Dr.
Josef Mengele & Dr. Shiro Ishii are both monsters of science and warfare;
both were fanatics of torture and dissection. While very similar in criminal
nature they did many things differently. While Ishii targeted Chinese people
and prisoners, Josef Mengele caused destruction among many groups of people,
specifically children, Jewish and Gypsy people, and he had an obsession for
twins.
Josef Mengele, would torture and
test his patients with drugs, perform grotesque surgeries without anesthesia
including castrations, freeze them, and expose them to various diseases and
traumas. He often would draw blood from twins and perform experiments on them
and kill them as soon as he was finished. He once supervised and operation
where twins were sewn together causing them deadly infections. He also often
injected chemicals in the eyes of his patients to change their eye color.
While Mengele’s experiments lie
mostly on the line of dissection and surgeries, Ishii was a man of biological warfare
weapons. Ishii supplied the Japanese Army with typhoid, cholera, plague, and
dysentery bacteria for battlefield use. He and his men contaminated water
sources, released disease carrying animals, and forced Chinese prisoners to
breathe, eat, and receive injections of deadly pathogens.
You would assume by the ruthless
behavior of both men that they would have received similar punishments… not so
much. Ishii actually faked his own death because he was aware that the charges
he would face for his war crimes would not be so favorable. American occupation
forced learned he was alive and ordered the Japanese to turn him over for
interrogation. At first he denied the accusations but he then decided to reveal
all the details of his program in exchange for immunity from prosecution.
Americans accepted his offer and as
a result, biological weapons were never mentioned in the Japanese war crimes
trials. Ishii died a wealthy free man in his home in 1959. Mengele was not so
lucky. He faced many charged following the war, causing him to flee to South
America where he eventually died and was buried under a false name.
The United States government relayed the same
offer to many other Japanese war criminals, allowing many of them to live
freely after the war in exchange for valuable information. In the movie we
clearly saw that the Japanese were as guilty as the Germans in committing horrific
war crimes. Germans unlike Chinese faced several million dollars of reparations
and charges for their wartime crimes including execution.
