Chapter 13 - Lesson 1 Sterilization: Fill & Download for Free

No!Were US POWs Starved to Death in German Camps?Reports of the Allied advance in Europe in spring 1945 raised concerns about the treatment of prisoners of war.July 23, 2018Background: During World War II, an estimated 90,0000 Americans were held as prisoners of war (POWs) in Germany. Once captured, the POWs were first processed through a Dulag (transit camp) where, according to the Geneva Convention signed in 1929, they were required to give their name, rank, and serial number. They were then sent to the actual POW camps, which were sometimes divided among different types of camps such as Marlag (Marinelager), a prison camp for naval servicemen; Oflag (Offizierslager), a camp for officers; Stalag (Stammlager), a camp for officers and enlisted men.Map of the major POWs camps in Germany. Image: Cindy Farrar Bryan and TheArrowheadClub.com.Under the Geneva Convention, officers were not required to work but enlisted men were often made to work, often in difficult conditions. While Allied POWs were subjected to harassment, beating, starving and sometimes death in German camps, their situation was altogether more tolerable than in the Pacific. Over 40% of the American POWs in the Pacific perished, compared to between 1 and 2% in Germany.The main concerns were shortages of food; the meager rations POWs received from the Germans were supplemented by the more than 27 million parcels sent by the Red Cross during the war.Standard content of a Red Cross parcel.In the USA, the parcels were assembled by more than 13,000 volunteers in distribution centers such as New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and St. Louis, and sent to the International Red Cross Committee in Geneva, Switzerland, for distribution in roughly 60 POW camps in Germany.The packages contained nonperishable foods like prunes, raisins, liver pâté, coffee, corned beef, sugar, dried milk, oleomargarine, biscuits, orange concentrate, cheese, canned salmon or tuna fish and chocolate bars, along with amenities like cigarettes and soap.In an enormous logistical feat, POWs at first received one Red Cross parcel per week, greatly alleviating the plights of the POWs.Results:Source: Gallup Poll, May 1945, Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at Cornell University.What Happened: As the war progressed, the logistics of delivering the parcels became insurmountable. The German planes that flew daily from Lisbon, Portugal (a neutral country), to Germany carrying air mail to POWS were cut off after the liberation of France in the summer of 1944. In addition, surface mail and next-of-kin parcels, which were formerly shipped to Marseille, France, were stalled from June to October 1944. Fighting along the Marseille-Switzerland line made it almost impossible to move mail into or out of Switzerland (a neutral country). As a result, POWs experienced long periods in later 1944-early 1945 where they received no Red Cross parcels and no news from home. The few rations they received were woefully inadequate as the fierce fighting on the continent led to a tripling of the numbers of American POWs.When the Allied liberated their first POW camps in April 1945, they found prisoners in different states of poor conditions: recently imprisoned men who survived on a few slices of bread a week, those who had been in prison for a long time and suffered from the harsh conditions and the poor diet, while others, who had been on forced marches, sometimes 600 miles long, from the east as the Germans moved them inland, were in even worse shape.The Allies themselves, and future historians, however, found no documented effort by the Germans to purposefully starve or kill American POWS. The situation was different for eastern, especially Russian prisoners of war. It is estimated that about 3.5 million, or 57% of all Soviet POWs died in German custody.The results of this May 1945 poll can be explained by the fact that in April and early May 1945, there were numerous reports of Allied forces liberating concentration camps. The deliberate killing and starving of camp inmates was widely reported and may have been conflated with news of Prisoners of War camps by the American public. Articles such as the ones below use words such as “semi-starvation,” “slave labor,” mistreatment and appalling sanitary condition, when reporting on both POWs camps and concentration camps.Gene Currivan, "Out of Hitler Slavery Into the Light," in the New York Times, April 1, 1945.Were US POWs Starved to Death in German Camps? | The National WWII Museum | New OrleansJapan revisits its darkest moments where American POWs became human experimentsOne Japanese doctor has dedicated himself to ensuring the vivisection of eight US airmen by his fellow countrymen is not forgottenJustin McCurry in FukuokaThu 13 Aug 2015 12.40 EDTLast modified on Wed 29 Nov 2017 08.00 ESTShares3803Comments909B-29 crew that were used for live vivisection experiments. Photograph: World War II Database: Your WW2 History Reference DestinationFor a while after the end of the second world war, Toshio Tono could not bear to be in the company of doctors. And the thought of putting on a white coat filled him with dread.As a young man with an interest in gynaecology, it was an aversion that could have quickly ended his dream of a career in medicine.But there were powerful reasons behind his phobia.In 1945, as a first-year student at Kyushu Imperial University’s medical school in southern Japan, Tono became an unwilling witness to atrocities.Those atrocities – namely the dreadful medical experimentation on live American prisoners of war – decades later, continue to provoke revulsion and disbelief in his country and abroad.The man who survived Hiroshima: 'I had entered a living hell on earth'Read moreAs Japan prepares to mark the 70th anniversary of its wartime defeat on Saturday, speculation is building over how, or if, Shinzo Abe, the conservative prime minister, will apologise for his country’s wartime atrocities.Amid widespread criticism, including in the US, that under Abe Japan is attempting to expunge the worst excesses of its past brutality from the collective memory, Tono believes his “final job” is to shed light on one of the darkest chapters in his country’s modern history.In early May 1945, just weeks after he began his studies, a US B-29 Superfortress crashed in northern Kyushu island after being rammed by a Japanese fighter plane. The US plane, part of the 29th Bomb Group, 6th Bomb Squadron, had been returning to its base in Guam from a bombing mission against a Japanese airfield.One of the estimated 12 crew died when the cords of his parachute were sliced by another Japanese plane. On landing, another opened fire on villagers before turning his pistol on himself. Local people, incensed by the destruction the B-29s were visiting on Japanese cities, reportedly killed another two airmen on the ground.“The B-29s crews were hated in those days,” Tono, now the 89-year-old director of a maternity clinic in Fukuoka, told the Guardian in a recent interview.FacebookTwitterPinterestToshio Tono, who now heads a maternity clinic. Photograph: Justin McCurry/GuardianThe remaining airmen were rounded up by police and placed in military custody in the nearby city of Fukuoka. The squadron’s commander, Marvin Watkins, was sent to Tokyo for questioning. There, Watkins endured beatings at the hands of his interrogators, and is thought to have died in his native Virgnia in the late 1980s.The prisoners were led to believe they were going to receive treatment for their injuries. But over the following three weeks, they were to be subjected to a depraved form of pathology at the medical school – procedures to which Tono is the only surviving witness.“One day two blindfolded prisoners were brought to the school in a truck and taken to the pathology lab,” Tono said. “Two soldiers stood guard outside the room. I did wonder if something unpleasant was going to happen to them, but I had no idea it was going to be that awful.”Inside, university doctors, at the urging of local military authorities, began the first of a series of experiments that none of the eight victims would survive.According to testimony that was later used against the doctors and military personnel at the Allied War Crimes Tribunals, they injected one anaesthetised prisoner with seawater to see if it worked as a substitute for sterile saline solution.Other airmen had parts of their organs removed, with one deprived of an entire lung to gauge the effects of surgery on the respiratory system. In another experiment, doctors drilled through the skull of a live prisoner, apparently to determine if epilepsy could be treated by the removal of part of the brain.The tribunals also heard claims from US lawyers that the liver of one victim had been removed, cooked and served to officers, although all charges of cannibalism were later dropped owing to a lack of evidence.As an inexperienced medical student, Tono’s job was to wash the blood from the operating theatre floor and prepare seawater drips.“The experiments had absolutely no medical merit,” he said. “They were being used to inflict as cruel a death as possible on the prisoners.