Heath, Tim The Nazi and Japanese Human Experimentation Programmes. Biological War Crimes during WW2

Among the most horrific atrocities committed during the Second World War were undoubtedly the medical and military experiments on humans, both living and dead. The various Nazi human experimentation programmes were initially carried out not so much in pursuit of a particular scientific discipline, but primarily as a result of the Third Reich's obsession with ethnicity and eugenics. However, this criminal sub-discipline of the Nazi fascination with its distorted racial ideologies was excused by many Nazi doctors and their helpers as merely collateral damage. Germany's ally, the Japanese Empire, notorious for its cruelty and sadism, maintained its own independent human experimentation programmes, such as Unit 731, in which people were not only subjected to the most horrific abuse, but also injected with cocktails of poison and/or disease, and in some cases dissected while fully conscious, without anaesthesia being administered first. It can be said that throughout the Second World War, both the Third Reich and Imperial Japan had a more or less inexhaustible supply of human guinea pigs for their cruel endeavours in the field of medical human experimentation. These unfortunate souls were mostly inmates of concentration camps or, in the case of the Japanese, the indigenous population of the countries they conquered, as well as British, American, Indian and Australian prisoners of war held by the Allies... But what was the real purpose of these so-called experiments and what requirements, if any, were they supposed to fulfil? And is there evidence that Germany and the Japanese Empire co-operated in the collection of data as part of these cruel experiments? Another aspect examined in this thesis is the question of why the Japanese doctors involved in human experimentation and medical torture were spared war crimes charges even though the evidence against them was clear and overwhelming? And is it true that the Allied powers profited from the material obtained through interrogations at the end of the Second World War? This work is an attempt to analyse all these factors within the framework of a single volume, using the testimony of perpetrators and victims from numerous new first-hand and archival sources, and is a chilling and sobering reminder of man's capacity for inhumanity at the hands of two of the worst military regimes in the history of the 20th century.