. The United States only let them go in order to
gain more biological information for themselves. But it is unfair that the
Nazis were convicted of crimes against humanity and Unit 731 was not. Let’s
just hope that history doesn’t repeat itself.
