The terrible crimes of the Japanese during World War II! Japanese history

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Japan did not support the Geneva Convention on the Treatment of Prisoners of War, and cruel jailers were free to do whatever they wanted to the prisoners: starve them, torture them and abuse them, turning people into emaciated half-corpses

When, after the surrender of Japan in September 1945, Allied troops began to release Japanese prisoners of war concentration camps, a terrifying sight met their eyes.

The Japanese, who did not support the Geneva Convention on the Treatment of Prisoners of War, mocked captured soldiers, turning them into living skeletons covered in leather.

The exhausted prisoners were constantly tortured and abused by the Japanese.

The inhabitants of the camps pronounced with horror the names of the guards, who were famous for their special sadism. Some of them were subsequently arrested and executed as war criminals.

Prisoners in Japanese camps were fed extremely poorly, they were constantly hungry, and most of the survivors were in an extreme state of exhaustion at the time of liberation.

Tens of thousands of starving prisoners of war were constantly subjected to abuse and torture. The picture shows torture devices discovered in one of the prisoner of war camps by the Allied troops who liberated the camp.

The tortures were numerous and inventive. For example, “water torture” was very popular: guards first poured a large volume of water into the prisoner’s stomach through a hose, and then jumped on his swollen belly.

Some guards became especially famous for their sadism. The picture shows Lieutenant Usuki, known among the prisoners as the “Black Prince.”

He was an overseer on the construction of the railway, which prisoners of war called “the road of death.” Usuki beat people for the slightest offense or even without any guilt. And when one of the prisoners decided to escape, Usuki personally cut off his head in front of the other prisoners.

Another brutal overseer, a Korean nicknamed “Mad Half-Breed,” also became famous for his brutal beatings.

He literally beat people to death. He was subsequently arrested and executed as a war criminal.

Many British prisoners of war had their legs amputated while in captivity, both due to brutal torture and due to numerous inflammations caused by wet conditions. warm climate Any wound could become, and in the absence of adequate medical care the inflammation quickly developed into gangrene.

In the photo - large group amputee prisoners after liberation from the camp.

By the time of liberation, many prisoners literally turned into living skeletons and could no longer stand up on their own.

Horrifying photographs were taken by officers of the Allied forces liberating the death camps: they were supposed to become evidence of Japanese war crimes during World War II.

During the war, more than 140 thousand Allied soldiers were captured by the Japanese, including representatives from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, the Netherlands, Great Britain, India and the United States.

The Japanese used prison labor to build highways, railways, airfields, for work in mines and factories. Working conditions were unbearable, and the amount of food was minimal.

The “road of death”, a railway line built on the territory of modern Burma, enjoyed especially terrible fame.

More than 60 thousand Allied prisoners of war were involved in its construction, about 12 thousand of them died during construction from hunger, disease and abuse.

The Japanese guards abused the prisoners as best they could.

About 36,000 prisoners of war were transported to central Japan, where they worked in mines, shipyards, and munitions factories.

The prisoners ended up in the camp in the clothes in which they were captured by Japanese troops. They were not given any other things: only sometimes, in some camps, they received work clothes, which were worn only while working.

The rest of the time the prisoners wore their own things. Therefore, by the time of liberation, most prisoners of war remained in complete rags.

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Almost everyone knows about the atrocities of the Gestapo, but few have heard about the horrific crimes committed by the Kempeitai, military police the modernized Imperial Japanese Army, founded in 1881. The Kempeitai was an ordinary, unremarkable police force until the rise of Japanese imperialism after World War I. However, over time, it became a brutal organ of state power, whose jurisdiction extended to occupied territories, prisoners of war and conquered peoples. Kempeitai employees worked as spies and counterintelligence agents. They used torture and extrajudicial execution to maintain their power over millions of innocent people. When Japan surrendered, the Kempeitai leadership deliberately destroyed most of the documents, so we are unlikely to ever know the true scale of their brutal crimes.

