Human Vivisection/Wartime Atrocities
in 1942, he was given another task — prepping plague-infected people to be cut up alive.
Prisoners were infected so that the unit could study the progress and potency of their biological weapons. Samples removed from the prisoners were used to produce more bacteria.
“The first time, my legs were shaking so badly I could hardly stand up,” Shinozuka said.
He knew the person on the operating table.
“I’d seen him a few times,” he said. “He seemed like an intellectual. He wasn’t even 30. But by the time he was brought in to the dissection room, he was so black with the plague that he looked like a different person. He was clearly on the verge of death.”
In a tiled operating room, Shinozuka cleaned the victim with a scrub brush, front then back, then dried him off. Another man used a stethoscope to make sure the victim was still alive and then assisted a third man who quickly but methodically cut the victim open and removed his organs.
“We were told that it was crucial to extract the specimens before putrefaction had time to set in and contaminate our research,” Shinozuka said. “The room didn’t have a clock, but I guess the operations took about four hours. I will never forget the feeling of being there.”
Shinozuka personally participated in three more vivisections.
“We called the victims ‘logs,’ ” he said. “We didn’t want to think of them as people. We didn’t want to admit that we were taking lives. So we convinced ourselves that what we were doing was like cutting down a tree. When you see someone in that state, you just can’t move. Your mind goes blank. The fear is overwhelming.”
