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In his definitive chronicle of Japan’s biowarfare program, [Hal] Gold recounts how Japan’s charismatic surgeon general, Shirō Ishii, hijacked Japan’s blue-chip medical proficiencies, civilian physicians, medical journals and universities, diverting them to serve the so-called “death sciences” of weapons development.

Following the bioweapons culture’s affinity for innocuous euphemisms to disguise sinister purpose, Japan’s biowarfare division adopted the Orwellian title “Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department.”

The more accurate description of Unit 731’s principal proficiencies were poisoning water and causing epidemics.

Unit 731’s diabolical Commander Ishii made himself Japan’s version of Germany’s “Angel of Death,” Dr. Josef Mengele, and transformed occupied Manchuria into a nightmarish bioweapons hellhole during the Sino-Japanese War.

Unit 731 operated 4,500 incubators in Manchuria for breeding plague-infected fleas on rats and mice to disseminate various contagions. Back on the home front, Ishii’s Unit recruited Japanese farmers, soldiers, and youth corps members across Japan to capture and breed rats, and elderly men to ranch fleas on their bodies.

Detachment 731 researchers also used sick dogs to cultivate and spread cholera and ticks to spread hemorrhagic fever and poisoned wells with cholera.

Ishii field-tested bacteriological weapons by aerial dousings of civilian populations in occupied Chinese cities and towns. Ishii proved the efficacy of entomological weapons during highly successful plague attacks on Manchuria’s port city of Ningbo in October 1940, Unit 731 dropped ceramic barrels filled with plague-laden fleas. Within days, residents were dying in droves.

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The physicians of Unit 731 moved in with stretchers, pretending to offer treatment — but instead, removed the patients to field laboratories disguised as treatment centers and dissected them alive. Buoyed by the successful massacre at Ningbo, the Japanese dropped germ bombs carrying typhoid and cholera on over seventy Chinese communities — including eleven major cities — killing approximately five hundred thousand civilians.

Dr. Friedrich Frischknecht, professor of Integrative Parasitology at Heidelberg University and the Department of Parasitology at the Institut Pasteur, observed that the casualties mounted after cessation of hostilities: “Some of the epidemics they caused persisted for years and continued to kill more than 30,000 people in 1947, long after the Japanese surrendered.”

The “Special Handling” unit of Japan’s feared elite intelligence agency, the Kenpeitai, functioned as Unit 731’s “Human Materials Procurement Unit.” At night, the Kenpeitai raided city streets and emptied jails across occupied Manchuria to conscript “volunteers” for bioweapons experiments. The recruiters bound these prisoners’ arms and hips, and shipped them in boxcars to a walled city of 150 buildings housing thousands of test subjects on a six-square-kilometer proving ground in a remote village, Pingfang, in the Harbin district.

The compound included a camp for prisoners of war called the Zhongma Prison Camp. The involuntary subjects, according to Japanese sources, “were mostly Chinese prisoners, some Russians and, as one Japanese participant put it, some miscellaneous ‘half-breeds.’”

After the war, Moscow reported that Unit 731 also used American war prisoners as guinea pigs. Eyewitnesses reported viewing the bodies of deceased American servicemen preserved in large pickle jars, beside soldiers and civilians of diverse nationalities, on display in the specimen room of Unit 731’s massive headquarters in Pingfang.

The Japanese biowarfare units took special care to keep their trial subjects able-bodied and well-fed, since experiments sought to test efficacy of deadly germs on healthy populations.

Healthy subjects

Nazi doctors also demanded healthy subjects for their experimentation. On November 15, 1943, for example, German virus expert and vaccine creator Dr. Eugen Haagen, a key developer in the covert Nazi bioweapons program, sent a scolding letter to a university administrator complaining that of the one hundred prisoners sent to his lab in a recent delivery, eighteen had died in transport and only twelve were “in a condition suitable for my experiments.”