1. Killing prisoners of war

After the Japanese occupied the Dutch East Indies, a group of approximately two hundred British troops found themselves surrounded on the island of Java. They did not give up and decided to fight to the last. Most of them were captured by the Kempeitai and subjected to severe torture. According to more than 60 witnesses who testified at the Hague court after the end of World War II, British prisoners of war were placed in bamboo cages (meter by meter in size) designed to transport pigs. They were transported to the coast in trucks and on open rail carts at air temperatures reaching 40 degrees Celsius.

The cages containing the British prisoners, who were suffering from severe dehydration, were then loaded onto boats off the coast of Surabaya and thrown into the ocean. Some prisoners of war drowned, others were eaten alive by sharks. One Dutch witness, who was only eleven years old at the time of the events described, said the following:

“One day around noon, during the hottest part of the day, a convoy of four or five army trucks carrying so-called “pig baskets”, which were usually used to transport animals to the market or slaughterhouse, drove down the street where we were playing. Indonesia was a Muslim country. Pork meat was marketed to European and Chinese consumers. Muslims (residents of the island of Java) were not allowed to eat pork because they considered pigs to be “dirty animals” that should be avoided. To our great surprise, the pig baskets contained Australian soldiers in shabby military uniform. They were attached to each other. The condition of most of them left much to be desired. Many were dying of thirst and asking for water. I saw one of the Japanese soldiers open his fly and urinate on them. I was terrified then. I will never forget this picture. My father later told me that the cages containing the prisoners of war were thrown into the ocean.”

Lieutenant General Hitoshi Imamura, the commander of the Japanese forces stationed on the island of Java, was accused of crimes against humanity, but was acquitted by the Hague court due to insufficient evidence. However, in 1946, an Australian military tribunal found him guilty and sentenced him to ten years in prison, which he spent in prison in the city of Sugamo (Japan).

2. Operation Suk Ching

After the Japanese captured Singapore, they gave the city a new name - Sionan ("Light of the South") - and switched to Tokyo time. They then initiated a program to clear the city of Chinese, whom they considered dangerous or undesirable. Every Chinese male between the ages of 15 and 50 was ordered to appear at one of the registration points located throughout the island for questioning to determine their political views and loyalties. Those who passed the test were given a “Passed” stamp on their face, hands or clothing. Those who did not pass it (these were communists, nationalists, members of secret societies, bearers in English, government officials, teachers, veterans and criminals) were detained. A simple decorative tattoo was sufficient reason for a person to be mistaken for a member of an anti-Japanese secret society.

Two weeks after interrogation, the detainees were sent to work on plantations or drowned in the coastal areas of Changi, Ponggol and Tanah Merah Besar. Methods of punishment varied depending on the whims of the commanders. Some of the detainees were drowned in the sea, others were shot with a machine gun, and others were stabbed or beheaded. After the end of World War II, the Japanese claimed to have killed or tortured to death about 5,000 people, however, it is estimated local residents, the number of victims ranged from 20 to 50 thousand people.

3. Sandakan Death Marches

The occupation of Borneo gave the Japanese access to valuable offshore oil fields, which they decided to protect by building a nearby military airfield near the port of Sandakan. About 1,500 prisoners of war, mostly Australian soldiers, were sent to work on construction work in Sandakan, where they endured terrible conditions and received meager rations of dirty rice and few vegetables. At the beginning of 1943, they were joined by British prisoners of war, who were forced to make an airstrip. They suffered from hunger, tropical ulcers and malnutrition.

The first few escapes by prisoners of war led to reprisals in the camp. Captured soldiers were beaten or locked in cages and left in the sun for picking coconuts or for not bowing their heads low enough to a passing camp commander. People suspected of any illegal activities were brutally tortured by the Kempeitai police. They burned their skin with a lighter or stuck iron nails into their nails. One of the prisoners of war described the Kempeitai torture methods as follows:

“They took a small wooden stick the size of a skewer and used a hammer to “hammer” it into my left ear. When she ruptured my eardrum, I lost consciousness. The last thing I remembered was excruciating pain. I came to my senses literally a couple of minutes later - after a bucket was poured on me cold water. My ear healed after a while, but I could no longer hear with it.”

