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Inside Japan's WW2 'horror bunker' where evil scientists cut prisoners open alive in dissection rooms and kept them in low-pressure chambers until their eyeballs exploded
In hidden underground laboratories in a field ringed by barbed wire fencing, the Japanese Imperial Army's Unit 731 conducted horrifying human experiments which remained a secret to the outside world for decades.
Chinese, Korean, Russian and American prisoners who entered the Unit 731's camps during World War II were killed while being used as human guinea pigs for some of history's most depraved war crimes.
More than 12,000 innocent people were killed in the most savage ways imaginable - dissected alive, infected with deadly viruses like typhoid and cholera, raped and used for target practice with flamethrowers and even 'plague bombs'.
The sadistic experiments also included keeping inmates inside low-pressure chambers until their eyeballs burst or being injected with animal blood before their torturers sliced them open alive.
While there have been unconfirmed reports about the subterranean torture chamber for nearly eight decades, archaeologists have only recently unearthed the derelict 'horror bunker' containing evidence of the most heinous crimes.
An aerial view of the Anda test site where archaeologists have located an underground biological weapons research bunker used by the Japanese military's Unit 731 in World War II
The Anda site (pictured above) was used by Unit 731 to conduct horrifying germ warfare experiments until 1945
Disturbing pictures of Unit 731's crimes shows how Japanese scientists carrying out a vivisection (pictured above) - a dissection of a live human being without anesthetics
A file photo disclosed by Chinese experts in August, 2002, shows Japanese troops from Unit 731 conducting a frostbite experiment on a live Chinese person on a stretcher in the Heilongjiang province in 1941 during World War II
The U-shaped bunker's labyrinthine network of interconnected rooms researchers believe to be laboratories, dissection rooms and holding cells as well as tunnels stretched over a length of 108 feet and a width of 67 feet - hidden 5 feet underground.
The facility near the city of Anda, in the Heilongjiang province in north China, was built in 1941 and was used by Unit 731 to test new biological weapons on human subjects during Japan's occupation of China from 1931 to 1945.
Bunkers like this one were used to contain and control the spread of infectious agents.
Researchers believe that inmates were also brought there for observation and dissection after they were either deliberately infected with a disease or exposed to chemical agents.
The experiments reportedly also included dehydrating the prisoners, killing them inside spinning centrifuges, injecting them with horse blood, zapping them with powerful X-rays and keeping them inside low-pressure chambers until their eyes exploded.
Historical records show that the Anda bunker on the heavily guarded field was Unit 731's largest, best equipped and most frequently used test site, with just a few outbuildings like warehouses, a runway and bombing targets visible overground.
'[The facility] highlights the ongoing legacy of Unit 731's atrocities and their impact on global efforts to prevent biological warfare,' a researcher from the Heilongjiang Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology told the South China Morning Post.
The archaeologists have not yet entered the remains of the bunker, which - along with other buildings at the prison camp site in Anda - was partially destroyed by Unit 731 in August 1945 to erase evidence of the horrifying experiments.
'Most of the surface buildings were destroyed except for the runway,' the researchers explained in their report published in May 2023.
They found the location of the 'terror' chambers after starting their investigation in 2019, using geological prospecting, drilling and excavation.
They plan on doing a full excavation in the hopes of finding more evidence of the despicable crimes committed by Unit 731.
Wooden outbuildings like these barns were the only overground structures visible on the Anda test field
Pictured above are members of Unit 731 conducting a biological warfare exercise on the south bank of the Songhua River in the Heilongjiang province near capital Harbin
The picture shows a schematic diagram of the field experiment at the Anda Special Experimental Field
Unit 731 dropped bacterial bombs filled with anthrax, some fragments of which can be seen above
Overseeing all of these unspeakable acts at Unit 731's was Dr Death - Shiro Ishii - a charismatic surgeon and ultra-nationalist fanatic who is considered the architect of the atrocities.
Army surgeon Ishii established the biological warfare research unit in 1936 to conduct research into germ warfare, weapons capabilities and the limits of the human body.
He did so with significant government funds and the blessing of Emperor Hirohito, who approved the policies and methods set out to him, some of which his brother witnessed first-hand.
Ishii arrived in Manchuria, modern-day China, not long after the occupation forces, and set to work building his empire of death.
A town called Ping Fan, 75 miles away from Anda, was selected as the headquarters and main prison camp site for Unit 731 - a far bigger and more secure site than previous camps which had been shut down after their secrecy was compromised.
In the surrounding town, the Japanese occupiers would not permit the construction of buildings high enough to glimpse the violence going on within the compound walls.
'None of the people around here had any idea what the real purpose of the facility was,' researcher Han Xiao said.
'It was the secret of all secrets - trains could only pass with their curtains drawn; the Air Force would shoot down any plane that came too close.'
