More evidence of Japanese troops' atrocities of germ warfare during World War II has been made public, as confessions of a commander of the Japanese germ warfare unit to the US after the war were released in Northeast China's Heilongjiang Province.
The confession was written by Masaji Kitano, the second commander of Japanese Army Unit 731, when he was interrogated by investigators from the US' Fort Detrick military biological labs, after he was extradited by the US from a prison in Shanghai to Japan in 1946. Kitano admitted that Unit 731 had conducted human experiments and bacterial warfare in China during the war, the Global Times learned from the Museum of Evidence of War Crimes by the Japanese Army Unit 731, based in Harbin, Northeast China's Heilongjiang Province, which has acquired a copy of the confession.
To obtain the core secrets of Unit 731 including data of bacterial warfare and human experiments, the US extradited Kitano from a prison camp in Shanghai after Japan surrendered in the war, and when he returned to Japan, he was investigated by the US Army and wrote the 17-page confession. The original copy is stored in the National Archives of the US.
The confession reveals the Japanese military's crimes against humanity when it invaded China, Jin Chengmin, curator of the museum, told the Global Times.
Kitano's confession covers content related to Unit 731's founder Shiro Ishii, its missions, composition, study and germ warfare weapons. Kitano had also…