Despite the repression, one Australian soldier, Captain L. S. Matthews, was able to create a clandestine intelligence network, smuggling medicine, food and money to prisoners and maintaining radio contact with the Allies. When he was arrested, despite severe torture, he did not reveal the names of those who helped him. Matthews was executed by the Kempeitai in 1944.

In January 1945, the Allies bombed the Sandakan military base and the Japanese were forced to retreat to Ranau. Three death marches occurred between January and May. The first wave consisted of those who were considered to be in the best physical shape. They were loaded with backpacks containing various military equipment and ammunition and forced to march along tropical jungle for nine days, with food rations (rice, dried fish and salt) were given for only four days. Prisoners of war who fell or stopped to rest a little were shot or beaten to death by the Japanese. Those who managed to survive the death march were sent to build camps. The prisoners of war who built the airfield near the port of Sandakan suffered constant abuse and starvation. They were eventually forced to go south. Those who could not move were burned alive in the camp as the Japanese retreated. Only six Australian soldiers survived this death march.

4. Kikosaku

During the occupation of the Dutch East Indies, the Japanese had significant difficulty controlling the Eurasian population, people of mixed (Dutch and Indonesian) blood who tended to be influential people and did not support the Japanese version of pan-Asianism. They were subjected to persecution and repression. Most of them faced a sad fate - the death penalty.

The word "kikosaku" was a neologism and derived from "kosen" ("land of the dead", or "yellow spring") and "saku" ("technique" or "maneuvering"). It is translated into Russian as “Operation Underworld.” In practice, the word "kikosaku" was used to refer to execution without judicial trial or unofficial punishment leading to death.

The Japanese believed that the Indonesians, who had mixed blood in their veins, or "kontetsu" as they pejoratively called them, were loyal to the Dutch forces. They suspected them of espionage and sabotage. The Japanese shared the Dutch colonialists' fears about the outbreak of riots among communists and Muslims. They concluded that the judicial process in investigating cases of lack of loyalty was ineffective and hampered management. The introduction of kikosaku allowed the Kempeitai to arrest people indefinitely without formal charges, after which they were shot.

Kikosaku was used when Kempeitai personnel believed that only the most extreme interrogation methods would lead to a confession, even if the end result was death. Former member Kempeitai admitted in an interview with the New York Times: “At the mention of us, even babies stopped crying. Everyone was afraid of us. The prisoners who came to us faced only one fate – death.”

5. Jesselton Rebellion

The city today known as Kota Kinabalu was formerly called Jesselton. It was founded in 1899 by the British North Borneo Company and served as a way station and source of rubber until it was captured by the Japanese in January 1942 and renamed Api. On October 9, 1943, rioting ethnic Chinese and Suluk (indigenous people of North Borneo) attacked the Japanese military administration, offices, police stations, hotels where soldiers lived, warehouses and the main pier. Although the rebels were armed with hunting rifles, spears and long knives, they managed to kill between 60 and 90 Japanese and Taiwanese occupiers.

Two army battalions and Kempeitai personnel were sent to the city to suppress the uprising. The repression also affected the civilian population. Hundreds of ethnic Chinese were executed for suspicion of aiding or sympathizing with the rebels. The Japanese also persecuted representatives of the Suluk people who lived on the islands of Sulug, Udar, Dinawan, Mantanani and Mengalum. According to some estimates, the number of victims of repression was about 3,000 people.

6. Double Ten Incident

In October 1943, a group of Anglo-Australian special forces ("Special Z") infiltrated Singapore harbor using an old fishing boat and kayaks. Using magnetic mines, they neutralized seven Japanese ships, including an oil tanker. They managed to remain undetected, so the Japanese, based on information given to them by civilians and prisoners from Changi Prison, decided that the attack was organized by British guerrillas from Malaya.

