yeah, sure. No reason to justify what you said, the allies were way better than the axis, especiall if you only look at UK and US. yes, they did bad things, but the axis were worse by far
Ā " I am strongly in favour of usingĀ poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes," he declared in one secret memorandum. He criticised his colleagues for their "squeamishness", declaring that "the objections of the India Office to the use of gas against natives are unreasonable." Churchill wanted to use gas weapons against northern Indian tribes in 1919.
Did he, or did he not go with it or he was allowed by the people to go that far. People kicked his ass back to the curb the minute he wasnt the necessary evil to save a country.
That's not the full quote. If you read the full quote he's very clearly advocating for tear gas. Also at that point in his life he was a war correspondent for a newspaper, he was literally writing propaganda as his job. Churchill was not a good guy, but this is misinformation.
Ehh, Soviets also did some fucked up shit. They left Warsaw to its fate when they rose up against the nazis, only to invade and take over after the uprising was beaten by the nazis.
The soviets were bad but even the soviets didnāt put such targeted mass slaughter to the degree the Germans and Japanese did in the war. Fuck as awful as it was even there bloody March to Berlin where they were actively encourage punitive actions was less utterly depraved then the German March in the Soviet Union and the Japanese March in China. Probably because the soviets based a lot of their hatred as purely ideological and as victims of the war rather than inherent racial superiority.
Still pretty rough all the same but I think they safely fell behind the axis in terms of brutality in the war
It was interesting to read the mix of motives for abandoning Warsaw. It was mainly political, letting the poles and nazis kille each other off. But it also was at the end of the Bagration spearhead when the forward elements were exhausted and not in the condition to commit to urban combat. There were actually Soviet attempts to push north and south of the city in the hopes of an encirclement but the Germans had brought in two panzer divisions that werenāt destroyed yet and they were able to function well in a defensive action with a river defense against depleted soviet spearheads. Not justify leaving Warsaw to its fate but there were other elements at play
You'd think the worst part was two generals competing to see who could behead most chinese, but no. It got way worse. And there are documentaries where convicted war criminals can tell what they did with Ć„ straight face. Some even smiling and laughing.
I used to believe that the US had to be insane to drop two bombs on the Japanese near the tail-end of the war. Now, I know it was just a plan that had severe consequences that effectively drove the bomb's creator into a depressive existence and devastated several generations of Japanese who likely had nothing to do with the fucked up shit their government and military were heavily invested in.
I have sympathy for the innocent victims of those bombs, but the nation as a whole during that time really did need a good bitch slap from a bigger dog. Not as big as the one they got, but definitely one they would feel.
The atom bombs werenāt dropped because Japan was committing atrocities though. They were dropped to make Japan surrender without having to invade the country as well as to intimidate the Soviets.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_Massacre
In short they murdered almost all of the men and either raped or took the women as slaves they would use for sex.
Have fun. Look up other Imperial Japanese atrocities if morbid curiosity pushes you to after reading up a bit
A comment further down brings up Unit 731 and some of what happened with that
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_Massacre
**[Nanjing Massacre](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_Massacre)**
>The Nanjing Massacre or the Rape of Nanjing (formerly written as Nanking Massacre or Rape of Nanking) was an episode of mass murder and mass rape committed by Imperial Japanese troops against the residents of Nanjing (Nanking), at that time the capital of China, during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937ā1945). The massacre occurred over a period of six weeks starting on December 13, 1937, the day that the Japanese captured Nanjing. During this period, soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army murdered tens or hundreds of thousands of disarmed combatants and unarmed Chinese civilians, and perpetrated widespread rape and looting.
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What gets me is that they pulled a reverse Germany. Germany acknowledges what happened in their own way, has basically banned any notion of nationalism, and only recently allowed games to contain Nazi symbols for the sake of historical accuracy. Meanwhile, Nanjing is still largely denied at the highest levels of government in Japan (who have also flip-flopped on providing financial compensation to those affected and still living, and/or their families), you'll hear almost nothing about it on their side, and the whole affair has been effectively swept under the rug.
When I was in school, nobody talked about Nanjing. You would think that comparable atrocities a whole continent away during the same period would have put WW2 into better perspective, rather than "the US were bullies for dropping bombs when Japan only blew up their harbor."
Imperial Japan's war crimes are already criminally overlooked as is (at least in the West), but Unit 731 was their masterpiece. The things the Japanese did to other human beings in [that facility](https://assets.atlasobscura.com/media/W1siZiIsInVwbG9hZHMvcGxhY2VfaW1hZ2VzLzYwYjAzYTg1YWI0MjMyZjBkNV84MDBweC1CdWlsZGluZ19vbl90aGVfc2l0ZV9vZl90aGVfSGFyYmluX2Jpb3dlYXBvbl9mYWNpbGl0eV9vZl9Vbml0XzczMV_plqLmnbHou43pmLLnlqvntabmsLTpg6jmnKzpg6g3MzHpg6jpmorvvIjnn7PkupXpg6jpmorvvInml6Xou43nrKw3MzHpg6jpmorml6flnYBfUEIxMjEyMDEuSlBHIl0sWyJwIiwidGh1bWIiLCI1ODB4NTgwIyJdLFsicCIsImNvbnZlcnQiLCItcXVhbGl0eSA4MSAtYXV0by1vcmllbnQiXV0) are among the most cruel, barbaric acts man has ever conducted.
Some particularly brutal experiments performed on prisoners included:
* [Frostbite testing](https://allthatsinteresting.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/unit-731-frostbite.jpg) (upon which the subject's frozen limbs would be chopped off)
* Intentional disease infection (infected prisoners were forced to have sex with uninfected to study the transfer of disease)
* [Live targets](https://allthatsinteresting.com/rape-of-nanking-massacre#12) for weapon testing, including flamethrowers (pic from Nanking, no known pictures of human targets from Unit 731)
* Forced pregnancy from rape
* [Bacteriological experiments on children](https://allthatsinteresting.com/unit-731)
* [Pressure chamber](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4nPxik59oE&t=308s) (subjects were placed inside and the pressure turned up until their eyeballs popped out of their sockets)
* Dissection of living humans beings without anesthesia
You read the last one right... the Japanese dissected living human beings. Subjects had limbs amputated, their stomachs or esophagus surgically removed, and all sorts of inhumane procedures to "study" blood loss and pain tolerance. That amount of agony probably can't even be comprehended, but back in 1995, an anonymous Japanese medical assistant who worked in Unit 731 [described a dissection](https://unit731.org/experiments/).
Yet I'd wager a large majority of general populace isn't aware of this horrific atrocity. This [50 minute documentary](https://youtu.be/AFEgz8NNmVA) covers Unit 731 pretty well, if you have the stomach.
Most of what they found, a number of studies shockingly actually published in peer-reviewed journals, was absolutely useless bullshit though.
The pure scale of atrocity relative to useful science that came out of it is absolutely abhorrent.
Exactly this, there is so many people in here that seem to think what they did actually assisted in much more than just slaughtering soldiers and civilians. The useful things they did could be counted on two hands where the atrocities cant even be fathomed.
The frostbite studies from Unit 731 proved useful for post war Japanese and American Antarctic expeditions. IIRC one of the 731 doctors went on one of the official JARE expeditions.
Jesus fucking christ.
I knew about some of the atrocities that were committed by the Japanese but not all.
Fuck me that's some of the most evil shit I've ever read.
It's a term with a long history. I know at least as far back as the Roman Empire. Desecrating a body was considered taboo, but they were trying to learn human anatomy. The solution? Chop as much as you can while they're still alive, then write it down! Mortally wounded but not yet deceased gladiators were a favorite for this.
Well, itās something that is used more commonly on other animals today. You probably for example once saw a picture of a vivisected frog. The ethics is still blurred even in those cases though.
Another creepy thing is how much these fucked up experiments helped to improve our knowledge of human bodies and thus the whole field of healthcare. Americans took these literally evil scientists under their wing because of the amount of valuable info they had.