Once set up, military police began to hunt down victims for the unit's experiments - many of whom were Chinese civilians including children. The army also sent Russian, British and American POWs there.
The inmates were deliberately kept healthy, fed on a diet of rice, meat, fish and even alcohol on occasion, so their bodies would be in good condition for the experiments to begin.
When one Imperial army general inspected the unit, supposedly set up to help Japan's war effort, he shared his disgust at its activities, writing about what he saw.
Members of a Japanese germ warfare unit (like Unit 731) in Yiwu, Zhejiang Province in eastern China, in June 1942
Staff carrying out bacteriological tests on babies and small children - directed by the Japanese Army Unit 731 - in November 1940
Shiro Ishii was a charismatic surgeon and ultra-nationalist who is considered the architect of the now notorious death camp's atrocities
'It was said that it was for national defence purposes, but the experiments were performed with appalling brutality and the dead were burned in high-voltage electric furnaces, leaving no trace,' he wrote in his memoir.
The level of dehumanisation was such that the victims were called 'marutas' by their captors - Japanese for wooden logs.
Also named the Togo Unit, after Ishii's favourite war hero whose name he adopted as an alias, the facility acted as a factory for his morbid fantasies.
He and his staff employed gruesome tactics to secure specimens of certain organs for their experiments, according to historian Sheldon H Harris.
'If Ishii or one of his co-workers wished to do research on the human brain, then they would order the guards to find them a useful sample,' he wrote in his book Factories of Death.
'A prisoner would be taken from his cell. Guards would hold him while another guard would smash the victim's head open with an ax. His brain would be extracted and rushed immediately to the laboratory.
'The body would then be whisked off to the pathologist, and then to the crematorium for the usual disposal.'
Vivisections were common practice, especially on pregnant women, many of whom were pregnant by rape.
Former workers revealed what they saw - and even did themselves - decades later, like an unnamed former medical assistant at Unit 731, who is now in his 70s, told the New York Times in 1995 about the first time he cut open a live man.
'The fellow knew that it was over for him, and so he didn't struggle when they led him into the room and tied him down,' he said. 'But when I picked up the scalpel, that's when he began screaming.
'I cut him open from the chest to the stomach, and he screamed terribly, and his face was all twisted in agony. He made this unimaginable sound, he was screaming so horribly. But then finally he stopped.
'This was all in a day's work for the surgeons, but it really left an impression on me because it was my first time.'
Inmates also had limbs amputated and organs removed before the depraved surgeons reattached their body parts - often in the wrong place - to see the effects.
Germ warfare experiments were also a key part of Unit 731, with Ishii and his henchmen breeding lethal strains of viruses to wipe out the Chinese population.
Remains of germ warfare victims is discovered in Nanjing, east China's Jiangsu Province, in August, 1998. Invading Japanese troops set up 60 germ warfare units like Unit 731, with one of the biological weapons ones conducting experiments in Nanjing
A human 'subject', seemingly a young Chinese civilian, is subjected to an unknown form of bacteriological test at Unit 731
The effects of various remedies were tested on their frostbitten limbs, which were also painfully heated up by the sick surgeons as they tested the effects on victims
Enough germs were created to kill everyone on earth many times over, according to reports, with 300 kilos of plague bacteria were produced every month, 500 kilos of anthrax, and nearly a tonne of dysentery and cholera.
Children were fed chocolates laced with anthrax and biscuits infected with bubonic plague, while older inmates were given typhoid-infected dumplings and drinks.
Thirty teenagers from Harbin, Heilongjiang province, died after being given typhoid-contaminated lemonade, according to a report in the Sydney Morning Herald looking back at the horrors of what it called 'Asia's Auschwitz'.
Some prisoners were locked in cages in the same room as plague-infected mice and fleas to figure out how long it took for the inmates to become infected.
Once they had the disease, the evil scientists would cut them open alive to study how the disease affected living organs.
Another atrocity saw men infected with syphilis and then forced to rape other inmates, with the stated purpose of the torture to see how the disease was transmitted.
Women were forcibly impregnated for them and their babies to be used in these experiments.
While babies were born in Unit 731, all of the hundreds of prisoners who were alive when Japan surrendered at the end of the war were murdered and buried as the imperial army tried to cover up its crimes.
Sworn to secrecy by the Japanese Imperial Army, veteran Hideo Shimizu carried the horrors he saw at the notorious Unit 731 facility with him for more than 70 years.
Disturbing images show how Chinese civilians and allied POWs were dissected alive and infected with the plague
Unit 731 soldiers are pictured digging near Ping Fan, likely as part of their evil human experiments
The of the Japanese Unit 731 in Harbin, Heilongjiang, which was opened to the public to mark the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II
The 93-year-old was just 14 when he was drafted as a cadet to the city of Harbin, in what was then Japanese-occupied Manchuria, during World War II.