He requested “another 100 prisoners, between twenty and forty years of age, who are healthy and in a physical condition comparable to soldiers. Heil Hitler.”

In Japan, healthy, plump Chinese, Manchurian, and Russian guinea pigs — men, women, children, and infant civilians — awaited death in 1,000 cages from where they would, when ordered, extend their arms into adjacent corridors to receive inoculations from syringes filled with teeming pathogens administered by roving squads of physicians and scientists.

The injections included a long menu of infectious diseases with weapons potential: bubonic plague, anthrax, cholera, gangrene, typhoid, tuberculosis, syphilis, gonorrhea, dysentery, smallpox, and botulism.

A few hours — or perhaps days — later, an extraction team would bind these subjects to surgery tables, stuff towels in their mouths to suppress screams, dissect them alive, and harvest their organs for further study.

The pace of research kept three incinerators in operation to eliminate eviscerated bodies, with chemical baths waiting to destroy charred bone fragments. There were no survivors. The military liquidated every single patient utilized in research.

Following Japan’s surrender, Shirō Ishii presided over the massacre of the few surviving prisoners and razed the facility to destroy evidence of the atrocities prior to the arrival of Russian forces. As many as ten thousand subjects died in the camps, with three thousand killed during experimentation and live vivisections.

The Japanese occupiers told local Chinese and ethnic Russian Manchurians that the vast industrial complex that suddenly appeared in rural Pingfang was a lumber factory. In a dark joke, the human subjects became “logs.”

In controlled open-air experiments, physicians and their assistants tied Russian and Chinese men, children, and women — often with their infants — to stakes in open fields. Ishii’s men would then detonate flea-laden bug bombs. After waiting the four days needed for bubonic plague — or some other deadly contagion — to incubate in the bodies of these “logs,” the civilian physicians dissected their victims alive at various stages of infection to observe the living viscera before harvesting organs for shipment to medical schools and pharmaceutical companies.

In addition to injecting test subjects with lethal pathogens, Japanese researchers — mainly civilian physicians from Japan’s most prominent medical schools — killed “logs” with dehydration, poison, and starvation, or in sadistic amputation experiments similar to experiments Dr. Mengele and his henchmen were conducting in Germany.

Some five thousand miles distant from each other, German and Japanese doctors froze men, women, and infants to death in ice water, or outdoors during the subzero Manchurian and Eastern European winters, to study frostbite. They froze the limbs of living “volunteers” in special freezers until their bones shattered and the flesh dropped off.

Japanese doctors gassed prisoners with a wide variety of toxic vapors outdoors and in enclosures, and forced men infected with venereal diseases to rape female prisoners before performing living vivisections on both parties.

Physicians at Unit 731’s Harbin laboratory shipped the extracted body parts by plane to Ishii’s Epidemic Prevention Research Laboratory in Tokyo for distribution to academic and research institutions and pharmaceutical companies throughout Japan.

The arrangement allowed civilian physicians, researchers, and scholars to study hemorrhagic fever, bubonic plague, cholera, and other diseases that did not exist in Japan. The resultant research by thousands of Japan’s leading university physicians and professors kept Japan at the forefront of infectious disease expertise globally.

Ishii’s fleet of organ transport planes returned to Manchuria from Tokyo loaded with hundreds of thousands of rats for ranching the fleas that would fill the ceramic bug bombs with which Dr. Ishii delivered weaponized bubonic plague, hemorrhagic fever, and cholera.

To further embroil Japan’s major medical schools and academic research institutes, Ishii recruited thousands of professors and PhD students — “the brightest minds from Japan” — who flocked to Ishii’s Manchurian death camp to take advantage of unique research opportunities and for career advancement.

Just as many Americans now revere Anthony Fauci, wartime Japanese lauded Ishii’s Epidemic Prevention Unit as the global apex of cutting-edge science and Ishii as a medical deity.