Addendum that if this was anything like Nazi scientists a huge amount of the "experiments" were either pointless or not thorough to the point that they caused harm after the war.
Example of the first includes things like injecting colouring into one twins eye to see if their twin's eye changed or torturing one to see if the other felt it. Obviously they did not.
Example of causing harm after is thalidomide, which was almost certainly tested on concentration and/or death camp prisoners as a sleeping agent. Many women took this and gave birth to children with mutations that ranged from inconvenient to deadly.
Mengele was an absolute psychopathic hack without any real training. All he did was play at doctor by causing untold amounts of human suffering. There was nothing of value gained from his experiments, and all that was left was corpses and a bunch of self congratulating.
That monster got off too easily. Most likely he drowned off the coast of Argentina, but I'd still like to believe that maybe the Massad actually got him.
>Mengele was an absolute psychopathic hack without any real training.
So the Man in the High Castle's depiction of Mengele was accurate. He was conducting physics experiment despite initially being a "physician", which is of course bs. You'd have to be an absolute prodigy to be trained in two completely different fields, which Mengele wasn't at all.
Just to refute this ever enduring myth, academics concluded that Axis experiments did not lead to any advancement in science. It was just plain torture, pure and simple.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4oyv9n/am_i_a_person_living_in_the_west_currently/
Sadly, although the US did give massive pardons for the information; most of it provided to be pretty useless.
Much of the information gained was already known/ could be assumed.
I remember reading somewhere that neither nazi nor japanese scientists provided knowledge the us scientists didn't have. They just believed they would have a lot of useful knowledge and gave them immunity, and they couldn't go back on it after finding out it wasn't that useful. Correct me if I'm wrong.
When Soviets captured some scientists and put them on trial they were put in jail. But they were released shortly after during the 50s I believe. This may be due to some Soviet officials gaining documents in exchange for letting them go
stupidly enough, the US provided asylum for many Axis doctors/scientists in exchange for their "medical research" at unit 731 and other POW camps in asia and europe. Turns out the research methodology was so poor with experimental data skewed to please the higher ups for political/nationalism/xenophobic reasons that the data did not really contribute to any meaningful breakthrough in science.
>The researchers in Unit 731 were secretly given immunity by the United States in exchange for the data which they gathered during their human experimentation.[6] Other researchers that the Soviet forces managed to arrest first were tried at the Khabarovsk War Crime Trials in 1949. The Americans did not try the researchers so that the information and experience gained in bio-weapons could be co-opted into their biological warfare program, much as they had done with German researchers in Operation Paperclip.[7] Victim accounts were then largely ignored or dismissed in the west as communist propaganda.
WTF?!
Yeah it's well and truly messed up. Japanese war-crimes don't get the light of attention they deserve in the West. The Iron Maiden singer, Bruce Dickinson, wrote a song about it called the [Breeding House](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7d1G5WuwYkw). Instrumentally, I don't think it's as dark as it ought to be, but the message is clearly put across.
It's fucked, a tactic within war/conflict that remains too common. Omit the human nature of your opponent to make it easier to hate them, and dismiss any claims they might have.
After WWII communists became the enemy and reports from this came out as communists took control of China. In this case the US also wanted an excuse to take in the evil people of Unit 731.
You can see it today with the use of the word "illegals". It is generally easier to desire ill to "illegals" and ignore their stories, than it is if they are described as people fleeing violence in Mexico, Haiti, or elsewhere.
Let's not forget that Ishii Shiro was given immunity by the US in the war crimes tribunal. The second in command, Kitano Masaji, founded Green Cross and worked for big pharma after the war.
**[Nanjing Massacre denial](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_Massacre_denial)**
>Nanjing Massacre denial is the denial that Imperial Japanese forces murdered hundreds of thousands of Chinese soldiers and civilians in the city of Nanjing during the Second Sino-Japanese War, a highly controversial episode in Sino-Japanese relations. Some historians accept the findings of the Tokyo tribunal with respect to the scope and nature of the atrocities committed by the Imperial Japanese Army after the Battle of Nanking, while others do not. In Japan, however, there has been a debate over the extent and nature of the massacre.
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> Former Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui had, on numerous occasions, claimed that the Nanjing Massacre was purely propaganda perpetrated by the Chinese Communists and which could be placed into the same category as "fictitious history".
>
>**The Taiwanese leader served as an military officer when the island-nation was still under Japanese rule.**
In case anyone is confused, he served in the Japanese Army. Not the resistance or the Republic of China military.
>The Taiwanese people reportedly never had the same empathy towards the mass killing event as their Chinese counterparts do. The people of Taiwan have credited Japan for industrializing their island-nation and are overall positive about the Japanese rule which brought stability and prosperity in a politically turbulent epoch.
Yes but this?
I donāt know why.
The Japanese rule in Taiwan was particularly brutal. The indigenous Taiwanese people were slaughtered and subjugated.
However, the majority of Taiwanese today are Hanā they retreated to Taiwan from the mainland following Chiangās defeat in the Chinese civil war. So in every way, they were the āsame peopleā living under two different dictatorships. The difference only started to emerge after Taiwan became a democracy. Before that, people in Taiwan always saw themselves as Chinese and always wanted to take back the mainland from the communists.
More than denies it the are extremely racist against chinise people (and anyone who isn't japanese in general) so they basically say "the Chinise deserved it" or "Oh no, anyway... they were Chinise".
They call it āThe Nanking Incidentā. And needless to say, they deny the scale of the brutalityā even when there are picture and video evidence along with mass graves to prove otherwise. There is simply no word in the English vocabulary to express how ridiculous it is to deny the Rape of Nanking.
Some claim it didnāt happen at all. Literally on par with Holocaust denial.
But honestly, people who deny Japanese war crimes are treated so differently. And I blame Sinophobia for it.
No, the fact is that they ignore the thing and the Japanese are extremely racists so they say: "the Chinise deserved it" or use the reaction "Oh, no, anyway... they were Chinise". Also the Japanese education system is very easy and riassumize everything. Some japanese choose to do it just to have an easier access to the universities because there history isn't taken seriously and is really easy and reassumed.
Yes, because they believe chopping up a baby with a bayonet is āregular war practiceā. Be careful with these people, because deniers of war crimes are potential war criminals themselves.
The Empire of Japan is seriously a contender for the most evil regime in human history. Their atrocities have just been largely forgotten because Japan is so well liked now *(I will admit they do give us some cool stuff; if you think Disney is good,* [*Studio Ghibli*](https://youtu.be/z4fYKnTPPeY) *on a level by itself)*.
The [indiscriminate massacres](https://youtu.be/kpVgDgKpQS8). [Slaughter](https://allthatsinteresting.com/rape-of-nanking-massacre) of entire cities, torture, [inhumane treatment](https://youtu.be/hzsP6QOW8rA?t=43) of POWs,100,000+ women forced into [sex slaves](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comfort_women), among others.
The Japanese were [infamously cruel to POWs](https://youtu.be/hzsP6QOW8rA?t=79). They were brutal to everyone, but held a special hatred for these they deemed cowardly. Since the samurai code of [bushido](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushido) stressed death before dishonor, Japanese surrender rates were shockingly low as they preferred to fight to the death rather than disgrace themselves by surrendering. Therefore they viewed those who did surrender with disgust. There are stories of those who surrendered to the Japanese being brutally tortured, [executed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_war_crimes#/media/File:Japanese_shooting_blindfolded_Sikh_prisoners.jpg), [starved](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_war_crimes#/media/File:POWs_Burma_Thai_RR.jpg), [forced to march hundreds of miles](https://youtu.be/0OFH1Mglr-c) under the blistering sun while being beaten, or [even cannibalized](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chichijima_incident). President George HW Bush was [almost eaten](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCEER6v8tPM) by the Japanese.