“I was in a state of panic, but I couldn’t say anything to the other doctors. We kept being reminded of the misery US bombing raids had caused in Japan. But looking back it was a terrible thing to have happened.”Medical staff preserved the POWs’ corpses in formaldehyde for future use by students, but at the end of the war the remains were quickly cremated, as doctors attempted to hide evidence of their crimes.When later questioned by US authorities, they claimed the airmen had been transferred to camps in Hiroshima and had died in the atomic bombing on 6 August.On the afternoon of 15 August, hours after the emperor had announced Japan’s surrender, more than a dozen other American POWs held in Fukuoka camps were taken to a mountainside execution site and beheaded.The macabre experiments at Kyushu University were not without precedent. In occupied China, members of the imperial army’s Unit 731 experimented on thousands of live Chinese and Russian POWs and civilians as part of Japan’s chemical and biological weapons programme.Of the 30 Kyushu University doctors and military staff who stood trial in 1948, 23 were convicted of vivisection and the wrongful removal of body parts. Five were sentenced to death and another four to life imprisonment. But they were never punished.They were the beneficiaries of the slow pace of justice as US-led occupation authorities attempted to deal with large numbers of military leaders and civilian collaborators suspected of war crimes. One of the most senior doctors, Fukujiro Ishiyama, killed himself before his trial.By the early 1950s the Korean peninsula was in the midst of a bloody civil war, while Japan had been officially recognised as a US ally under the terms of the San Francisco peace treaty.With a politically stable Japan regarded as key to preventing the spread of communism in the region, President Truman issued an executive order that led to freedom for imprisoned war criminals, including those awaiting execution.By the end of 1958, all Japanese war criminals had been released and began reinventing themselves, some as mainstream politicians, under their new, US-authored constitution.“The way Japan was during the war, it was impossible to refuse orders from the military,” Tono said. “Dr Ishiyama and the other doctors committed crimes, but in a way they were also victims of the war. But I hated doctors for a while. I couldn’t get to sleep without pills.”After the war, Tono spent years examining documents and revisiting relevant locations in an attempt to establish what had happened.Ignoring pleas from his former superiors not to disclose the truth about the POWs’ treatment, Tono revealed all in Disgrace, his meticulously researched account of the crimes.Like the leaders of Unit 731, the doctors who conducted live vivisection re-entered postwar society as respectable members of the medical community. Most never spoke of their wartime experiences.Earlier this year, the university, which has long since dropped its imperial title, made the surprising decision to acknowledge the darkest chapter in its history with the inclusion of vivisection exhibits at its new museum.Tono, too, is currently displaying photographs and documents at his clinic.Seven decades on, a simple stone monument erected by a local farmer marks the spot where the B-29 came down, and where the airmen’s terrifying ordeal began.“The job of a doctor is to help people, but here were doctors doing exactly the opposite,” Tono said. “It’s difficult to accept, but this really happened. I decided to tell the truth because I don’t want anything like this to ever happen again.”What War Captives FacedIn Japanese Prison Camps,And How U.S. RespondedBy JESS BRAVINStaff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNALApril 7, 2005After his B-24 Liberator crashed into the Pacific Ocean in May 1943, U.S. Army Capt. Louis Zamperini spent 47 days on a life raft before being rescued by a Japanese patrol boat. Then his ordeal really began.Shipped through a succession of prison camps, he finally arrived at Japan's secret Ofuna interrogation center. There, prisoners thought to hold critical intelligence were placed under a strict regimen designed to make them break. Solitary confinement, blindfolding and compulsory calisthenics were routine. Prisoners were shaved and stripped, forbidden from speaking to each other and made to stand at attention or assume uncomfortable positions for interrogations. Cooperate, and treatment might improve. Violate the rules and you might be slapped or beaten -- or worse."There was no such thing as international law, just Japanese law," says Mr. Zamperini, now 88 years old. Japan had never ratified the Geneva Conventions, and Ofuna inmates were told they had no treaty protections -- such as the right to reveal nothing but name, rank and serial number.Upon Tokyo's surrender, however, the U.S. declared that international law did apply -- and held accountable much of the Japanese hierarchy, from prison guards to cabinet ministers. U.S. military prosecutors brought hundreds of cases for mistreatment of captured Americans, failure to classify them as prisoners of war and hiding them from delegations of the International Committee of the Red Cross. Offenses as minor as failing to post camp rules or holding up a prisoner's meal were considered war crimes. A single count could bring a year at hard labor."The defendants in these cases, as you would expect in most contexts of war, believed that the circumstances justified what they were doing," says Prof. David Cohen of the University of California, Berkeley, who has been collecting trial records from around the world for a War Crimes Studies Center he founded in 2000.Summary ExecutionsAlthough Nuremberg