Ishii’s rarified status made it easy to recruit the most promising medical students and preeminent Japanese medical and scientific authorities into the dark enterprise. Like Anthony Fauci, the government allowed Ishii to collect royalties on technologies that he developed while performing his duties. Ishii became wealthy from sales of his water purification device to private companies and the Japanese military.

Ishii explicitly exhorted Japan’s leading doctors to abandon the physicians’ traditional ethical codes:

Our God-given mission as doctors is to challenge all varieties of disease-causing micro-organisms; to block all roads of intrusion into the human body; to annihilate all foreign matter resident in our bodies; and to devise the most expeditious treatment possible. However, the research work upon which we are now about to embark is the complete opposite of these principles, and may cause us some anguish as doctors. Nevertheless, I beseech you to pursue this research, based on the dual thrill of 1) a scientist to exert efforts in probing for the truth in natural science and research into, and discovery of, the unknown world and 2) as a military person, to successfully build a powerful military weapon against the enemy.

Some twenty thousand physicians, researchers, and workers took part in Ishii’s bioweapons research project. Only a small percentage of Unit 731’s research staff were active military. Most were civilian physicians and researchers from academia.

In this way, Unit 731 co-opted the bulk of Japan’s medical community — civilian, military, and academic — away from healing and into weapons production and the death sciences, and implicated them in criminal atrocities, including human experimentation and bioweapons development.

Virtually all the Japanese doctors involved in Ishii’s research were aware of the savage brutality of Ishii’s human experimentation, Dr. Ishii and Japanese military instructed physicians and nurses, police and youth squad helpers to keep mum about their dirty work and to tell the world that they were developing vaccines. And they obeyed.

Gold notes that Ishii and the army of academic scientists used “aggressive salesmanship” to persuade the public and the world that they were engaged in defensive bioweapons and vaccine development — the same propaganda strategy that the American biosecurity cartel and its modern czar, Anthony Fauci, later adopted.

But Gold points out that “it seems clear that there was nothing defensive about Unit 731. The only thing remotely defensive about it was [the] strident tone of the argument with which Ishii justified its existence.”

Academics also conspired with the leading Japanese medical journals to mask their scholarly papers under pretense of vaccine development, epidemic prevention, and defensive biowarfare. Japanese academies used the term “monkeys” — without a species designation — in their published scientific papers as a euphemism for human subjects who were sacrificed during the experiment. Professor Tsuneishi Keiichi explained this ruse:

Failure to identify the species of an animal in an experiment lowers the value of the paper reporting its results. Where monkeys were actually used, it was common practice to identify the type. Thus, it was an open secret that the simple and unscientific use of the term “monkey” by itself was a code which meant that the subjects were human. The medical community knew this. The journal knew this. The readiness with which [Lieutenant General Kitano Masaji] publicized this transparent sham — and its acceptance by Japan’s medical community at large — is a sad testament to the lack of conflict between the ethical standards of the medical world in Japan and those of Unit 731.

Every medical school, regulatory agency, medical bureaucracy, medical journal, and virtually every research physician in Japan became complicit in the atrocities. The omertà [Mafia’s code of silence] by the Japanese medical professionals was strikingly similar to the Third Reich’s human experimentation.

In his book, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William Shirer points out that virtually every physician in Germany complied with the program and there is no record of a single complaint by a physician or medical association.

Although the “experiments” were conducted by fewer than two hundred murderous quacks — albeit some of them held eminent posts in the medical world — their criminal work was known to thousands of leading physicians of the Reich, not a single one of whom, so far as the record shows, ever uttered the slightest public protest.

Furthermore, Hitler’s government adopted policies to systematically eliminate physically handicapped and intellectually disabled subgroups — the so-called “useless eaters.” German law required doctors to identify all of their patients who were eligible for this program. Germany’s doctors complied, generally with enthusiasm. These programs implicated Germany’s leading physicians, medical institutes, and individual doctors as collaborators in Nazi atrocities.