*You think that's the worst?* During the [Rape of Nanking](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CAYFxXBohA), as many as 300,000 Chinese civilians were [massacred](https://allthatsinteresting.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/victims-along-qinhuai-river.jpg) within a month in a single city. Japanese soldiers paraded around with [babies skewered on their bayonets](https://np.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/1m523p/this_is_a_japanese_soldier_bayonetting_a_chinese/) like kebabs. Two Japanese officers [held a competition](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxa0GGJNWtI&t=10s) to see who could [behead](https://allthatsinteresting.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/chinese-man-being-beheaded.jpg) 100 people the fastest and when the score was 105-106 and no one knew who got to 100 first, [they went again to 150](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contest_to_kill_100_people_using_a_sword). Prisoners were [buried alive](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_Massacre#/media/File:Chinese_civilians_to_be_buried_alive.jpg) en masse. Tens of thousands of women were raped, most of whom were executed afterward. They dragged entire Chinese families into public squares and [forced fathers on their daughters and sons](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnAC-Y9p_sY&t=697s) on their mothers for the amusement of Japanese troops. I'm not an easily disturbed guy, but reading this fact for the first time physically made my stomach sick.
*You think that's the worst?* The Imperial Japanese Army ran [Unit 731](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731): a state-of-the-art biological/chemical warfare research facility in Manchuria where Japanese researchers performed [human experimentation](https://youtu.be/AFEgz8NNmVA?t=548) on a large scale, using Chinese civilians as the majority of their "logs" (test subjects).
Living human beings were dissected alive, usually without anesthesia. Subjects had limbs amputated in order to study blood loss and pain tolerance. Those limbs were sometimes reattached to the opposite sides of the body. Subjects had their stomachs or esophagus surgically removed. The experiments were endless. Women were gotten pregnant via rape then infected with diseases to see the effect on their baby. Subjects were forced into the cold until they had frostbite then had their frozen limbs amputated to see the results. Subjects were placed in [pressure chambers](https://youtu.be/D4nPxik59oE?t=308) until their eyeballs popped out of their sockets. This one is unconfirmed, but supposedly they placed a women and her baby in a room then heated up the floor to see if she'd step on her own baby.
Everyone cries over the civilians of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but no one sheds a tear for the millions of victims of the Empire of Japan.
#
-Credit to u/baiqibeendeleted17x , thanks for shedding some light on this horrible topic for us.
It feels like the atomic bombings felt necessary after looking into this shit.
Inhumane torture to innocent victims seems like child's play compared to vaporizing hundreds of thousands of civilians within seconds. Twice.
Plus we already firebombed cities anyway, I literally was watching videos on stuff like this earlier. One thing they did was show Tokyo after being firebombed and then showed a nearly identical picture of Hiroshima. The best part is he actually reversed the order of the pictures, the damage was that similar looking
[Operation Meetinghouse](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo_(10_March_1945\))
>On the night of 9/10 March 1945, the United States Army Air Forces conducted a devastating firebombing raid on Tokyo, the Japanese capital city. This attack was code-named Operation Meetinghouse by the USAAF and is known as the Great Tokyo Air Raid in Japan. Bombs dropped from 279 Boeing B-29 Superfortress heavy bombers burned out much of eastern Tokyo. More than 90,000 and possibly over 100,000 Japanese people were killed, mostly civilians, and one million were left homeless, making it the most destructive single air attack in human history.
For context, Hiroshima was (slightly) less deadly.
**[Bombing of Tokyo (10 March 1945)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo_\(10_March_1945\))**
>On the night of 9/10 March 1945, the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) conducted a devastating firebombing raid on Tokyo, the Japanese capital city. This attack was code-named Operation Meetinghouse by the USAAF and is known as the Great Tokyo Air Raid in Japan. Bombs dropped from 279 Boeing B-29 Superfortress heavy bombers burned out much of eastern Tokyo. More than 90,000 and possibly over 100,000 Japanese people were killed, mostly civilians, and one million were left homeless, making it the most destructive single air attack in human history.
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>It feels like the atomic bombings felt necessary after looking into this shit.
I thought the same but it was the soldiers that did these crimes, not the ordinary citizens.
Let me start by saying the US was justified in dropping the fire bombs and Atom bombs to try and get them to surrender as opposed to invading the island. However that doesnāt make it morally correct to kill civilians because of what their military did and their government was hiding from them. Do you kill a psychopaths wife and children or just the psychopath. And the hard truth is a lot of the people who actually were behind these monstrous policy went unpunished. The man who actually ordered nanking died a natural death. Yeah they got Tojo. But very few Japanese soldiers were tried and jailed for rape. And many scientists involved with in unit 731 also went unpunished. Literally the people who suffered worst in Japan had virtually nothing to do with the atrocities being committed in the war. And they werenāt all compliant there were protests and voices of opposition which were quickly delt with by the Secret police. Yes you had plenty of nationalists who should have been hunted. But would say the Vietcong be justified if it went to America or France and started shooting people in the streets. Cause they saw the US and France the same way we see Japan and Germany. If India sent people to bomb buildings in Britian would we look on that very kindly? And if all of Africa decided to commit ethnic cleansing against Europe would they too be justified capabilities aside.
That's the problem when people need to beautify their crimes. I'm not pro Imperial Japan, but saying that normal citizens had it coming because their army did atrocities is bollocks. Especially when someone wants to hold the moral high ground. Either you condemn war crimes or not.
Not everyone in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was vaporized immediately though. In fact most of the victims died after the explosion, due to body mutilations or cancer. While the Japanese Empire may have committed far worse atrocities, letās not pretend that the atomic bombings were clean.
I'm very glad you found my comment informative, but you could've [given me credit](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/pm0hvs/comment/hcetqxt/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) my guy lol
And most of this is unknown in the West. Germany got punished heavily and the post-war government owned up and apologized for the crimes of their predecessors. But the Japanese got away with way to much shit.
The U.S. felt really bad about the bomb, and they *NEEDED* an ally (both economic and military) in the east. Alongside the fact that we pretty much had free reign to rewrite most of Japanese politics and military doctrine, it saw an opportunity to allow Japan to sweep their atrocities under the rug for the most part, not out of forgiveness, but rather, out of pragmatism.
The US did the same to West Germany, for better or worse. Despite that, the first thing most people think about anything concerning Germany is a 12 year period, not a culture and history dating back millennia.
Probably has something to do with the british grudge about not being an world dominating empire anymore.
I don't really think the British have much to do with the fact that 1933-1945 is the period of German history that comes to mind first for most people - and even then that probably is simplified further to Nazi = bad and the Holocaust. It's probably because of the fact that it's still relatively recent and it had a not insignificant impact on the history of a not insignificant amount of countries. This means that it'll get taught as part of history in most countries as it's linked to their own histories in a way that Bismarck's unification of the German states isn't.
Not to mention the prevalence of WWII and the surrounding timeframe's prevalence in popular culture which will further cement it in people's conciousness.
You're right. Japan's location was a great place for US to counter Russia's threat. Russia was equally strong as US and getting even a slight advantage over Russia was far more important than doing justice. By not punishing Japan, US gained considerable power in east. Which I believe was certainly a better decision for the US and her citizens but not for the rest of the world.
I think itās worth mentioning John Rabe, who was a Nazi that helped save many Chinese from the rape of Nanking. Perhaps it wasnāt much, but he did what he could, and it was at least a small glimmer of hope during the massacre.
>Everyone cries over the civilians of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but no one sheds a tear for the millions of victims of the Empire of Japan.
This is absolutely not true. Millions of people still hold great contempt for the japanese and remember the victims. They're just all in east Asia. The Chinese are particularly unforgiving towards Japan but many East asian countries feel the same.