and other postwar tribunals largely are remembered for prosecuting the Nazi leadership for crimes against humanity, the trials originated in the mistreatment of prisoners of war. It was the German practice of summarily executing downed Allied flyers that in 1944 led Washington to begin planning for war-crimes prosecutions.Ofuna prison camp, where American prisoners were interrogated during World War II. Image courtesy "Devil at My Heels," the memoir of POW Louis Zamperini.Other than the flyers, Prof. Cohen says, American and British soldiers captured by the Germans usually received adequate treatment. (Russian POWs fared far worse, under Nazi racial policies that considered Slavs subhuman.)Prisoners of the Japanese, however, faced grueling treatment across the board. Forced labor, meager rations and poor medical care were the rule, along with occasional beheadings by samurai sword and even incidents of cannibalism.But as the U.S. saw it, mistreatment didn't have to rise to the level of torture to merit punishment. For conditions that fell short of torture, prosecutors brought charges under the sweeping Geneva provision that barred "any unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind." Along with routine beatings, Japanese interrogators had used solitary confinement, sleep deprivation, blindfolding, head shaving, restricting meals, uncomfortable positions and other techniques to make prisoners talk. Japan failed to register some prisoners or facilities with the Red Cross, delayed delivering their mail or Red Cross packages and denied some Americans POW privileges without full-blown judicial proceedings.Japanese regulations required that prisoners of war "be humanely treated and in no case shall any insult or maltreatment be inflicted." In a February 1942 diplomatic note, Tokyo told Washington that while Japan held "no obligations" under the Geneva Conventions, it nevertheless intended to apply "corresponding similar stipulations of the treaty" to captured Americans. When complaints arrived from the foreign governments or the Red Cross, which then as now was the only independent group allowed to visit prisoners, officials forwarded them to military authorities.Soda Pop and a BiscuitMr. Zamperini, who still lives in his hometown of Los Angeles, says his first encounters with Japanese interrogators were hardly pleasant, but to his surprise, "they didn't beat you to get information out of you" -- at least not always.Louis Zamperini, held by the Japanese during World War II, in a 2003 photo.After subsisting on a diet of plain rice, Mr. Zamperini was led before "naval officers in white suits with gold braid" who sat feasting at "a table full of goodies." Refuse to answer and they sent "you back to your cell more miserable than when you started." To get some of the food, Mr. Zamperini says he used a ruse, pretending to crack under pressure and then offering misleading information about the location of U.S. airstrips. "I got a soda pop and I got a biscuit, so I won," he says.U.S. military commissions classified practices like these as war crimes. "Any corporal punishment, any imprisonment in quarters without daylight and, in general, any form of cruelty is forbidden," an Army judge advocate explained.Government-appointed defense attorneys protested the vagueness of some charges. Threatening prisoners with "unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment … does not constitute any war crime," one argued. "It does not allege any specific act." The attorney recalled his own World War I experience as a U.S. interrogator. "We tried by all manner of words and all manner of inducements -- I will not go beyond that -- to attempt to glean information which would be helpful in our operations against the enemy," he said, and no one considered it a war crime."We looked this up very carefully," the prosecutor replied. "When you start to threaten a man, of course you violate the provisions of the Rules of Land Warfare." The commission ruled for the prosecution.The World War II defendants insisted that they hadn't received proper training, or that prisoners exaggerated their mistreatment, or that any problems resulted from cultural misunderstandings or were appropriate punishment for breaking camp rules. Low-ranking guards claimed they were following superior orders, while top officers and cabinet ministers blamed rogue subordinates. Defense lawyers argued that Japan wasn't legally bound by the Geneva Conventions and, even if it were, many prisoners, such as Allied flyers, had no right to treaty protections because they committed such war crimes as sabotage or "indiscriminate bombing" of cities.Hundreds of TrialsWhile the international tribunals at Tokyo and Nuremberg focused on a handful of high-ranking Axis defendants, hundreds of lower-profile national military commissions tried the small fry. For instance, in November 1945, a British military court at Wuppertal, Germany, sentenced three German officers to terms of up to