Who is the most notorious mad genius of all time?

How about instead of notorious we focus on an evil genius that should be more notorious? Nazi scientists always get all the focus but what if I told you Japan had their own version of an evil scientist and he was an absolute monster.

Meet Shirō Ishii - a serious piece of sh%t

This guy was a Doctor and microbiologist- and a rather smart one at that. He was regarded as a brilliant person for nearly his entire life. He was well educated and joined the army as a doctor. While there he caught the eyes of his superiors and was sent for further education at Kyoto Imperial University.

During WW2 he was placed in charge of Unit 731 and this is what he was known for.

What was unit 731? Well, they were a scientific unit that conducted experiments and thought up new ways to win the war. Some examples of things they did include

• Imprisoning women, raping them until they got pregnant, and then running horrid painful experiments on them just so they could see how certain poisons affected pregnant women.
• They would infect people with syphilis and then cut them open (while alive and awake) so they could see what their bodies did as the infection progressed. Women, men, and even children were forcibly infected
• This is called vivisection- its the practice of cutting someone open while alive to see what their body is doing and its typically done when experimenting on animals. In unit 731 they did it to people without anesthesia- always resulting in a slow agonizing death for the person.
• Injected people with animal blood to see what happens (bad way to die)
• Placed people in centrifuges and spun it until they died
• Deprived prisoners of food and water to see how long it was until they died
• Placed people in low-pressure chambers until their eyes popped out
• Burned people alive to see how long they would live
• Injected people with saltwater to see what would happen
• Poisoned people to see the effects
• gave people radiation poisoning to see the effects
• Leave 3-day old babies in the cold just to see how long it took them to freeze to death
• Tested flamethrowers on live people
• Tested grenades on live people
• Removed organs for fun. For instance, they would remove someone's stomach and attach their esophagus to their intestines directly.
• Tested hundreds of diseases and biological weapons on people

In all, around 10,000 prisoners were killed by Unit 731 and as many as 20,000 were tested on. The biological weapons produced by this unit were used to kill as many as 500,000 civilians

On a side note not even the Nazis used chemical weapons in WW2 (they only did in concentration camps). The ONLY nation to employ chemical weapons against civilian and military targets in WW2 was Japan.

You may wonder what happened to Shirō. I mean we caught him and put him on trial for war crimes right?

Nope

He was given full immunity in exchange for full disclosure of his tests. American microbiologists stated that Shirō’s findings were extremely valuable and impossible to replicate unless the experiments were done again.

Shirō lived out the remainder of his life a free man and died in 1959.

 

By Alex Man, an Historian