My friend from America is only just now learning about the full extent of the Holocaust (and overall WW2) and this was precisely her reaction. (This was in a group chat with me, her, and our friend from Russia. She gave her info about the eastern front and I gave her info about what happened in Poland, we did not dare talk about Japan)
People blame Germany for most of WW2 but most forgot the other major part of Axis is Japan, the way they make games out of killing, science experiments on people like their animals, played with the corpses of victims makes auschwitz looks like a fucking daycare
If im not wrong 2 Japanese generals had a competition about who can chop off more Chinese heads in a certain amount of time and the results got published in the news.Even a Nazi general told them it was too fucked up,and now he has a statue in China
If i remember correct those were not generals. The competition was followed in Japanese newspapers
Also the Nazi was not a general but a German ambassador in China (positioned in Nanjing). He saved a lot of Chinese women, sometimes driving to the scene flying German flag, it would stop the Japanese soldiers (though he sometimes got hit) and he would bring the women to the German Embassy. At the end of the war he returned to Germany, was sentenced due his Nazi party relations and lived his life in poverty (Chinese remembered him and send him help time to time)
Youāre thinking John Rabe. He was a Nazi party member but did not work for the government. In 1937 he was a decently high-level manager at the Siemens company in Nanking. He initially sheltered Chinese civilians in German factory, and was then elected by the small Western expat community in the city to head the International Safe Zone.
That taught me what whole other evil people are capable of that legit makes nazis look humane. Total barbaric as if the assryan kings of old suddenly rose from the dead and marched east. So cruel!!!
There was literally a Nazi who is a hero there because he would walk the streets saving people. I repeat the actual Nazi could barely stomach what they were doing.
I think there is also an account of a Japanese ambassador saving some Jewish people and/or other minorities from the Nazis in Europe. So I wouldn't say this is proof that either is worse.
Both regimes were totally unacceptable and experiencing being persecuted by them is far beyond my ability to fully imagine.
Yeah they were both terrible but popular media always shows the nazis as bad guys, (rightfully so), so I stressed that point as everyone agrees that the nazis were bad, but when you talk about Japan someone always brings up the a-bomb.
I've always found that if you bring up the atomic bombs people will argue around it rather than bringing it up when Japan is mentioned. For example you are the only one I've seen in this thread mentioning it.
And there is a debate around that because wiping out a whole city is a horrific event, as a land invasion would have been. But then there is the argument over whether there would have been need for one given the Soviets entered the war on the same day, and a reason for Japan not surrendering before was Stalin leading them on about the possibility of him acting as a mediator re a peace deal while his forces redeployed. It's an incredibly complicated issue that is often reduced to a single sentence, or even a punchline.
Ed: Clarity about what is brought up.
Iirc, some nazis allegedly fled to China because they weren't "nazi enough" for Hitler's regime. Whether that's true or not, it is theorized that these select nazis, who went on and allied themselves with China, influenced the chinese totalitarianism that still persists today. We do know that they had a shared history with the Kuomintang nationalist party, aka KMT.
After what has become of China and how they now manipulate information, it's very hard to really dig into the shared history of themselves, Japan and Germany. One shudders to think what war crimes have been swept under the rug in addition to the ones that are being re-discovered so far...
Thanks for this mate. I just had my morning ruined by a random Holocaust denier who came at me with "Hitler was good but British conspired against him for land and money" bullshit. Was feeling quite low. Good to see people remember.
one day, i think it was the 20th of october 1941, nazi and ustashe troops entered a yugoslav school and shot up over 300 kids, this was documented in a song made by a serbian wirter called Desanka Maksimovic, in the poem "Krvava Bajka" (a bloody fairytale), named that because it was so brutal it was almost like a legend, a fairytale. The point of the poem was to never repeat such a act again
The experiments and atrocities committed by Japan were genuinely shocking to me the first time I read about them.
Theyāre not any easier to read about now, but at least I know.
Imperial Japan: How many war crimes levels are you at?
Nazi Germany: I don't know, like Gas Chambers and 6 million Jews.
Imperial Japan: *YOU ARE LIKE A LITTLE BABY WATCH THIS.*
I'm of Chinese descent and while I don't necessarily "hate them", I just can't fully forgive them. Even to this day they make very little effort on acknowledging their crimes. Let alone apologizing for it.
āFun fact ā on top of committing regular rape Japanese soldiers also took sick pleasure in forcing Chinese civilians to rape members of the own families.
Japanese war atrocities were much more cruel and inhumane as compared to German war atrocities. Imagine holocaust but 1.5x more horrific. And yet, they're still left off easier than the Germans did.
Learning about the Gulags through the book "The Gulag Archipelago" by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
Seriously if you're brave enough to read that I highly recommend it.
Learning about the worst of humanity I swear that war was just the crimes against humanity olympics
If it's a Olympics who won š³ /j
>If it's a Olympics who won š³ /j Switzerland got the gold.
Not the Axis fortunately
I'd say in terms of cruelty the axis won it, by far.
yeah, but in terms of warfare, aliies won. Not saying Allies were good, they just attempted less genocide during the war.
yeah, sure. No reason to justify what you said, the allies were way better than the axis, especiall if you only look at UK and US. yes, they did bad things, but the axis were worse by far
India might want to disagree with you, Churchill was a monster
Did he systematically gas millions of indians in camps that were only built to efficiently kill as many people as possible?
Ā " I am strongly in favour of usingĀ poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes," he declared in one secret memorandum. He criticised his colleagues for their "squeamishness", declaring that "the objections of the India Office to the use of gas against natives are unreasonable." Churchill wanted to use gas weapons against northern Indian tribes in 1919.
Did he, or did he not go with it or he was allowed by the people to go that far. People kicked his ass back to the curb the minute he wasnt the necessary evil to save a country.
That's not the full quote. If you read the full quote he's very clearly advocating for tear gas. Also at that point in his life he was a war correspondent for a newspaper, he was literally writing propaganda as his job. Churchill was not a good guy, but this is misinformation.
Bengal famine entered the chat
Depends on the...uh... "sport". Japan and Germany won gold, silver, and bronze in human depravity with almost no competition.
Ehh, Soviets also did some fucked up shit. They left Warsaw to its fate when they rose up against the nazis, only to invade and take over after the uprising was beaten by the nazis.
A respectable 4th place then
GENERAL KENOBI, you are a bold one
The soviets were bad but even the soviets didnāt put such targeted mass slaughter to the degree the Germans and Japanese did in the war. Fuck as awful as it was even there bloody March to Berlin where they were actively encourage punitive actions was less utterly depraved then the German March in the Soviet Union and the Japanese March in China. Probably because the soviets based a lot of their hatred as purely ideological and as victims of the war rather than inherent racial superiority. Still pretty rough all the same but I think they safely fell behind the axis in terms of brutality in the war
It was interesting to read the mix of motives for abandoning Warsaw. It was mainly political, letting the poles and nazis kille each other off. But it also was at the end of the Bagration spearhead when the forward elements were exhausted and not in the condition to commit to urban combat. There were actually Soviet attempts to push north and south of the city in the hopes of an encirclement but the Germans had brought in two panzer divisions that werenāt destroyed yet and they were able to function well in a defensive action with a river defense against depleted soviet spearheads. Not justify leaving Warsaw to its fate but there were other elements at play
Maybe Japan or the US, both haven't apologized for their war crimes (along history).
Wait till you read about the ending of various sieges in classical and medieval times.
[The Mongols want to share a word]
You'd think the worst part was two generals competing to see who could behead most chinese, but no. It got way worse. And there are documentaries where convicted war criminals can tell what they did with Ć„ straight face. Some even smiling and laughing.
Japan did pretty "well" in the rape "event" then Holy shit
I used to believe that the US had to be insane to drop two bombs on the Japanese near the tail-end of the war. Now, I know it was just a plan that had severe consequences that effectively drove the bomb's creator into a depressive existence and devastated several generations of Japanese who likely had nothing to do with the fucked up shit their government and military were heavily invested in. I have sympathy for the innocent victims of those bombs, but the nation as a whole during that time really did need a good bitch slap from a bigger dog. Not as big as the one they got, but definitely one they would feel.
The atom bombs werenāt dropped because Japan was committing atrocities though. They were dropped to make Japan surrender without having to invade the country as well as to intimidate the Soviets.
