Holocaust/Japanese Atrocities

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.