Unit 1855. 1938-1945
Unit 1855 operated under the supervision of Unit 731, tasked with the role of performing experiments in the use of plague, typhus, cholera, and other communicable diseases as weapons against both military targets and civilian populations. It was located in Beijing and was staffed by about 2,000 members.
Its existence was considered top secret, and it was commanded by a Japanese Army Colonel who was also a surgeon. The Japanese employed both Chinese and Korean interpreters at the site, conducting all personal contact with “patients” through them. Patients were prisoners brought to the site for the purpose of human experimentation.
The prisoners were kept in the facility in different areas depending upon whether they had been infected with disease which was as yet dormant, were presenting symptoms, or were not yet infected. Some were infected with plague, some with typhus, some with cholera, and others with varying combinations or all three. Through the interpreters, Japanese doctors would question the infected about their symptoms, recording the responses for each case, but no attempts were made to alleviate the symptoms or to arrest the spread of the disease.
The interpreters were used to ensure the personal safety of the Japanese doctors, most interpreters were sickened and died after repeated exposure, or were condemned to become “patients.” Later the interpreters would speak to the patients from behind the safety of a glass partition, using a microphone.
As the war went on vaccines were developed in the unit, and some patients were vaccinated against typhus as a control group while others were forced to consume typhus-infected beverages. The experimentation at Unit 1855 continued until the Japanese surrender, at which time it fell under the same arrangements with the United States as did its overseer, Unit 731. None of the experimenters at Unit 1855 were ever charged with war crimes, nor was the building destroyed after it was occupied by Chinese forces. Over 1,000 Chinese and Koreans died as the result of the human experiments conducted by Unit 1855 over the course of the war.