five years for crimes at a Luftwaffe interrogation center. The central offense: "excessive heating of the prisoners' cells … for the deliberate purpose of obtaining from the prisoners of war information of a kind which under the Geneva Convention they were not bound to give," according to the summary published in 1948 by the United Nations War Crimes Commission."POW asleep, Ofuna" (1945) by John Goodchild, Australian war artist.At Yokohama, Japan, meanwhile, the U.S. Army conducted more than 300 war-crimes trials through 1948. More than 90% involved prisoner mistreatment, says Berkeley's Prof. Cohen. American prosecutors focused on Ofuna, a secret interrogation camp run by the Imperial Navy for pilots and other high value prisoners, including Col. Gregory "Pappy" Boyington, the Marine Corps flying ace. Using affidavits and testimony from former prisoners, prosecutors depicted a grim world where men were broken through physical and psychological cruelty.When Japan failed to cooperate with the Red Cross, the U.S. considered it a war crime. Lt. Gen. Hiroshi Tamura, head of prisoner management, was sentenced to eight years hard labor for, in part, "refusing and failing to grant permission" to the Red Cross to visit prison camps, denying Red Cross delegates "access to all premises" where prisoners were held and refusing to let prisoners speak to the Red Cross without Japanese observers present.Japanese authorities told Ofuna prisoners that they weren't POWs but unarmed "belligerents" who weren't entitled to Geneva's protections. Navy aviator James Balch testified that an interrogator "explained to me that I wasn't a registered prisoner of war, that I was a special prisoner of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere and was, as far as the Japanese were concerned, still a combatant."Lawyers for the Japanese defendants argued that since some captured Americans "lost the status of POWs in that they were saboteurs," it was no war crime to withhold POW privileges from them, Army records say. A military commission rejected that argument as "untenable" because "there is no evidence of any judicial proceedings against the … victims for the alleged acts of sabotage by which they would be deprived of their status" as POWs.The 'Ofuna Crouch'Japanese interrogators put captured Americans in painful contortions for periods of 30 minutes to several hours. One hated position, the so-called Ofuna crouch, involved "standing on the ball of your foot, knees half bent and arms extended over the head," Navy Lt. Cmdr. John Fitzgerald said in a http://deposition.In an affidavit, Navy Capt. Arthur Maher recounted his treatment after his ship, the USS Houston, was sunk in February 1942 off Indonesia. Captured after swimming to Java, Capt. Maher said Japanese officers "promised that we would be treated in accordance with international law."Upon reaching Ofuna, things were different. "As we entered the camp gates, the utter stillness was noticeable." The Americans were told not to speak, locked in nine-by-six-foot cells and put to a stultifying routine of closely timed meals, exhausting calisthenics and limited chances to wash up. Prisoners were given just one cigarette a day and had to smoke it immediately, Capt. Maher said. Many of the guards, he said, "were sadists, some obviously cowards who did not wish to see battle," he said. "A few were definitely decent and tried to alleviate our condition."During interrogations, "prisoners were required to sit at rigid attention and were never allowed to relax," Capt. Maher said. "At times, a cigarette would be offered in an attempt to throw you off guard. Interrogators used different tactics to obtain results. Some tried flattery, cajolery and sympathy; others used threats of violence. But the prisoner was never allowed to forget that he was in a subservient position and there was nothing that he could do about it," he said.Mail between prisoners and their families was restricted to a trickle of censored letters, Capt. Maher said. "This flagrant violation of international law caused great anxiety on the parts of the relatives of all prisoners in Ofuna. The Japanese frequently referred to the fact that we could write as soon as we left Ofuna, using that as an added incentive to talk and be rewarded by being sent to a regular prisoner-of-war camp."At trial, Japanese officials insisted they had done nothing wrong. The chief of naval intelligence, Rear Adm. Kaoru Takeuchi testified that he had ordered that prisoners be treated well."I had a pamphlet named 'How to Interrogate Prisoners of War' compiled," he said. "The main points in the book" were "to respect international law. Not to mistreat prisoners of war. And to conduct the interrogation in a free, conversational manner." To make sure staff got the message, he had these passages "printed in gothic letters and underlined it with a black line," he said. Moreover, abusing the prisoners was ineffective. "Since Anglo-Saxons would not betray their