On October 10, Kempeitai officers raided Changi Prison, conducted a day-long search, and arrested the suspects. A total of 57 people were arrested on suspicion of involvement in the harbor sabotage, including a Church of England bishop and a former British Colonial Secretary and Information Officer. They spent five months in prison cells, which were always brightly lit and were not equipped with sleeping beds. During this time, they were starved and subjected to harsh interrogations. One suspect was executed for alleged participation in sabotage, fifteen others died due to torture.

In 1946, a trial took place for those involved in what became known as the "Double Ten Incident". British prosecutor Lieutenant Colonel Colin Sleeman described the Japanese mentality of the time:

“I have to talk about actions that are an example of human depravity and degradation. What these people did, devoid of mercy, can only be described as unspeakable horror... Among the huge amount of evidence, I tried hard to find some mitigating circumstance, a factor that would justify the behavior of these people, that would raise the story from the level of pure horror and bestiality and would have ennobled it before the tragedy. I admit, I was not able to do this.”

7. Bridge House

After Shanghai was occupied by the Imperial Japanese Army in 1937, the Kempeitai secret police occupied the building known as Bridge House.

The Kempeitai and the collaborationist reform government used the Yellow Road (Huandao Hui), a paramilitary organization of Chinese criminals, to kill and carry out terrorist attacks against anti-Japanese elements in foreign settlements. Thus, in an incident known as Kai Diaotu, the editor of a famous anti-Japanese tabloid was beheaded. His head was then hung on a lamppost in front of the French Concession, along with a banner reading “This is what awaits all citizens opposed to Japan.”

After Japan entered the Second world war Kempeitai employees began to persecute the foreign population of Shanghai. People were arrested on charges of anti-Japanese activity or espionage and taken to Bridge House, where they were kept in iron cages and subjected to beatings and torture. The conditions were terrible: “Rats and lice were everywhere. No one was allowed to take a bath or shower. Diseases at Bridge House ranged from dysentery to typhoid.”

The Kempeitai received particular attention from American and British journalists who reported on Japanese atrocities in China. John Powell, editor of the China Weekly Review, wrote: “When the interrogation began, the prisoner took off all his clothes and knelt in front of the jailers. If his answers did not satisfy the interrogators, he was beaten with bamboo sticks until blood began to ooze from the wounds.” Powell managed to return to his homeland, where he soon died after surgery to amputate a leg affected by gangrene. Many of his colleagues were also seriously injured or went crazy from the shock they experienced.

In 1942, with the assistance of the Swiss Embassy, ​​some of the foreign citizens who were detained and tortured in the Bridge House by Kempeitai employees were released and returned to their homeland.

8. Occupation of Guam

Along with the islands of Attu and Kiska (the Aleutian Islands archipelago), whose populations were evacuated before the invasion, Guam became the only inhabited territory of the United States occupied by the Japanese during World War II.

The island of Guam was captured in 1941 and renamed Omiya Jayme (Great Shrine). The capital Agana also received a new name - Akashi (Red City). The island was initially under the control of the Imperial Japanese Navy. The Japanese resorted to vicious methods in an attempt to weaken American influence and force members of the indigenous Chamorro people to adhere to Japanese social mores and customs.

Kempeitai personnel took control of the island in 1944. They introduced forced labor for men, women, children and the elderly. Kempeitai employees were convinced that the pro-American Chamorros were engaged in espionage and sabotage, so they brutally dealt with them. One man, José Lizama Charfauros, came across a Japanese patrol while searching for food. He was forced to kneel and a huge cut was made on his neck with a sword. Charfauros was found by his friends a few days after the incident. The maggots stuck to his wound, which helped him stay alive and not get blood poisoning.

9. Women for carnal pleasures

The issue of "comfort women" who were forced into prostitution by Japanese soldiers during World War II continues to be a source of political tension and historical revisionism in East Asia.

