Archaeologists have unearthed a derelict “terror” bunker in China that was used by Japanese scientists to conduct heinous biological experiments during World War II, including subjecting victims to dehydration, frostbite and anthrax bombs.
The subterranean torture chamber has been known about for nearly eight decades but its existence wasn’t confirmed until now.
“It [the facility] highlights the ongoing legacy of Unit 731’s atrocities and their impact on global efforts to prevent biological warfare,” said a researcher with the Heilongjiang Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, which discovered the notorious testing site near Anda in Heilongjiang province, the South China Morning Post reported.
Built in 1941, the U-shaped structure measured 108 feet long and 67 feet wide and comprised a labyrinthine network of interconnected rooms and tunnels.
These included what archaeologists believe to be laboratories, dissection rooms and holding cells for human guinea pigs.
Indeed, the covert torture chamber is thought to be the largest and best-equipped testing site used by the Japanese Imperial Army Unit 237, a notorious biological warfare unit responsible for some of the most appalling experiments in history.
From 1935 until the Japanese surrender in 1945, this infamous group used Chinese, Korean, Russian and American POWs for gruesome biological and chemical warfare experiments.
These included exposing subjects to grenades and chemical weapons, spinning them to death inside centrifuges, vivisecting them sans painkillers and even imprisoning people in low-pressure chambers until their eyeballs exploded, Live Science reported.
Unit 731 also bred plague-infected fleas, which were then released over Chinese cities via plane, sparking disease epidemics that killed hundreds of thousands of people.
During the Shenyang war crimes tribunal in 1956, former Unit 731 commander Sakaki Hayao described one “especially brutal” experiment, in which victims were strapped to wooden polls and strafed with anthrax bombs to gauge the efficacy of weaponized microbes.
All told, over 12,000 men, women and children perished as a result of these grotesque tests.
These coincidentally occurred concurrently with similarly lurid experiments carried out by sadistic Nazi doctor Josef Mengele inside Auschwitz who subjected prisoners to dissection, infections and more to demonstrate the “superiority” of the Aryan race.
In order to keep their experiments safe, Unit 731 outfitted the “horror bunker” with defense mechanisms worthy of a missile silo.
The test field was ringed by barbed wire while all the laboratories, dissection bunkers, barracks and other facilities were located below ground to defend them against discovery and air raids.
As a final prophylactic measure ahead of the Japanese surrender in 1945, Unit 731 destroyed the facility to hide all the evidence of their experiments.
Not only that, but the war criminals went largely unpunished as following their surrender, the US’ General Douglas MacArthur granted them immunity from prosecution and denied any knowledge of the crimes in exchange for the data, the SCMP reported.
Archaeologists hope that the discovery of the “terror” bunker will help bring the atrocities back into the spotlight.
They plan to carry out further excavations with the aim of generating a more accurate blueprint of the facility’s layout.
