The saga of Unit 731 and how they received zero punitive action is just one of the several horridly fucked-up things that came out of the end of the Second World War, and how both the Western Allies and the Soviets cleaned up afterwards.
this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2026
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The Soviet Union and the United States gathered data and evidence from the Unit after the fall of Japan. While twelve Unit 731 researchers arrested by Soviet forces were tried at the December 1949 Khabarovsk war crimes trials, they were sentenced only to the Siberian labor camp from 2 to 25 years, seemingly in exchange for the information they held.[1] Those captured by the US military were secretly given immunity,[2] while being covered up with stipends to the perpetrators. The US was purported to have co-opted the researchers' bioweapons information and experience for use in their own warfare program (resembling Operation Paperclip), and so did the Soviet Union in building their bioweapons facility in Sverdlovsk using documentation captured from the Unit in Manchuria.[1][3][4] In 1956, those still serving their sentences were released and repatriated to Japan.
That's a weird way to phrase it given some of the data is still used today, for example with the frostbite information specifically.
But yes the US is made up of all the nazis and evil people they claimed to want to fight. Because they didn't really want to fight them, it was just the most profitable thing to do at the time.
That data is not used anymore and you can't cite it or cite any paper that cite them.
Out of sheer interest, is it because the data was discredited or is there an ethics issue that kills a paper once it's been cited?
My understanding is there was little to no actual science in that data.
To be science, the data would need to be systematic and care would need to be taken to exclude confounding factors. What that unit did doesn't become science simply because they made notes.
We just don't have much use for data about how frostbite affects people who've already been tortured first.
Lemme tell you about how we got the right scientists to be able to put a person on the moon.
They concluded it was worthless? Sure. Sure they did 😉😉