Officially, Kempeitai employees began to engage in organized prostitution in 1904. Initially, brothel owners contracted with the military police, who were assigned the role of overseers, based on the fact that some prostitutes could spy for enemies, extracting secrets from talkative or careless clients.

In 1932, Kempeitai officials took full control of organized prostitution for military personnel. Women were forced to live in barracks and tents behind barbed wire. They were guarded by Korean or Japanese yakuza. Railroad cars were also used as mobile brothels. The Japanese forced girls over 13 years of age into prostitution. The prices for their services depended on the ethnic origin of the girls and women and what kind of clients they served - officers, non-commissioned officers or privates. The highest prices were paid for Japanese, Korean and Chinese women. It is estimated that about 200 thousand women were forced to provide sexual services to 3.5 million Japanese soldiers. They were kept in terrible conditions and received virtually no money, despite the fact that they were promised 800 yen a month.

In 1945, members of the British Royal Marine Corps seized Kempeitai documents in Taiwan, which stated what was done with prisoners in the case emergency. They were destroyed using massive bombardment, poisonous gas, beheading, drowning and other methods.

10. Epidemic Prevention Department

Japanese experiments on humans are associated with the infamous "Object 731". However, the scale of the program is difficult to fully assess, since there were at least seventeen other similar facilities throughout Asia that no one knew about.

“Object 173,” for which Kempeitai employees were responsible, was located in the Manchurian city of Pingfang. Eight villages were destroyed for its construction. It included living quarters and laboratories where doctors and scientists worked, as well as barracks, a prison camp, bunkers and a large crematorium for disposing of corpses. "Facility 173" was called the Epidemic Prevention Department.

Shiro Ishii, head of Object 173, told new employees: “The God-given mission of a doctor is to block and cure diseases. However, what we are working on now is the exact opposite of those principles.". Prisoners who ended up in Site 173 were generally considered to be "incorrigible", "with anti-Japanese views" or "of no value or use." Most of them were Chinese, but there were also Koreans, Russians, Americans, British and Australians.

In the laboratories of Object 173, scientists conducted experiments on people. They tested the influence of biological (bubonic plague, cholera, anthrax, tuberculosis and typhoid viruses) and chemical weapons on them. One of the scientists who worked at Object 173 spoke about one incident that happened outside its walls: “He [we are talking about a thirty-year-old Chinese] knew that it was all over for him, so he did not resist when he was brought into the room and tied to the couch. But when I picked up the scalpel, he started screaming. I made an incision on his body from his chest to his stomach. He screamed loudly; his face twisted in agony. He screamed in a voice that was not his own, and then stopped. Surgeons face this every day. I was a little shocked because it was my first time."

Facilities controlled by Kempeitai and Kwantung Army personnel were located throughout China and Asia. At "Object 100" in Changchun they developed biological weapons, which was supposed to destroy all livestock in China and the Soviet Union. At “Object 8604” in Guangzhou, rats that carried bubonic plague were bred. At other sites, for example, in Singapore and Thailand, malaria and plague were studied.

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This is what the unlimited power of money leads to... Why are Japanese hated in neighboring countries?

During World War II, it was common for Japanese soldiers and officers to cut down civilians with swords, bayonet them, rape and kill women, kill children and the elderly. That is why, for the Koreans and Chinese, the Japanese are a hostile people, murderers.

In July 1937, the Japanese attacked China, starting the Sino-Japanese War, which lasted until 1945. In November-December 1937, the Japanese army launched an attack on Nanjing. On December 13, the Japanese captured the city, there was a massacre for 5 days (the killings continued later, but not as massive), which went down in history as the “Nanjing Massacre.” During the massacre carried out by the Japanese, more than 350 thousand people were slaughtered, some sources cite the figure as half a million people. Tens of thousands of women were raped, many of them killed. The Japanese army acted on the basis of 3 “clean” principles:

The massacre began when Japanese soldiers took 20 thousand Chinese of military age out of the city and bayoneted them all so that they would never be able to join the Chinese army. The peculiarity of the massacres and abuses was that the Japanese did not shoot - they conserved ammunition, killed and maimed everyone with cold steel.

