After the Second World War, people across the world hoped to claim their justice and to draw lessons from the wounds of the past. Yet today we face a new danger. The memory of history, particularly when it concerns the Eastern Front and the struggle that the Soviet Union and China waged together against Japanese militarism, is becoming ever more susceptible to being wielded as a political instrument. In these circumstances, we as journalists bear a special responsibility. It is not enough simply to relay the findings of historians or to recount historical stories for our audiences; we must ourselves go in search of these historical memories, as researchers would, striving to preserve them and to make our own contribution.
This year we embarked on that work with particular commitment, directing our attention to one of the darkest pages of our shared history: the crimes committed by Japan's Unit 731. In 1945, during the campaign to liberate China's north-east, the Soviet Red Army struck the Japanese Kwantung Army. It was in China's north-east that the Japanese military had established those terrible laboratories. Through materials made available by the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation, we were granted a rare opportunity to examine documents that had been sealed for decades under the marking 'Top Secret.' Among them were interrogation records, case files, photographs, and letters, which revealed not only the scale of Japan's war crimes, but the efforts the Soviet Union made to bring those crimes to light.
Our aim was not simply to recount this history to our audiences. We wanted to show that the truth resides in specific documents, specific places, and the life stories of specific individuals. To that end, we travelled to the village of Cherntsy in Ivanovo Oblast, where there once stood a strictly guarded camp under the authority of the Soviet Interior Ministry — Camp No. 48. Within those red-brick walls, many war criminals had been held: German generals, Hungarian and Romanian officers, and Japanese prisoners, among them Yamada Otozō, the last commander of the Kwantung Army. Today, all that remains of the camp are some crumbling walls and foundations; yet through the traces left behind, the original layout, and the records preserved in the archives, one can reconstruct in the mind's eye what it once looked like, recall something of the people who were held there and of the fates that eventually befell them.
Among the FSB archives to which we were granted access are the declassified interrogation records of Yamada Otozō. These pages are not boring bureaucratic reports; behind them lies a living human tragedy.
At first, the General denied everything. He claimed to know nothing of Unit 731, nothing of Dr Shirō Ishii, nothing of the experiments conducted on living human subjects. He insisted that his responsibilities had been confined entirely to strategic defence. In the course of later interrogations, particularly in 1949, his position changed. He acknowledged that Unit 731 had indeed been under his command. It was he who, upon learning of the Soviet Red Army's advance, had personally ordered the destruction of all the laboratories and documents. He also recounted that he had personally inspected Unit 731's base near Harbin. He even mentioned a detail of a particularly chilling kind: that at a dinner, Ishii had boasted to him of how salt could be extracted from human urine.
Absurd as it sounds, it is precisely details of this kind that reveal the depth of the moral collapse to which Japanese militarism had sunk by that point. In 1949, an extraordinary trial was held in Khabarovsk, the first international tribunal in the world to expose the Japanese military's use of biological weapons. The Soviet side presented conclusive evidence of the crimes committed by Unit 731, and all the defendants, including the commanding officer Yamada Otozō, were found guilty. None, however, was sentenced to death: the Soviet Union had abolished capital punishment in 1947, and so the maximum sentence handed down was twenty-five years' imprisonment. The verdict was not born of sympathy for these war criminals; it reflected a humanitarian consideration that these men should be kept alive to serve as living witnesses to the crimes of Japanese militarism.
Unit 731 conducted a great many horrific experiments on human beings. In the eyes of those who ran the unit, the people subjected to these experiments were not regarded as human beings at all; they were referred to as 'maruta,' a Japanese word meaning 'logs'.
The archival documents we examined make clear that the Japanese military's plan was to deploy these biological weapons against the Soviet Red Army and the Chinese civilian population. Yamada Otozō himself acknowledged in later interrogations that had the Soviet Red Army not advanced with such speed and halted their preparations, these weapons would in all likelihood have been used on the battlefield. His words speak directly to the significance of what the Soviet Red Army accomplished in 1945: they did not only liberate China's north-east but also they prevented a humanitarian catastrophe of far greater magnitude, protecting countless innocent lives. As Russian journalists, we did not confine ourselves to consulting archives and writing reports. We went in person to the sites where these historical events unfolded, filming documentary footage on location, visiting the remains of the camp, and speaking face to face with archivists, historians, and those who carry knowledge of what took place.
We wanted to show our audiences that this history is not a remote and abstract story. It is living memory — an important bond connecting Russia and China.
Standing in the ruins of the camp at Cherntsy, at the very place where Yamada Otozō was once held, one seems almost to hear history speaking in a low voice through those crumbling bricks, those yellowing documents, and those names the world has long since forgotten. The most important responsibility we carry as journalists is to hear those voices, and to bring their stories to the world. For to forget is to die a second time. Thank you.
Watch the whole speech here: