Khabarovsk war crimes trials

The Khabarovsk war crimes trials were the Soviet hearings of twelve Japanese Kwantung Army officers and medical staff charged with the manufacture and use of biological weapons, and human experimentation, during World War II. The war crimes trials were held between 25 and 31 December 1949 in the Soviet industrial city of Khabarovsk (Хабаровск), the largest in the Russian Far East.

Both Soviet Union and United States allegedly gathered data 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 lightly to the Siberian labor camp from two 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 had co-opted the researchers' bioweapons information and experience for use in their own warfare program (resembling Operation Paperclip), 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.

^ ^a ^b Harris, S.H. (2002) Factories of Death. Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932–1945, and the American Cover-up, revised ed. Routledge, New York.
^ Hal Gold, Unit 731 Testimony, 2003, p. 109.
^ Kristof, Nicholas D. (1995-03-17). "Unmasking Horror – A special report. Japan Confronting Gruesome War Atrocity". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 2019-07-14. Retrieved 2019-07-14.
^ Brody, Howard; Leonard, Sarah E.; Nie, Jing-Bao; Weindling, Paul (2014). "United States Responses to Japanese Wartime Inhuman Experimentation after World War II: National Security and Wartime Exigency". Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics. 23 (2): 220–230. doi:10.1017/S0963180113000753. ISSN 0963-1801. PMC 4487829. PMID 24534743.