The 2025 film Nuremberg ends with a sober line from British historian R.G. Collingwood: “The only clue to what man can do is what man has done” – a stark reminder that history repeats when justice does not.
While the crimes of Nazi Germany were brought before an international tribunal 80 years ago, the atrocities committed by Japan’s secret Unit 731 in northeast China’s Heilongjiang province during the second world war – have never faced a comparable legal reckoning.
The covert unit conducted lethal human experiments that killed at least 3,000 people and biological warfare attacks that led to hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, with harms that persist to this day.
Advertisement
In a new paper, archaeologists Wang Xiaohua and Xue Kaifan from the Heilongjiang Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology argue that Unit 731’s conduct meets the modern definition of crimes against humanity.
It was vital to pursue the case under international law to prevent a future recurrence, they said in the paper, published on December 1 by the peer-reviewed journal Northern Cultural Relics.
The authors noted that the US granted immunity to Unit 731 leaders after the war in exchange for their biological warfare data.