After this, massacres began in the city; women, girls, and old women were raped and then killed. Hearts were cut out from living people, bellies were cut, eyes were gouged out, they were buried alive, heads were cut off, even babies were killed, madness was happening in the streets. Women were raped right in the middle of the streets - the Japanese, intoxicated with impunity, forced fathers to rape their daughters, sons to rape their mothers, samurai competed to see who could kill the most people with a sword - a certain samurai Mukai won, killing 106 people.

After the war, the crimes of the Japanese military were condemned by the world community, but since the 1970s, Tokyo has been denying them; Japanese history textbooks write about the massacre that many people were simply killed in the city, without details.

Singapore massacre

On February 15, 1942, the Japanese army captured the British colony of Singapore. The Japanese decided to identify and destroy “anti-Japanese elements” in the Chinese community. During Operation Purge, the Japanese checked all Chinese males of military age, the execution lists included Chinese men who participated in the war with Japan, Chinese employees of the British administration, Chinese who donated money to the China Relief Fund, Chinese natives of China, etc. d.

They were taken out of the filtration camps and shot. Then the operation was extended to the entire peninsula, where they decided not to “ceremoniously” and, due to the lack of people for the inquiry, they shot everyone. Approximately 50 thousand Chinese were killed, the remaining ones were lucky, the Japanese did not complete Operation Purge, they had to transfer troops to other areas - they planned to destroy the entire Chinese population of Singapore and the peninsula.

Massacre in Manila

When in early February 1945 it became clear to the Japanese command that Manila could not be held, the army headquarters was moved to the city of Baguio, and they decided to destroy Manila. Destroy the population. In the capital of the Philippines, according to the most conservative estimates, more than 110 thousand people were killed. Thousands of people were shot, many were doused with gasoline and set on fire, the city's infrastructure, residential buildings, schools, and hospitals were destroyed. On February 10, the Japanese carried out a massacre in the Red Cross building, killing everyone, even children, and the Spanish consulate was burned along with its people.

The massacre also took place in the suburbs; in the town of Calamba, the entire population was destroyed - 5 thousand people. Monks and nuns of Catholic institutions and schools were not spared, and students were also killed.

Comfort station system

In addition to the rape of tens, hundreds, thousands of women, the Japanese authorities are guilty of another crime against humanity - the creation of a network of brothels for soldiers. It was common practice to rape women in captured villages; some of the women were taken away, few of them were able to return.

In 1932, the Japanese command decided to create “comfortable station houses”, justifying their creation by the decision to reduce anti-Japanese sentiment due to mass rape on Chinese soil, by caring for the health of soldiers who needed to “rest” and not get sexually transmitted diseases. First they were created in Manchuria, in China, then in all the occupied territories - in the Philippines, Borneo, Burma, Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam and so on. In total, from 50 to 300 thousand women passed through these brothels, and most of them were minors. Before the end of the war, no more than a quarter survived, morally and physically disfigured, poisoned with antibiotics. The Japanese authorities even created the proportions of “service”: 29 (“clients”): 1, then increased to 40: 1 per day.

Currently, the Japanese authorities deny this data; previously, Japanese historians spoke about the private nature and voluntariness of prostitution.

Death Squad - Squad 731

In 1935, as part of the Japanese Kwantung Army, the so-called. "Detachment 731", its goal was to develop biological weapons, delivery vehicles, and testing on humans. It worked until the end of the war, the Japanese military did not have time to use biological weapons against the USA, and the USSR only thanks to the rapid offensive Soviet troops in August 1945.

Shiro Ishii - Commander of Unit 731

victims of unit 731

More than 5 thousand prisoners and local residents became “experimental mice” of Japanese specialists; they called them “logs.”

People were cut alive for “scientific purposes”, infected with the most terrible diseases, then “opened” while still alive. They conducted experiments on the survivability of “logs” - how long would they last without water and food, scalded with boiling water, after irradiation with an X-ray machine, withstand electrical discharges, without any cut out organ, and much more. other.

The Japanese command was ready to use biological weapons on Japanese territory against the American landing force, sacrificing the civilian population - the army and leadership had to evacuate to Manchuria, to Japan’s “alternate airfield”.

The Asian people have still not forgiven Tokyo, especially in light of the fact that in recent decades Japan has refused to acknowledge more and more of its war crimes. Koreans recall that they were even forbidden to speak their native language, they were ordered to change their native names to Japanese (the “assimilation” policy) - approximately 80% of Koreans accepted Japanese names. Girls were taken to brothels; in 1939, 5 million people were forcibly mobilized into industry. Korean cultural monuments were taken away or destroyed.

Sources:
http://www.battlingbastardsbataan.com/som.htm
http://www.intv.ru/view/?film_id=20797
http://films-online.su/news/filosofija_nozha_philosophy_of_a_knife_2008/2010-11-21-2838
http://www.cnd.org/njmassacre/
http://militera.lib.ru/science/terentiev_n/05.html

Massacre in Nanjing.

Like any crime of capitalism and state ambitions, the Nanjing massacre should not be forgotten.

Prince Asaka Takahito (1912-1981), it was he who issued the order to “kill all prisoners”, giving official sanction to the “Nanking Massacre”

In December 1937, during the Second Sino-Japanese War, soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army brutally murdered many civilians in Nanjing, then the capital of the Republic of China.

Despite the fact that after the war a number of Japanese soldiers were convicted of the Nanjing massacre, since the 1970s the Japanese side has pursued a policy of denying the crimes committed in Nanjing. Japanese school history textbooks simply write vaguely that “many people were killed” in the city.

The Japanese began by taking 20 thousand men of military age out of the city and bayoneting them so that in the future they “could not take up arms against Japan.” Then the occupiers moved on to exterminating women, old people, and children.

In December 1937 Japanese newspaper, who described the exploits of the army, enthusiastically reported on the valiant competition of two officers who bet who would be the first to kill more than a hundred Chinese with his sword. The Japanese, as hereditary duelists, requested additional time. A certain samurai Mukai won, killing 106 people against 105.

Mad samurai completed sex with murder, gouged out eyes and tore out the hearts of still living people. The murders were carried out with particular cruelty. Firearms, which was in service with Japanese soldiers, was not used. Thousands of victims were stabbed with bayonets, their heads were cut off, people were burned, buried alive, women had their bellies ripped open and their insides turned out, and small children were killed. They raped and then brutally killed not only adult women, but also little girls and old women. Witnesses say that the sexual ecstasy of the conquerors was so great that they raped all the women in a row, regardless of their age, in broad daylight on busy streets. At the same time, fathers were forced to rape their daughters, and sons were forced to rape their mothers.

A peasant from Jiangsu province (near Nanjing) tied to a post to be shot.

In December 1937, the capital of Kuomintang China, Nanjing, fell. Japanese soldiers began to practice their popular "three out" policy:

“burn it clean,” “kill everyone clean,” “rob it clean.”

When the Japanese left Nanjing, it turned out that the transport ship could not land on the shore of the river bay. He was disturbed by thousands of corpses floating along the Yangtze. From memories:

“We just had to use the floating bodies as a pontoon. To board the ship, we had to walk over the dead.”

In just six weeks, about 300 thousand people were killed and more than 20,000 women were raped. Terror exceeded all imagination. Even the German consul, in an official report, described the behavior of the Japanese soldiers as “brutal.”

The Japanese bury living Chinese in the ground.

A Japanese soldier entered the monastery courtyard to kill Buddhist monks.

In 2007, documents from one of the international charitable organizations who worked in Nanjing during the war. These documents, as well as records confiscated from Japanese troops, show that Japanese soldiers killed more than 200,000 civilians and Chinese troops in 28 massacres, and at least another 150,000 people were killed in in some cases during the infamous Nanjing massacre. The maximum estimate of all victims is 500,000 people.

