As humans, it's hard to understand the brutality we are willing to cause by our own hands. How many millions of people have been killed because of experimentation or in the name of war? The atrocities are beyond understanding, and it's amazing to realize that human experiments and crimes of war are still being carried out today.
The Angel of Death
Whilst walking amongst his child victims, he would tell them to call him Uncle Mengele. He would sometimes give them candy, giving off the appearance of being a protector amongst the soon to be dead children. In 1943, Mengele became the medical officer of Auschwitz-Birkenau's killing camps. It would be here where he would perform inhumane atrocities to the children of the camp. He was especially interested in twins, and he would pull them aside and separate them from the other children. He would sew twins together to try to create Siamese twins. Many twins would be exterminated after his studies of them were done. Many twins had been injected with chloroform, which would kill them. He would then dissect their bodies. He dissected live infants, castrated boys and men without anesthetics, sterilized nuns with X-Ray machines (leaving them horribly burned), injected chemicals into the eyes of children to change eye color, and amputated limbs of victims. So fanatical was his studies with twins that often times he would bleed them to death while drawing blood from them. He would draw a line on the walls of the children's block. If the children were too short, they would be sent to the gas chambers. He would inject victims with viruses. He would remove organs from victims without offering anesthesia, perform caesarians on women without anesthesia and then allow the woman to bleed to death. It is estimated he killed thousands of children. Outside of theses children, it is estimated he had a hand in the extermination of hundreds of thousands of victims.
Asian Auschwitz
Unit 731 was a place where heinous crimes were taken out on the Chinese, Korean, Russian, as well as some Japanese criminals, and American and European soldiers. Biological and chemical warfare were the primary forms of torture. More than 9,000 people died at Unit 731, with a possible 200,000 more dying from chemical experiments. General Shiro Ishii gathered test subjects to have brutal experiments done. Prisoners were injected with diseases and then had vivisections performed to see what the effects were on the organs by the diseases. Vivisections were more favorable because they did not want the bodies to already be in a state of decomposition. Vivisections were also performed on pregnant women, and then the fetus would be removed. Prisoners were forced to stand in freezing temperatures, and then their limbs would be struck with rods to see if their limbs had indeed frozen. Some had their limbs amputated and then reattached to the other side of their body. Some victims were used as targets with grenades, explosive and germ-releasing bombs, and chemical weapons. Some prisoners were infected with the plague and venereal diseases. Some were purposely burned or hanged upside down to see how long it would take for a victim to choke to death. Such was the extent of their torture that there is too much to list.
My Lai Massacre
Charlie Company of 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, 11th Brigade, 23rd Infantry Division, was involved in a massacre of presumably innocent civilians in 1968. During a Tet offensive, the enemy front retreated into neighboring villages. U.S. forces were ordered to go into the hamlets and aggressively kill anyone who may be “enemy” soldiers, whether they are women or children, man or old. The soldiers took fire on civilians, indiscriminately shooting at anything that moved. As the massacre escalated, the brutality of murders became increasingly violent. Women holding babies were gunned down. Anyone trying to escape or even surrender was gunned down. Babies were used as targets. Women were raped. Anyone who greeted the American soldiers was beaten. Some victims had C Company carved into their chests. Bodies were thrown into ditches to be shot. When helicopter intervention came in, Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson Jr., noticed that many dead (mostly women, children, and old men) lay strewn about the village. He had tried on many occasions to retrieve the victims from the ditches. On some occasion, he was met with hostility, and as he left, he noticed soldiers firing into the ditches at bodies that were still moving. There were some soldiers who refused to participate in the bloodbath. Those who refused to shoot, had their guns taken from them, whereby other soldiers or commanding officers would fire their guns. Most of the men involved in the military had left the military and were exempt from prosecution. But 26 were charged, and only one was convicted, William Calley. However, Nixon reduced his life in prison sentence, and he only served four and a half months in prison. While the numbers dead ranged between 300-500 unarmed citizens, the dead count is still unknown.
Radiation Experiments on Humans
From the early 1930's to 1960's experiments of the effects of radiation were carried out on American and foreign individuals. Many died as a result of exposure. During World War II, unsuspecting people (perhaps in the hundreds) in hospitals who were thought to have terminal illnesses were injected with plutonium. Between 1945-1947, 18 victims of Los Alamos were injected directly with plutonium. All but 1 died slow, excruciating deaths. The last victim survived until 1991, but he suffered severe depression because his leg had been amputated shortly after receiving the “treatments”. Elmer Allen had thought he had cancer in his leg, and received a large dose of plutonium. In the 1950's, terminally ill patients were injected with uranium at Massachusetts General Hospital. Most of them died as a result of deterioration from the injections. In the 1950's, 73 mentally handicapped children at the Fernard School in Waltham, Massachusetts, were fed radiation in their cereal. Quaker Oats had funded the research to see if nutrients in the cereal could be identified while traveling through the digestive track.
They wanted to see if they could detect the rate of absorption and elimination of radiation. From 1945-1949, over 800 pregnant women were fed radioactive iron drinks to detect the effects on fetal development. Many children died from the effects from this radiation. Project 4.1 was the study of “accidental” exposure to Marshallese victims of the Castle Bravo nuclear test at Bikini Atoll. Controversy surrounds the intentions of American scientists on whether they knew about the possibility of winds carrying dangerous fallout plumes throughout the islands. If they did indeed know, evacuation measures could have been done to prevent injuries. Over 200 people were exposed and showed various signs of radiation exposure, from serious burns, to hair loss and lesions. Decades after the nuclear blast, women had suffered miscarriages, stillbirths, children ended up with various forms of cancer, or were born with sever deformities and mental disabilities. Some of the babies are called jellyfish babies, where they are born with no heads or arms. Some are so severely deformed at birth that they often died shortly afterwards.
