Journalists from the 24 Channel website decided to talk about the most terrible concentration camps Nazi Germany, in which almost a third of the entire Jewish population of the planet was exterminated.

Auschwitz (Auschwitz)

This is one of the largest concentration camps of World War II. The camp consisted of a network of 48 locations that were subordinate to Auschwitz. It was to Auschwitz that the first political prisoners were sent in 1940.

And already in 1942, mass extermination of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and those whom the Nazis considered “dirty people” began there. About 20 thousand people could be killed there in a day.

The main method of killing was gas chambers, but people also died en masse from overwork, malnutrition, poor living conditions and infectious diseases.

According to statistics, this camp claimed the lives of 1.1 million people, 90% of whom were Jews

Treblinka

One of the most terrible Nazi camps. Most of the camps from the very beginning were not built specifically for torture and extermination. However, Treblinka was a so-called “death camp” - it was designed specifically for killings.

The weak and infirm, as well as women and children, that is, “second-class” people who were not able to work hard, were sent there from all over the country.

In total, about 900 thousand Jews and two thousand Gypsies died in Treblinka

Belzec

The Nazis founded this camp exclusively for Gypsies in 1940, but already in 1942 they began killing Jews en masse there. Subsequently, Poles who opposed Hitler's Nazi regime were tortured there.

In total, 500-600 thousand Jews died in the camp. However, to this figure it is worth adding the dead Roma, Poles and Ukrainians

Jews in Belzec were used as slaves in preparation for a military invasion of the Soviet Union. The camp was located in an area close to the border with Ukraine, so many Ukrainians who lived in the area died in prison.

Majdanek

This concentration camp was built to hold prisoners of war during the German invasion of the USSR. The prisoners were used as cheap labor and no one was intentionally killed.

But later the camp was “reformatted” - everyone began to be sent there en masse. The number of prisoners increased and the Nazis simply could not cope with everyone. Gradual and massive destruction began.

About 360 thousand people died in Majdanek. Among whom were “dirty” Germans

Chelmno

In addition to Jews, ordinary Poles from the Lodz ghetto were also deported en masse to this camp, continuing the process of Germanization of Poland. There were no trains to the prison, so prisoners were transported there by truck or had to walk. Many died along the way.

According to statistics, approximately 340 thousand people died in Chelmno, almost all of them were Jews

In addition to mass killings, medical experiments were also carried out in the “death camp,” in particular chemical weapons tests.

Sobibor

This camp was built in 1942 as an additional building for the Belzec camp. In Sobibor, at first, only Jews who were deported from the Lublin ghetto were detained and killed.

It was in Sobibor that the first gas chambers were tested. And also for the first time they began to classify people into “suitable” and “unsuitable”. The latter were killed immediately, the rest worked until they were completely exhausted.

According to statistics, about 250 thousand prisoners died there.

In 1943, there was a riot in the camp, during which about 50 prisoners escaped. Everyone who remained died, and the camp itself was soon destroyed.

Dachau

The camp was built near Munich in 1933. At first, all opponents of the Nazi regime and ordinary prisoners were sent there.

However, later everyone ended up in this prison: there were even Soviet officers there who were awaiting execution.

Jews began to be sent there in 1940. In order to collect more people, about 100 other camps were built in southern Germany and Austria, which were under the control of Dachau. That is why this camp is considered the largest.

The Nazis killed over 243 thousand people in this camp

After the war, these camps were used as temporary housing for displaced Germans.

Mauthausen-Gusen

This camp was the first where people began to be killed en masse and the last one to be liberated from the Nazis.

Unlike many other concentration camps, which were intended for all segments of the population, in Mauthausen only the intelligentsia were exterminated - educated people and members of the highest social classes in occupied countries.

It is not known exactly how many people were tortured in this camp, but the figure ranges from 122 to 320 thousand people.

Bergen-Belsen

This camp in Germany was built as a prison for prisoners of war. About 95 thousand foreign prisoners were kept there.

There were Jews there too - they were exchanged for some outstanding German prisoners. Therefore, it is obvious that this camp was not intended for extermination. No one was killed or tortured there on purpose.

At least 50 thousand people died in Bergen-Belsen

However, due to a lack of food and medicine, as well as unsanitary conditions, many in the camp died due to starvation and disease. After the prison was liberated, about 13 thousand corpses were found there, just lying around everywhere.

Buchenwald

This was the first camp to be liberated during World War II. Although this is not surprising, because from the very beginning this prison was created for communists.

Freemasons, gypsies, homosexuals and common criminals were also sent to the concentration camp. All prisoners were used as free labor for the production of weapons. However, later they began to conduct various medical experiments on prisoners there.

In 1944, the camp came under Soviet air attack. Then about 400 prisoners died, and about two thousand more were injured.