Japanese soldiers raped 20,000 people, according to evidence presented to the Tokyo war crimes court. Chinese women(an underestimate), many of whom were subsequently killed.

At the memorial to the victims of the Nanking Massacre.

What were the Japanese "death camps" like?

A collection of photographs taken during the liberation of prisoners from Japanese death camps has been published in Britain. These photographs are no less shocking than photographs from German concentration camps. Japan did not support the Geneva Convention on the Treatment of Prisoners of War, and cruel jailers were free to do whatever they wanted to the prisoners: starve them, torture them and abuse them, turning people into emaciated half-corpses, reports Chips.

When Allied forces began liberating prisoners of war from Japanese concentration camps after Japan's surrender in September 1945, they were greeted with a horrific sight. The Japanese, who did not support the Geneva Convention on the Treatment of Prisoners of War, mocked captured soldiers, turning them into living skeletons covered in leather.

The exhausted prisoners were constantly tortured and abused by the Japanese. The inhabitants of the camps pronounced with horror the names of the guards, who were famous for their special sadism. Some of them were subsequently arrested and executed as war criminals.

Prisoners in Japanese camps were fed extremely poorly, they were constantly hungry, and most of the survivors were in an extreme state of exhaustion at the time of liberation.

Tens of thousands of starving prisoners of war were constantly subjected to abuse and torture. The picture shows torture devices discovered in one of the prisoner of war camps by the Allied troops who liberated the camp. The tortures were numerous and inventive. For example, “water torture” was very popular: guards first poured a large volume of water into the prisoner’s stomach through a hose, and then jumped on his swollen belly.

Some guards became especially famous for their sadism. The picture shows Lieutenant Usuki, known among the prisoners as the "Black Prince". He was an overseer on the construction of the railway, which prisoners of war called "the road of death." Usuki beat people for the slightest offense or even without any guilt. And when one of the prisoners decided to escape, Usuki personally cut off his head in front of the other prisoners.

Another cruel overseer - a Korean nicknamed "Mad Half-Breed" - also became famous for his brutal beatings. He literally beat people to death. He was subsequently arrested and executed as a war criminal.

Very many British prisoners of war suffered amputations of their legs in captivity - both due to cruel torture and due to numerous inflammations, the cause of which in a humid, warm climate could be any wound, and in the absence of adequate medical care, the inflammation quickly developed into gangrene.

The picture shows a large group of amputee prisoners after being released from the camp.

By the time of liberation, many prisoners literally turned into living skeletons and could no longer stand up on their own.

Horrifying photographs were taken by officers of the Allied forces liberating the death camps: they were supposed to become evidence of Japanese war crimes during World War II.

During the war, more than 140 thousand Allied soldiers were captured by the Japanese, including representatives from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, the Netherlands, Great Britain, India and the United States.

The Japanese used prison labor to build highways, railroads, airfields, and to work in mines and factories. The working conditions were unbearable and the amount of food was minimal.

The “road of death”, a railway line built on the territory of modern Burma, enjoyed especially terrible fame. More than 60 thousand Allied prisoners of war were involved in its construction, about 12 thousand of them died during construction from hunger, disease and abuse.

The Japanese guards abused the prisoners as best they could. The prisoners were loaded with work that was clearly beyond the strength of exhausted people, and they were severely punished for failure to fulfill the quota.

Prisoners of war in Japanese camps lived in such ramshackle huts, in constant dampness, overcrowding and cramped conditions.

About 36,000 prisoners of war were transported to central Japan, where they worked in mines, shipyards, and munitions factories.

The prisoners ended up in the camp in the clothes in which they were captured by Japanese troops. They were not given any other things: only sometimes, in some camps, they received work clothes, which were worn only while working. The rest of the time the prisoners wore their own things. Therefore, by the time of liberation, most prisoners of war remained in complete rags.