There, he was groomed to take part in some of history's worst atrocities. Decades on, innocent pictures of his grandchildren and great-grandchildren reminded Shimizu of the faces of the many victims he came across in the slaughterhouse.
Now a retired architect who built a comfortable life for himself and his family, Shimizu tried to bury his dark past, not even revealing it to his closest relatives.
But the memories of his former life came flooding back when he and his wife visited a war museum back in 2015.
He was unable to contain his emotions when he saw a photo among the relics of a large brick building - the Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army, or Unit 731.
He found himself telling his wife everything he knew about the building, and finally admitted that his knowledge was first-hand as he had been a member of the biological warfare unit himself.
The covert operation of Unit 731 was run originally under the guise of a lumber mill, then a water purification plant, but in reality it was human flesh rather than lumber the sick scientists were cutting up.
They dehumanised their victims by referring to them in Japanese as 'marutas,' or wooden logs. 'So many "marutas" died, and the Japanese soldiers were also dissected,' Shimizu said.
He was recruited into the unit's ranks at the end of March 1945, just a few months before the war ended, to serve as a 'technician on probation.'
A picture remains of Shimizu as a teenage cadet in uniform alongside his comrades when he joined up. 'I knew nothing about what the army was or what it did specifically,' he said in a recent interview.
He expected he would be sent to a factory, but instead, he and five other boys from his village were packed off on a train to China to start work in Unit 731's laboratories.
Hideo Shimizu, now a great-grandfather, has revealed the horrors that he saw as a member of Unit 731
Hideo Shimizu, centre, in 1945 when he was a teenage cadet who had just been recruited to Unit 731
He says he still has nightmares even now about the day in July 1945 when he was taken to a specimen room inside the auditorium on the second floor of the building, which had walls lined with massive jars containing human body parts preserved in formalin.
'There were ones that had been sliced in two vertically, so you could see their organs,' Shimizu said. 'There were children; ten or twenty of them, perhaps more. I was dumbfounded. I thought, 'how could they do this to a small child?'
Shimizu soon realised that he was being trained to carry out dissections himself.
Three days after the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, Shimizu was called to the camp prison, morbidly dubbed the 'log cabin', to bury the burnt bones of murdered inmates in an effort to conceal the unit's crimes.
Soviet forces invaded the former Manchuria in August, and he and other members of the unit retreated back to Japan.
The soldiers and technicians were given a cyanide compound and ordered to kill themselves rather than be captured. After he returned to Japan, Shimizu never talked about what he saw or heard at the murder camp.
Former commanders, who were sworn to secrecy, recognised the savagery of their own operations, but many said they felt numb to them as they carried them out.
Sakaki Hayao, who headed Unit 731's Lin Kou branch, detailed an 'extremely cruel' experiment conducted at the Anda test field on which the bunker was found in his testimony to the Shenyang special military tribunal in 1956.
Hayao said he saw people tied to wooden poles and exposed to anthrax through bombs filled with the bacteria that were dropped from aircraft or detonated at close range.
Hayao said he saw people tied to wooden poles (like in the picture above) and exposed to anthrax through bombs filled with the bacteria that were dropped from aircraft or detonated at close range
Picture shows inmates - known as 'maruta', meaning logs - and guards at the death camp
The senior officers of torture group Unit 731 are pictured during World War II
The cruel experiment was conducted just a few months before Japan's surrender. 'It was an especially brutal act,' he said.
Three days after the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, soldiers were ordered to bury the burnt bones of murdered inmates in an effort to conceal the unit's crimes, while buildings were destroyed to dispose of more evidence.
Soviet forces invaded the former Manchuria in August, and Unit 731's staff retreated back to Japan, with many never revealing their crimes and going on to enjoy relatively normal lives.
One of the most disturbing elements is the consequences many of these horrific experiments - unique in scientific history - had for medical knowledge today.
Some of the experimental data gleaned from the human test subjects marked advances in modern medical understanding.
Ishii was said to be particularly proud of Unit 731's discoveries about the mechanism of frostbite.
These were made by tying people to posts in temperatures 20 degrees below zero, as well as submerging their limbs in freezing water.
The effects of various remedies were tested on their frostbitten limbs, which were also painfully heated up in water between 38 and 50 degrees Celsius by the sick surgeons as they tested the effects on victims as young as three.
General Okamura, a friend of Ishii, proudly noted in his memoirs 'I did not know the details of the medical advances he made, but after the war Ishii told me that his work produced more than 200 patents.'
When the extent of what happened there was finally unearthed, the Americans helped to cover up the program in exchange for some of its data.
The vale drawn over his crimes meant that despite all the pain and death he inflicted and oversaw, Ishii was allowed to live out his days peacefully - dying from throat cancer in 1959.