According to estimates, almost 34 thousand prisoners died in the camp from torture, starvation and experiments.

It’s no secret that in the concentration camps it was much worse than in modern prisons. Of course, there are cruel guards even now. But here you will find information about the 7 most cruel guards of fascist concentration camps.

1. Irma Grese

Irma Grese - (October 7, 1923 - December 13, 1945) - warden of the Nazi death camps Ravensbrück, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen.

Irma's nicknames included "Blonde Devil", "Angel of Death", and "Beautiful Monster". She used emotional and physical methods to torture prisoners, beat women to death, and enjoyed arbitrarily shooting prisoners. She starved her dogs so she could set them on victims, and personally selected hundreds of people to be sent to the gas chambers. Grese wore heavy boots and, in addition to a pistol, she always carried a wicker whip.

The Western post-war press constantly discussed the possible sexual deviations of Irma Grese, her numerous connections with the SS guards, with the commandant of Bergen-Belsen Joseph Kramer (“The Beast of Belsen”).

On April 17, 1945, she was captured by the British. The Belsen trial, initiated by a British military tribunal, lasted from September 17 to November 17, 1945. Together with Irma Grese, the cases of other camp workers were considered at this trial - commandant Joseph Kramer, warden Juanna Bormann, and nurse Elisabeth Volkenrath. Irma Grese was found guilty and sentenced to hang.

On the last night before her execution, Grese laughed and sang songs with her colleague Elisabeth Volkenrath. Even when a noose was thrown around Irma Grese’s neck, her face remained calm. Her last word was “Faster,” addressed to the English executioner.

2. Ilse Koch

Ilse Koch - (September 22, 1906 - September 1, 1967) - German NSDAP activist, wife of Karl Koch, commandant of the Buchenwald and Majdanek concentration camps. Best known by her pseudonym "Frau Lampshaded" Received the nickname " The Witch of Buchenwald"for the brutal torture of camp prisoners. Koch was also accused of making souvenirs from human skin(however, at the post-war trial of Ilse Koch, no reliable evidence of this was presented).

On June 30, 1945, Koch was arrested by American troops and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1947. However, a few years later, American General Lucius Clay, the military commandant of the American occupation zone in Germany, released her, considering the charges of ordering executions and making souvenirs from human skin insufficiently proven.

This decision caused public protest, so in 1951 Ilse Koch was arrested in West Germany. A German court again sentenced her to life imprisonment.

On September 1, 1967, Koch committed suicide by hanging herself in her cell in the Bavarian prison of Eibach.

3. Louise Danz

Louise Danz - b. December 11, 1917 - matron of women's concentration camps. She was sentenced to life imprisonment but later released.

She began working in the Ravensbrück concentration camp, then was transferred to Majdanek. Danz later served in Auschwitz and Malchow.

Prisoners later said they were abused by Danz. She beat them and confiscated the clothes they had been given for the winter. In Malchow, where Danz had the position of senior warden, she starved the prisoners, not giving food for 3 days. On April 2, 1945, she killed a minor girl.

Danz was arrested on June 1, 1945 in Lützow. At the trial of the Supreme National Tribunal, which lasted from November 24, 1947 to December 22, 1947, she was sentenced to life imprisonment. Released in 1956 due to health reasons (!!!). In 1996, she was charged with the aforementioned murder of a child, but it was dropped after doctors said Dantz would be too hard to bear if she was imprisoned again. She lives in Germany. She is now 94 years old.

4. Jenny-Wanda Barkmann

Jenny-Wanda Barkmann - (May 30, 1922 - July 4, 1946) Worked as a fashion model from 1940 to December 1943. In January 1944, she became a guard at the small Stutthof concentration camp, where she became famous for brutally beating female prisoners, some of them to death. She also participated in the selection of women and children for the gas chambers. She was so cruel but also very beautiful that the female prisoners nicknamed her “Beautiful Ghost.”

Jenny fled the camp in 1945 when Soviet troops began to approach the camp. But she was caught and arrested in May 1945 while trying to leave the station in Gdansk. She is said to have flirted with the police officers guarding her and was not particularly worried about her fate. Jenny-Wanda Barkmann was found guilty, after which she was given the last word. She stated, "Life is indeed great pleasure, and pleasure is usually short-lived."

Jenny-Wanda Barkmann was publicly hanged at Biskupka Gorka near Gdańsk on July 4, 1946. She was only 24 years old. Her body was burned and her ashes were publicly washed away in the latrine of the house where she was born.

5. Hertha Gertrude Bothe

Hertha Gertrude Bothe - (January 8, 1921 - March 16, 2000) - warden of women's concentration camps. She was arrested on charges of war crimes, but later released.

In 1942, she received an invitation to work as a guard at the Ravensbrück concentration camp. After four weeks of preliminary training, Bothe was sent to Stutthof, a concentration camp located near the city of Gdansk. In it, Bothe received the nickname "Sadist of Stutthof" due to her cruel treatment of female prisoners.