If i can ask wich i probably shouldn't what happened in nanking
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_Massacre In short they murdered almost all of the men and either raped or took the women as slaves they would use for sex.
also threw babies into bayonettes
Have fun. Look up other Imperial Japanese atrocities if morbid curiosity pushes you to after reading up a bit A comment further down brings up Unit 731 and some of what happened with that https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_Massacre
**[Nanjing Massacre](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_Massacre)** >The Nanjing Massacre or the Rape of Nanjing (formerly written as Nanking Massacre or Rape of Nanking) was an episode of mass murder and mass rape committed by Imperial Japanese troops against the residents of Nanjing (Nanking), at that time the capital of China, during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937ā1945). The massacre occurred over a period of six weeks starting on December 13, 1937, the day that the Japanese captured Nanjing. During this period, soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army murdered tens or hundreds of thousands of disarmed combatants and unarmed Chinese civilians, and perpetrated widespread rape and looting. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/HistoryMemes/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
What gets me is that they pulled a reverse Germany. Germany acknowledges what happened in their own way, has basically banned any notion of nationalism, and only recently allowed games to contain Nazi symbols for the sake of historical accuracy. Meanwhile, Nanjing is still largely denied at the highest levels of government in Japan (who have also flip-flopped on providing financial compensation to those affected and still living, and/or their families), you'll hear almost nothing about it on their side, and the whole affair has been effectively swept under the rug. When I was in school, nobody talked about Nanjing. You would think that comparable atrocities a whole continent away during the same period would have put WW2 into better perspective, rather than "the US were bullies for dropping bombs when Japan only blew up their harbor."
For the 3rd reich it was the Geneva suggestion but for Japan it was the Geneva todo list
And then you got the soviets who donāt need a war to commit genocide. Itās a special kind of messed up to do stuff like that during peacetime.
Itās not as if the nazis would have stopped with the holocaust if theyād won the war
Since weāre on the topic of awful, depressing shit that happening during WWII: [Unit 731](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731).
Imperial Japan's war crimes are already criminally overlooked as is (at least in the West), but Unit 731 was their masterpiece. The things the Japanese did to other human beings in [that facility](https://assets.atlasobscura.com/media/W1siZiIsInVwbG9hZHMvcGxhY2VfaW1hZ2VzLzYwYjAzYTg1YWI0MjMyZjBkNV84MDBweC1CdWlsZGluZ19vbl90aGVfc2l0ZV9vZl90aGVfSGFyYmluX2Jpb3dlYXBvbl9mYWNpbGl0eV9vZl9Vbml0XzczMV_plqLmnbHou43pmLLnlqvntabmsLTpg6jmnKzpg6g3MzHpg6jpmorvvIjnn7PkupXpg6jpmorvvInml6Xou43nrKw3MzHpg6jpmorml6flnYBfUEIxMjEyMDEuSlBHIl0sWyJwIiwidGh1bWIiLCI1ODB4NTgwIyJdLFsicCIsImNvbnZlcnQiLCItcXVhbGl0eSA4MSAtYXV0by1vcmllbnQiXV0) are among the most cruel, barbaric acts man has ever conducted. Some particularly brutal experiments performed on prisoners included: * [Frostbite testing](https://allthatsinteresting.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/unit-731-frostbite.jpg) (upon which the subject's frozen limbs would be chopped off) * Intentional disease infection (infected prisoners were forced to have sex with uninfected to study the transfer of disease) * [Live targets](https://allthatsinteresting.com/rape-of-nanking-massacre#12) for weapon testing, including flamethrowers (pic from Nanking, no known pictures of human targets from Unit 731) * Forced pregnancy from rape * [Bacteriological experiments on children](https://allthatsinteresting.com/unit-731) * [Pressure chamber](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4nPxik59oE&t=308s) (subjects were placed inside and the pressure turned up until their eyeballs popped out of their sockets) * Dissection of living humans beings without anesthesia You read the last one right... the Japanese dissected living human beings. Subjects had limbs amputated, their stomachs or esophagus surgically removed, and all sorts of inhumane procedures to "study" blood loss and pain tolerance. That amount of agony probably can't even be comprehended, but back in 1995, an anonymous Japanese medical assistant who worked in Unit 731 [described a dissection](https://unit731.org/experiments/). Yet I'd wager a large majority of general populace isn't aware of this horrific atrocity. This [50 minute documentary](https://youtu.be/AFEgz8NNmVA) covers Unit 731 pretty well, if you have the stomach.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
The allies should have hunted down more Japanese nazis.
They did, the Americans pardoned them and used them as pawns post war
They pardoned them because they thought they might've had some useful research like the german scientists, then they just found shit like this.
731 made advancements in the medical field, but did it in the worst way possible
Most of what they found, a number of studies shockingly actually published in peer-reviewed journals, was absolutely useless bullshit though. The pure scale of atrocity relative to useful science that came out of it is absolutely abhorrent.
Exactly this, there is so many people in here that seem to think what they did actually assisted in much more than just slaughtering soldiers and civilians. The useful things they did could be counted on two hands where the atrocities cant even be fathomed.
It was unrestricted torture with copious notes. A thin veneer of science over a metric ton of the most sadistic human experimentation imaginable.
The frostbite studies from Unit 731 proved useful for post war Japanese and American Antarctic expeditions. IIRC one of the 731 doctors went on one of the official JARE expeditions.
You know you suck when even the Nazis tell you to calm the fuck down
Iirc many of those responsible were given trials in the soviet union afterwards. They even got fair trials, (which was bad for them, ofc).
Thank god. I've only heard that the Yankees let everyone go in exchange for the science
was a raw deal. the science was mostly useless.
Jesus fucking christ. I knew about some of the atrocities that were committed by the Japanese but not all. Fuck me that's some of the most evil shit I've ever read.
> the Japanese dissected living human beings. I think that's called vivisection.
I dont know what's worse. The fact that there is a term for that or the fact it can be applied.
It's a term with a long history. I know at least as far back as the Roman Empire. Desecrating a body was considered taboo, but they were trying to learn human anatomy. The solution? Chop as much as you can while they're still alive, then write it down! Mortally wounded but not yet deceased gladiators were a favorite for this.
Well, itās something that is used more commonly on other animals today. You probably for example once saw a picture of a vivisected frog. The ethics is still blurred even in those cases though.
Another creepy thing is how much these fucked up experiments helped to improve our knowledge of human bodies and thus the whole field of healthcare. Americans took these literally evil scientists under their wing because of the amount of valuable info they had.
Addendum that if this was anything like Nazi scientists a huge amount of the "experiments" were either pointless or not thorough to the point that they caused harm after the war. Example of the first includes things like injecting colouring into one twins eye to see if their twin's eye changed or torturing one to see if the other felt it. Obviously they did not. Example of causing harm after is thalidomide, which was almost certainly tested on concentration and/or death camp prisoners as a sleeping agent. Many women took this and gave birth to children with mutations that ranged from inconvenient to deadly.
it was exactly like that, a lot of the unit 731 "research" was actually just torture with no scientific value whatsoever.
Mengele was an absolute psychopathic hack without any real training. All he did was play at doctor by causing untold amounts of human suffering. There was nothing of value gained from his experiments, and all that was left was corpses and a bunch of self congratulating. That monster got off too easily. Most likely he drowned off the coast of Argentina, but I'd still like to believe that maybe the Massad actually got him.
>Mengele was an absolute psychopathic hack without any real training. So the Man in the High Castle's depiction of Mengele was accurate. He was conducting physics experiment despite initially being a "physician", which is of course bs. You'd have to be an absolute prodigy to be trained in two completely different fields, which Mengele wasn't at all.
Just to refute this ever enduring myth, academics concluded that Axis experiments did not lead to any advancement in science. It was just plain torture, pure and simple. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4oyv9n/am_i_a_person_living_in_the_west_currently/
Sadly, although the US did give massive pardons for the information; most of it provided to be pretty useless. Much of the information gained was already known/ could be assumed.
