If Josef Mengele is worth #2 overall, surely this guy is a high value pick late in Round 4.
Shiro Ishii
It doesn’t get nearly the press in the West that the Holocaust does, but the Japanese did some fucked up shit in World War 2. The most cruel and notorious were the activities that occurred in Unit 731 under the direction of my fourth pick, Shiro Ishii.
Unit 731, located in modern day Harbin, China, subjected its prisoners (mostly Chinese political dissidents, common criminals and mentally handicapped) to unimaginable torture.
These human testing activities included:
- Tying prisoners to stakes in order to test pathogen bombs and chemical weapons.
- Using grenade launchers and flame throwers at various distances.
- Forced sex acts between infected and non-infected people to observe the spread of diseases such as syphilis.
- Live frostbite testing.
- Injections with sea water.
- Forced withholding of food and water to see how long it would take for the person to die.
- Experimental surgeries of all kinds on a variety of people including children, infants and pregnant women.
And of course there was all kinds of other various physical, psychological and sexual abuses.
Here is one such account of one of the guards, which I’ll put behind spoiler tags because it’s gross and awful:
One of the former researchers I located told me that one day he had a human experiment scheduled, but there was still time to kill. So he and another unit member took the keys to the cells and opened one that housed a Chinese woman. One of the unit members raped her; the other member took the keys and opened another cell. There was a Chinese woman in there who had been used in a frostbite experiment. She had several fingers missing and her bones were black, with gangrene set in. He was about to rape her anyway, then he saw that her sex organ was festering, with pus oozing to the surface. He gave up the idea, left and locked the door, then later went on to his experimental work.
Obviously there are many assholes that contributed to the atrocities in Unit 731, but when you’re the head it for 10 years, you get top billing, so fuck you asshole.
Oh, and as a not-so-fun follow-up, this fucker didn’t even get prison time. Yeah, he got immunity from war crimes as the United States military officials thought that the data would be valuable.