countries, it would be no use to force them to talk," the admiral testified.Officers were held liable for their subordinates' mistreatment of prisoners -- even if they tried to stop the abuse. Camp commander Suichi Takata "took immediate action and investigated all complaints made by the POW officers as to abuses committed upon POWs, reprimanding the guilty," and also "tried to correct the food situation and living conditions in the camp," concluded Army reviewer George Taylor. Two former prisoners -- the senior American and British officers held there -- wrote letters recommending clemency. In view of such "mitigating circumstances," Mr. Taylor recommended that Mr. Takata's punishment be reduced -- to 15 years at hard labor, from the original sentence of 40 years.Half the time, Army reviewers found the commissions too lenient and recommended that harsher sentences be imposed. On occasion, though, they accepted defense arguments. Prison guard Masatomo Kikuchi was convicted of compelling prisoners "to practice saluting and other forms of arduous military exercises on their rest days and at other times when they were tired." The reviewer concluded that "drilling a detail of men for 15 or 30 minutes … is so universally utilized in the armies of the world to teach discipline and for exercise that it would be unjust and unreasonable to consider it a war crime."'No Serious Injury'Moreover, the reviewer found that the commission had overreached in convicting Mr. Kikuchi of two "beatings." In fact, testimony showed "that the mistreatment consisted of a series of slappings." Since "no serious injury was sustained by any of the POWs as a result of his mistreatment," Mr. Kikuchi's sentence was cut to eight years hard labor, from 12.Cmdr. Sashizo Yokura, an Ofuna interrogator, testified that he opposed beating American prisoners, even though beatings commonly were used to discipline Japanese soldiers. He said he had learned from an interpreter who studied in the U.S. that, while "the Japanese think that beating is the simplest punishment when someone violates a regulation, … the Americans consider beatings as the greatest humiliation." Moreover, he said, beatings were counterproductive, as prisoners wasted interrogators' time bemoaning their treatment.CASE FILE• See documents describing cases involving the beatings of American soldiers.Prosecutors, however, contended that Cmdr. Yokura had subtly signaled guards to soften up prisoners for interrogation. Specifically, they introduced evidence that in December 1944, Cmdr. Yokura delayed the meal of a captured B-29 flyer, Maj. H.A. Walker, and forced him to perform kampan soji, an awkward floor-cleaning exercise using a no-handle mop that typically was used to discipline Japanese sailors. These acts, prosecutors argued, contributed to Maj. Walker's "death by inches" nine months later, after he had been severely beaten by guards and denied medical attention.Cmdr. Yokura's defense attorney, Michael Braun, challenged this theory in his closing argument. "We all regret the death of Maj. Walker, just as we regret the deaths of 250,000 to 300,000 other Americans who died in the past war," he said. "But the fact that a man died in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp does not automatically mean that any Japanese brought to trial theoretically for his death is guilty of it." Cmdr. Yokura denied holding up Maj. Walker's meal, but even if he had, Mr. Braun argued, he would have been justified because Maj. Walker refused to give his name, rank and serial number, as required by the Geneva Conventions. The U.S. Army's own Rules of Land Warfare authorized "food restrictions as punishment," he http://observed.Mr. Braun urged the military commission not to apply a double standard. "The eyes of the world are focused on what America does here," and "whatever we do is going to be carefully read, carefully scanned, carefully measured against the principles we enunciate."The commission sentenced Cmdr. Yokura to 25 years at hard labor.Post-War LessonsIn 1949, the lessons of World War II trials were incorporated into international law. But following Sept. 11, 2001, Bush administration lawyers reexamined the degree of force and cruelty that could be used to interrogate prisoners captured in the war against terrorism. An April 2003 interrogation policy approved by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld listed permissible methods including 20-hour interrogations, "dietary manipulation," "isolation," "sleep deprivation," "face slap/stomach slap," and "prolonged standing."Mr. Zamperini, the former Japanese prisoner, says that in today's war on terrorism, severe treatment of the enemy might be called for."You've got a bunch of religious cutthroats that don't follow rules and regulations," he says, and "if it's a question of saving a lot of lives, then torture would be in keeping" with the country's best interest. "This is a whole new ballgame," he says.Write to Jess Bravin at [email protected]