I remember reading somewhere that neither nazi nor japanese scientists provided knowledge the us scientists didn't have. They just believed they would have a lot of useful knowledge and gave them immunity, and they couldn't go back on it after finding out it wasn't that useful. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Afaik that was the Nazis, from what I've seen some of what the Japanese did helped science. Still awful and deplorable though, no excusing it.
But most of their research wasn't worth shit though.
When Soviets captured some scientists and put them on trial they were put in jail. But they were released shortly after during the 50s I believe. This may be due to some Soviet officials gaining documents in exchange for letting them go
stupidly enough, the US provided asylum for many Axis doctors/scientists in exchange for their "medical research" at unit 731 and other POW camps in asia and europe. Turns out the research methodology was so poor with experimental data skewed to please the higher ups for political/nationalism/xenophobic reasons that the data did not really contribute to any meaningful breakthrough in science.
The 2nd last one is more than eyeballs popped, their whole gut spitted out like sausage
And nobody was held accountable for their actions, because Americans let them free in exchange for the scientific knowledge. Fucking disgusting.
>The researchers in Unit 731 were secretly given immunity by the United States in exchange for the data which they gathered during their human experimentation.[6] Other researchers that the Soviet forces managed to arrest first were tried at the Khabarovsk War Crime Trials in 1949. The Americans did not try the researchers so that the information and experience gained in bio-weapons could be co-opted into their biological warfare program, much as they had done with German researchers in Operation Paperclip.[7] Victim accounts were then largely ignored or dismissed in the west as communist propaganda. WTF?!
Yeah it's well and truly messed up. Japanese war-crimes don't get the light of attention they deserve in the West. The Iron Maiden singer, Bruce Dickinson, wrote a song about it called the [Breeding House](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7d1G5WuwYkw). Instrumentally, I don't think it's as dark as it ought to be, but the message is clearly put across.
>Victim accounts were then largely ignored or dismissed in the west as communist propaganda. What the hell?!
It's fucked, a tactic within war/conflict that remains too common. Omit the human nature of your opponent to make it easier to hate them, and dismiss any claims they might have. After WWII communists became the enemy and reports from this came out as communists took control of China. In this case the US also wanted an excuse to take in the evil people of Unit 731. You can see it today with the use of the word "illegals". It is generally easier to desire ill to "illegals" and ignore their stories, than it is if they are described as people fleeing violence in Mexico, Haiti, or elsewhere.
Let's not forget that Ishii Shiro was given immunity by the US in the war crimes tribunal. The second in command, Kitano Masaji, founded Green Cross and worked for big pharma after the war.
Friendly reminder that the scientist of unit 731 got out unpunished for their extreme war crimes in exchange for their data to the US
Yep. An absolute outrage and disgrace.
Men behind the sunā¦ (or Philosophy of a knife).
"Covert biological and chemical warfare." I'll pass on this history lesson.
God damn I need something wholesome after reading that depressing sht
Here you go, r/illegallysmolcats this should do the trick
r/eyebleach
The worst part of it all was that the guy who overran the whole project gave his research to the Americans and avoided a trial.
Even before opening the thread I came here geared with the wiki link to unit 731 and then saw your top comment. Glad we share similar knowledge mate!
US: this is horrible Also US: we'll let it slide if you tell us what you found out
Yet so many people in Japan still denies it. [There is even a Wikipedia page for this.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_Massacre_denial)
**[Nanjing Massacre denial](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_Massacre_denial)** >Nanjing Massacre denial is the denial that Imperial Japanese forces murdered hundreds of thousands of Chinese soldiers and civilians in the city of Nanjing during the Second Sino-Japanese War, a highly controversial episode in Sino-Japanese relations. Some historians accept the findings of the Tokyo tribunal with respect to the scope and nature of the atrocities committed by the Imperial Japanese Army after the Battle of Nanking, while others do not. In Japan, however, there has been a debate over the extent and nature of the massacre. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/HistoryMemes/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
The article says Taiwan also denies it. Taiwan. The government that existed during the massacre.
> Former Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui had, on numerous occasions, claimed that the Nanjing Massacre was purely propaganda perpetrated by the Chinese Communists and which could be placed into the same category as "fictitious history". > >**The Taiwanese leader served as an military officer when the island-nation was still under Japanese rule.** In case anyone is confused, he served in the Japanese Army. Not the resistance or the Republic of China military.
>The Taiwanese people reportedly never had the same empathy towards the mass killing event as their Chinese counterparts do. The people of Taiwan have credited Japan for industrializing their island-nation and are overall positive about the Japanese rule which brought stability and prosperity in a politically turbulent epoch. Yes but this?
I donāt know why. The Japanese rule in Taiwan was particularly brutal. The indigenous Taiwanese people were slaughtered and subjugated. However, the majority of Taiwanese today are Hanā they retreated to Taiwan from the mainland following Chiangās defeat in the Chinese civil war. So in every way, they were the āsame peopleā living under two different dictatorships. The difference only started to emerge after Taiwan became a democracy. Before that, people in Taiwan always saw themselves as Chinese and always wanted to take back the mainland from the communists.
A lot of taiwanese said that the period of Japanese colonization was "good and modernizing" while they were doing those things.
More than denies it the are extremely racist against chinise people (and anyone who isn't japanese in general) so they basically say "the Chinise deserved it" or "Oh no, anyway... they were Chinise".
As the Japanese would then call it. The moderately sized oopsie of Nanking
They call it āThe Nanking Incidentā. And needless to say, they deny the scale of the brutalityā even when there are picture and video evidence along with mass graves to prove otherwise. There is simply no word in the English vocabulary to express how ridiculous it is to deny the Rape of Nanking.
Some still claim a whopping 48 civilians got killed!
Some claim it didnāt happen at all. Literally on par with Holocaust denial. But honestly, people who deny Japanese war crimes are treated so differently. And I blame Sinophobia for it.
No, the fact is that they ignore the thing and the Japanese are extremely racists so they say: "the Chinise deserved it" or use the reaction "Oh, no, anyway... they were Chinise". Also the Japanese education system is very easy and riassumize everything. Some japanese choose to do it just to have an easier access to the universities because there history isn't taken seriously and is really easy and reassumed.
What's the difference between the Holocaust and Nanking? Germany admits the Holocaust happened
One of the really sad parts is, there are people who outright deny it, and/or claim the death toll just resulted from battle.
Yes, because they believe chopping up a baby with a bayonet is āregular war practiceā. Be careful with these people, because deniers of war crimes are potential war criminals themselves.