As in Japan, the Reich’s bioweapons effort succeeded in recruiting the nation’s most illustrious and respected medical luminaries. Among those bioweaponeers who enjoyed international renown before Hitler’s rise to power were Germany’s Surgeon General Walter Schreiber, who supervised the Reich’s vaccine research; Deputy Surgeon General Dr. Kurt Blome, who directed bioweapons development; and Dr. Eugen Haagen, a key developer of Hitler’s biowarfare program.

While working for the Rockefeller Foundation in New Jersey in 1932, Haagen helped develop the yellow fever vaccine, an accomplishment that made him a contender for the Nobel Prize in 1937. Five years later, he was conducting deadly vaccine experiments on humans under Heinrich Himmler.

Marveling at these doctors’ dramatic metamorphosis from healing to homicide, Annie Jacobsen, author of Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program That Brought Nazi Scientists to America, asks if “Nazi science . . . made monsters of these men?” The broad collapse of medical ethics among the entire generation of war-era Japanese and German physicians presaged parallel lapses among US and European doctors involved with bioweapons research and “defensive” vaccine research.

The COVID pandemic exposed this troubling phenomenon to the public eye, raising disturbing questions about the tendency of bioweapons and associated vaccine research to turn moral medical professionals into sociopaths.

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A dark profession

One of the costs of engaging in a bioweapons arms race is the moral damage to the entire society as medicine and its practitioners turn away from health and against humanity. Perhaps the most enduring legacy of Ishii and the Nazi doctors is the indelible imprint of their moral myopia on the US bioweapons and vaccine programs.

As I show in The Real Anthony Fauci and as many Americans learned during the COVID pandemic, once doctors stop practicing medicine and become agents of state policy, it’s inevitable that the government will quickly make them instruments of social control. Doctors who pursue the lure invariably betray their deeply held values and often become the enemies of their own patients and humanity at large.

Ishii, Schreiber, and the others demonstrated how the rubric of “national security” can override even the most sacred moral precepts upon which a society rests — including the moral prohibitions against human experimentation and the wholesale murder of noncombatants, innocent civilians, and vulnerable minorities “for the greater good.”

In every nation that devoted resources to the field, the bioweapons enterprise has caused the wholesale subversion of traditional ethics across the medical profession. One of the most striking and consistent features of “biosecurity” is its tendency to divert national medical establishments from their ethical credo and to transform competent medical doctors and regulators who have previously committed their lives to healing disease and saving lives into dark necromancers, mass murderers, and diabolical enthusiasts for ghoulish human experimentation.

Like Ishii and Schreiber, Dr. Fauci rose to run an all-powerful bureaucracy and to enjoy vast political power and a deified national reputation. As did Schreiber and Ishii, the NIAID chief has given overriding priority to industry profits and the military applications of infectious disease research in ways that inevitably subverted his agency’s public health program.

Like Ishii and Schreiber, Dr. Fauci masks his bioweapons research behind the veil of vaccine development and the smokescreen of national security. Like them, he has mastered the mechanisms for controlling the medical journals and the mainstream press, co-opting the leading academics and medical associations, and made the nation’s most prominent scientists, doctors, and medical schools complicit in serious wrongdoing. He has advanced national security concerns to drown out ethical precepts against human experimentation and population-wide experiments.

Like them, he launched a world-wide search for pathogens with weapons potential under the masquerade of pandemic prevention.

And like them, when the jig was up, he engaged in elaborate efforts to escape blame or accountability for his experiments gone wrong.

The Defender on occasion posts content related to Children’s Health Defense’s nonprofit mission that features Mr. Kennedy’s views on the issues CHD and The Defender regularly cover. In keeping with Federal Election Commission rules, this content does not represent an endorsement of Mr. Kennedy, who is on leave from CHD and is seeking the Independent party nomination for president of the U.S.