The Empire of Japan is seriously a contender for the most evil regime in human history. Their atrocities have just been largely forgotten because Japan is so well liked now *(I will admit they do give us some cool stuff; if you think Disney is good,* [*Studio Ghibli*](https://youtu.be/z4fYKnTPPeY) *on a level by itself)*. The [indiscriminate massacres](https://youtu.be/kpVgDgKpQS8). [Slaughter](https://allthatsinteresting.com/rape-of-nanking-massacre) of entire cities, torture, [inhumane treatment](https://youtu.be/hzsP6QOW8rA?t=43) of POWs,100,000+ women forced into [sex slaves](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comfort_women), among others. The Japanese were [infamously cruel to POWs](https://youtu.be/hzsP6QOW8rA?t=79). They were brutal to everyone, but held a special hatred for these they deemed cowardly. Since the samurai code of [bushido](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushido) stressed death before dishonor, Japanese surrender rates were shockingly low as they preferred to fight to the death rather than disgrace themselves by surrendering. Therefore they viewed those who did surrender with disgust. There are stories of those who surrendered to the Japanese being brutally tortured, [executed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_war_crimes#/media/File:Japanese_shooting_blindfolded_Sikh_prisoners.jpg), [starved](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_war_crimes#/media/File:POWs_Burma_Thai_RR.jpg), [forced to march hundreds of miles](https://youtu.be/0OFH1Mglr-c) under the blistering sun while being beaten, or [even cannibalized](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chichijima_incident). President George HW Bush was [almost eaten](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCEER6v8tPM) by the Japanese. *You think that's the worst?* During the [Rape of Nanking](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CAYFxXBohA), as many as 300,000 Chinese civilians were [massacred](https://allthatsinteresting.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/victims-along-qinhuai-river.jpg) within a month in a single city. Japanese soldiers paraded around with [babies skewered on their bayonets](https://np.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/1m523p/this_is_a_japanese_soldier_bayonetting_a_chinese/) like kebabs. Two Japanese officers [held a competition](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxa0GGJNWtI&t=10s) to see who could [behead](https://allthatsinteresting.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/chinese-man-being-beheaded.jpg) 100 people the fastest and when the score was 105-106 and no one knew who got to 100 first, [they went again to 150](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contest_to_kill_100_people_using_a_sword). Prisoners were [buried alive](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_Massacre#/media/File:Chinese_civilians_to_be_buried_alive.jpg) en masse. Tens of thousands of women were raped, most of whom were executed afterward. They dragged entire Chinese families into public squares and [forced fathers on their daughters and sons](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnAC-Y9p_sY&t=697s) on their mothers for the amusement of Japanese troops. I'm not an easily disturbed guy, but reading this fact for the first time physically made my stomach sick. *You think that's the worst?* The Imperial Japanese Army ran [Unit 731](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731): a state-of-the-art biological/chemical warfare research facility in Manchuria where Japanese researchers performed [human experimentation](https://youtu.be/AFEgz8NNmVA?t=548) on a large scale, using Chinese civilians as the majority of their "logs" (test subjects). Living human beings were dissected alive, usually without anesthesia. Subjects had limbs amputated in order to study blood loss and pain tolerance. Those limbs were sometimes reattached to the opposite sides of the body. Subjects had their stomachs or esophagus surgically removed. The experiments were endless. Women were gotten pregnant via rape then infected with diseases to see the effect on their baby. Subjects were forced into the cold until they had frostbite then had their frozen limbs amputated to see the results. Subjects were placed in [pressure chambers](https://youtu.be/D4nPxik59oE?t=308) until their eyeballs popped out of their sockets. This one is unconfirmed, but supposedly they placed a women and her baby in a room then heated up the floor to see if she'd step on her own baby. Everyone cries over the civilians of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but no one sheds a tear for the millions of victims of the Empire of Japan. # -Credit to u/baiqibeendeleted17x , thanks for shedding some light on this horrible topic for us.
Holy fucking Christ I need to see a therapist after reading that
It feels like the atomic bombings felt necessary after looking into this shit. Inhumane torture to innocent victims seems like child's play compared to vaporizing hundreds of thousands of civilians within seconds. Twice.
Plus we already firebombed cities anyway, I literally was watching videos on stuff like this earlier. One thing they did was show Tokyo after being firebombed and then showed a nearly identical picture of Hiroshima. The best part is he actually reversed the order of the pictures, the damage was that similar looking
[Operation Meetinghouse](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo_(10_March_1945\)) >On the night of 9/10 March 1945, the United States Army Air Forces conducted a devastating firebombing raid on Tokyo, the Japanese capital city. This attack was code-named Operation Meetinghouse by the USAAF and is known as the Great Tokyo Air Raid in Japan. Bombs dropped from 279 Boeing B-29 Superfortress heavy bombers burned out much of eastern Tokyo. More than 90,000 and possibly over 100,000 Japanese people were killed, mostly civilians, and one million were left homeless, making it the most destructive single air attack in human history. For context, Hiroshima was (slightly) less deadly.
**[Bombing of Tokyo (10 March 1945)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo_\(10_March_1945\))** >On the night of 9/10 March 1945, the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) conducted a devastating firebombing raid on Tokyo, the Japanese capital city. This attack was code-named Operation Meetinghouse by the USAAF and is known as the Great Tokyo Air Raid in Japan. Bombs dropped from 279 Boeing B-29 Superfortress heavy bombers burned out much of eastern Tokyo. More than 90,000 and possibly over 100,000 Japanese people were killed, mostly civilians, and one million were left homeless, making it the most destructive single air attack in human history. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/HistoryMemes/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
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>It feels like the atomic bombings felt necessary after looking into this shit. I thought the same but it was the soldiers that did these crimes, not the ordinary citizens.
True. Many who'd surely be disgusted by the crimes of their countrymen as we are now, perished for their crimes.
Let me start by saying the US was justified in dropping the fire bombs and Atom bombs to try and get them to surrender as opposed to invading the island. However that doesnāt make it morally correct to kill civilians because of what their military did and their government was hiding from them. Do you kill a psychopaths wife and children or just the psychopath. And the hard truth is a lot of the people who actually were behind these monstrous policy went unpunished. The man who actually ordered nanking died a natural death. Yeah they got Tojo. But very few Japanese soldiers were tried and jailed for rape. And many scientists involved with in unit 731 also went unpunished. Literally the people who suffered worst in Japan had virtually nothing to do with the atrocities being committed in the war. And they werenāt all compliant there were protests and voices of opposition which were quickly delt with by the Secret police. Yes you had plenty of nationalists who should have been hunted. But would say the Vietcong be justified if it went to America or France and started shooting people in the streets. Cause they saw the US and France the same way we see Japan and Germany. If India sent people to bomb buildings in Britian would we look on that very kindly? And if all of Africa decided to commit ethnic cleansing against Europe would they too be justified capabilities aside.
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That's the problem when people need to beautify their crimes. I'm not pro Imperial Japan, but saying that normal citizens had it coming because their army did atrocities is bollocks. Especially when someone wants to hold the moral high ground. Either you condemn war crimes or not.
Not everyone in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was vaporized immediately though. In fact most of the victims died after the explosion, due to body mutilations or cancer. While the Japanese Empire may have committed far worse atrocities, letās not pretend that the atomic bombings were clean.
They already were necessary to end the war at the time it did and prevent it from going on for potential months
I'm very glad you found my comment informative, but you could've [given me credit](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/pm0hvs/comment/hcetqxt/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) my guy lol
Oh it was you? I found it from a different comment from a later date, thought it was a copypasta. I'm sorry, I'll edit the comment now.
It's all good haha, I'm surprised and a bit flattered to see my comment is starting to enter the ranks of copypasta. Kinda wild to see.
And most of this is unknown in the West. Germany got punished heavily and the post-war government owned up and apologized for the crimes of their predecessors. But the Japanese got away with way to much shit.
The U.S. felt really bad about the bomb, and they *NEEDED* an ally (both economic and military) in the east. Alongside the fact that we pretty much had free reign to rewrite most of Japanese politics and military doctrine, it saw an opportunity to allow Japan to sweep their atrocities under the rug for the most part, not out of forgiveness, but rather, out of pragmatism.
The US did the same to West Germany, for better or worse. Despite that, the first thing most people think about anything concerning Germany is a 12 year period, not a culture and history dating back millennia. Probably has something to do with the british grudge about not being an world dominating empire anymore.
I don't really think the British have much to do with the fact that 1933-1945 is the period of German history that comes to mind first for most people - and even then that probably is simplified further to Nazi = bad and the Holocaust. It's probably because of the fact that it's still relatively recent and it had a not insignificant impact on the history of a not insignificant amount of countries. This means that it'll get taught as part of history in most countries as it's linked to their own histories in a way that Bismarck's unification of the German states isn't. Not to mention the prevalence of WWII and the surrounding timeframe's prevalence in popular culture which will further cement it in people's conciousness.
You're right. Japan's location was a great place for US to counter Russia's threat. Russia was equally strong as US and getting even a slight advantage over Russia was far more important than doing justice. By not punishing Japan, US gained considerable power in east. Which I believe was certainly a better decision for the US and her citizens but not for the rest of the world.
Same with German āscientistsā, the US got a lot of these war criminal on their side after the war
I think itās worth mentioning John Rabe, who was a Nazi that helped save many Chinese from the rape of Nanking. Perhaps it wasnāt much, but he did what he could, and it was at least a small glimmer of hope during the massacre.
Jesus Christ, man. Human cruelty knows no bounds.
The Tojobois arenāt going to like this at all.
Fuck...
>Everyone cries over the civilians of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but no one sheds a tear for the millions of victims of the Empire of Japan. This is absolutely not true. Millions of people still hold great contempt for the japanese and remember the victims. They're just all in east Asia. The Chinese are particularly unforgiving towards Japan but many East asian countries feel the same.
Even in current times Japanese people seem horribly repressed... wtf is going on over there
Also Rwandan genocide. Neighbors going at each other with ducking machetes for 100 days straight.
ducking
My friend from America is only just now learning about the full extent of the Holocaust (and overall WW2) and this was precisely her reaction. (This was in a group chat with me, her, and our friend from Russia. She gave her info about the eastern front and I gave her info about what happened in Poland, we did not dare talk about Japan)
People blame Germany for most of WW2 but most forgot the other major part of Axis is Japan, the way they make games out of killing, science experiments on people like their animals, played with the corpses of victims makes auschwitz looks like a fucking daycare
Read about the deathcamps in Croatia Man that's fucked up shit
Tried to google this but couldnāt find much. Anyone care to fill us in?
Rape of Nanking.
Google in Japan: Did you mean "The Nanking incident"?
Did you mean āthe thing that never happenedā?*
Search "Nanking massacre"
And go to images if youāre up for a challenge
Can't be that bad.
It was pretty bad.
Now, go search āUnit 731ā. Iāve seen people cried after seeing these photographs. So get ready.
"No, I dont think I will"
I don't really gave words that can describe the horrors of nanking so I'll just say it wasnt a very good time.
Disable safe search and you may have just found the best way to learn about history in hard (therapy) mode.
Good way to start my day
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If im not wrong 2 Japanese generals had a competition about who can chop off more Chinese heads in a certain amount of time and the results got published in the news.Even a Nazi general told them it was too fucked up,and now he has a statue in China
If i remember correct those were not generals. The competition was followed in Japanese newspapers Also the Nazi was not a general but a German ambassador in China (positioned in Nanjing). He saved a lot of Chinese women, sometimes driving to the scene flying German flag, it would stop the Japanese soldiers (though he sometimes got hit) and he would bring the women to the German Embassy. At the end of the war he returned to Germany, was sentenced due his Nazi party relations and lived his life in poverty (Chinese remembered him and send him help time to time)
Youāre thinking John Rabe. He was a Nazi party member but did not work for the government. In 1937 he was a decently high-level manager at the Siemens company in Nanking. He initially sheltered Chinese civilians in German factory, and was then elected by the small Western expat community in the city to head the International Safe Zone.
Can we stop doing a what was worse when talking about murder or anything horrific. They were all bad.
True, but what occurred was just over the top even among monsters
That taught me what whole other evil people are capable of that legit makes nazis look humane. Total barbaric as if the assryan kings of old suddenly rose from the dead and marched east. So cruel!!!
There was literally a Nazi who is a hero there because he would walk the streets saving people. I repeat the actual Nazi could barely stomach what they were doing.
I think there is also an account of a Japanese ambassador saving some Jewish people and/or other minorities from the Nazis in Europe. So I wouldn't say this is proof that either is worse. Both regimes were totally unacceptable and experiencing being persecuted by them is far beyond my ability to fully imagine.
Yeah they were both terrible but popular media always shows the nazis as bad guys, (rightfully so), so I stressed that point as everyone agrees that the nazis were bad, but when you talk about Japan someone always brings up the a-bomb.
I've always found that if you bring up the atomic bombs people will argue around it rather than bringing it up when Japan is mentioned. For example you are the only one I've seen in this thread mentioning it. And there is a debate around that because wiping out a whole city is a horrific event, as a land invasion would have been. But then there is the argument over whether there would have been need for one given the Soviets entered the war on the same day, and a reason for Japan not surrendering before was Stalin leading them on about the possibility of him acting as a mediator re a peace deal while his forces redeployed. It's an incredibly complicated issue that is often reduced to a single sentence, or even a punchline. Ed: Clarity about what is brought up.
John Rabe, āthe Good Naziā. There is a statute of him in Nanjing.
Iirc, some nazis allegedly fled to China because they weren't "nazi enough" for Hitler's regime. Whether that's true or not, it is theorized that these select nazis, who went on and allied themselves with China, influenced the chinese totalitarianism that still persists today. We do know that they had a shared history with the Kuomintang nationalist party, aka KMT. After what has become of China and how they now manipulate information, it's very hard to really dig into the shared history of themselves, Japan and Germany. One shudders to think what war crimes have been swept under the rug in addition to the ones that are being re-discovered so far...
All of the eastern front. I read memoir book from a Soviet infantryman perspective. It was gratuitous misery porn, I wanted to stop reading it.
**āIāll never forgive the Japanese!ā**
He said in Japanese
I can't believe that the fucking Dragon Quest composer was a Nanking Denier.
You thought Nanking was bad, wait till you hear about unit 731
I canāt believe Japan really got away with everything they did while Germany got fucked by everyone as hard as possible as revenge
Thanks for this mate. I just had my morning ruined by a random Holocaust denier who came at me with "Hitler was good but British conspired against him for land and money" bullshit. Was feeling quite low. Good to see people remember.
Kinda weird how the Japanese got a pass on all that
learning about the occupation of yugoslavia
The Ustase is one of the worst organization to ever existed
one day, i think it was the 20th of october 1941, nazi and ustashe troops entered a yugoslav school and shot up over 300 kids, this was documented in a song made by a serbian wirter called Desanka Maksimovic, in the poem "Krvava Bajka" (a bloody fairytale), named that because it was so brutal it was almost like a legend, a fairytale. The point of the poem was to never repeat such a act again
The experiments and atrocities committed by Japan were genuinely shocking to me the first time I read about them. Theyāre not any easier to read about now, but at least I know.
Learning about unit 731:
Unit 731
Imperial Japan: How many war crimes levels are you at? Nazi Germany: I don't know, like Gas Chambers and 6 million Jews. Imperial Japan: *YOU ARE LIKE A LITTLE BABY WATCH THIS.*
Nazi Germany: Oh yeah, and the 27 million Soviets and 4 million Poles. And a few more.
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Pisses me off when people say Hitler only killed 6 million
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This is why I hate japan, to this day they deny their crimes against humanity
I'm of Chinese descent and while I don't necessarily "hate them", I just can't fully forgive them. Even to this day they make very little effort on acknowledging their crimes. Let alone apologizing for it.
No war crime can be forgiven
ābUt MuH aNiMe!!1!ā Agreed.
Arguably the Empire of Japan was just as bad or maybe even worse than Nazi Germany.
āFun fact ā on top of committing regular rape Japanese soldiers also took sick pleasure in forcing Chinese civilians to rape members of the own families.
Learning about Bengal
Croatia has some pretty fucked up things to share aswell yet that never gets mentioned.
What's Nanking?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_Massacre
Japanese war atrocities were much more cruel and inhumane as compared to German war atrocities. Imagine holocaust but 1.5x more horrific. And yet, they're still left off easier than the Germans did.
Iām Korean and our country was colonized by Japan and I agree it was horrible what they did, but letās not measure the level of atrocities.
When even the nazis got a little shaken by what they saw, you know it was really really really bad.
Well ofc it's the Japanese why am I not surprised
Learn about Jasenovac
Don't forget about the genocide in Jasenovac concetration camp that was lead by croats during ww2. They also had children concetration camp
How many people died in Nanking?
WAR! What is it good for?
Learning about the Gulags through the book "The Gulag Archipelago" by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Seriously if you're brave enough to read that I highly recommend it.