In July 1944, she was sent by Gerda Steinhoff to the Bromberg-Ost concentration camp. From January 21, 1945, Bothe was a guard during the death march of prisoners from central Poland to the Bergen-Belsen camp. The march ended on February 20-26, 1945. In Bergen-Belsen, Bothe led a detachment of 60 women engaged in wood production.

After the liberation of the camp she was arrested. At the Belsen court she was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Released earlier than stated on December 22, 1951. She died on March 16, 2000 in Huntsville, USA.

6. Maria Mandel

Maria Mandel (1912-1948) - Nazi war criminal. Occupying the post of head of the women's camps of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in the period 1942-1944, she was directly responsible for the death of about 500 thousand female prisoners.

Mandel was described by fellow employees as an "extremely intelligent and dedicated" person. Auschwitz prisoners called her a monster among themselves. Mandel personally selected the prisoners, and sent thousands of them to the gas chambers. There are known cases when Mandel personally took several prisoners under her protection for a while, and when she got bored with them, she put them on the list for destruction. Also, it was Mandel who came up with the idea and creation of a women’s camp orchestra, which greeted newly arrived prisoners at the gate with cheerful music. According to the recollections of survivors, Mandel was a music lover and treated the musicians from the orchestra well, personally coming to their barracks with a request to play something.

In 1944, Mandel was transferred to the post of warden of the Muhldorf concentration camp, one of the parts of the Dachau concentration camp, where she served until the end of the war with Germany. In May 1945, she fled to the mountains in her area hometown- Münzkirchen. On August 10, 1945, Mandel was arrested by American troops. In November 1946, she was handed over to the Polish authorities at their request as a war criminal. Mandel was one of the main defendants in the trial of Auschwitz workers, which took place in November-December 1947. The court sentenced her to death by hanging. The sentence was carried out on January 24, 1948 in a Krakow prison.

7. Hildegard Neumann

Hildegard Neumann (May 4, 1919, Czechoslovakia - ?) - senior warden at the Ravensbrück and Theresienstadt concentration camps, began her service at the Ravensbrück concentration camp in October 1944, immediately becoming chief warden. Due to her good work, she was transferred to the Theresienstadt concentration camp as the head of all the camp guards. Beauty Hildegard, according to the prisoners, was cruel and merciless towards them.

She supervised between 10 and 30 female police officers and over 20,000 female Jewish prisoners. Neumann also facilitated the deportation of more than 40,000 women and children from Theresienstadt to the death camps of Auschwitz (Auschwitz) and Bergen-Belsen, where most of them were killed. Researchers estimate that more than 100,000 Jews were deported from the Theresienstadt camp and were killed or died at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, with another 55,000 dying in Theresienstadt itself.

Neumann left the camp in May 1945 and faced no criminal liability for war crimes. The subsequent fate of Hildegard Neumann is unknown.

“Skrekkens hus” - “House of Horror” - that’s what they called it in the city. Since January 1942, the city archive building has been the headquarters of the Gestapo in southern Norway. Those arrested were brought here, torture chambers were equipped here, and from here people were sent to concentration camps and executions.

Now in the basement of the building where the punishment cells were located and where prisoners were tortured, a museum has been opened that tells about what happened during the war in the state archive building.
The layout of the basement corridors has been left unchanged. Only new lights and doors appeared. In the main corridor there is a main exhibition with archival materials, photographs, and posters.

Thus, a suspended prisoner was beaten with a chain.

This is how they tortured us with electric stoves. If the executioners were especially zealous, the hair on a person’s head could catch fire.

I have already written about waterboarding before. It was also used in the Archive.

Fingers were pinched in this device and nails were pulled out. The machine is authentic - after the liberation of the city from the Germans, all the equipment of the torture chambers remained in place and was preserved.

Nearby are other devices for conducting interrogation with “bias.”

In several basements Reconstructions were arranged - how it looked then, in this very place. This is a cell where especially dangerous prisoners were kept - members of the Norwegian Resistance who fell into the clutches of the Gestapo.

In the next room there was a torture chamber. Here, a real scene of torture of a married couple of underground fighters, taken by the Gestapo in 1943 during a communication session with the intelligence center in London, is reproduced. Two Gestapo men torture a wife in front of her husband, who is chained to the wall. In the corner, suspended from an iron beam, is another member of the failed underground group. They say that before the interrogations, the Gestapo officers were pumped up with alcohol and drugs.

Everything in the cell was left as it was then, in 1943. If you turn over that pink stool standing at the woman's feet, you can see the Gestapo mark of Kristiansand.

This is a reconstruction of an interrogation - a Gestapo provocateur (on the left) presents the arrested radio operator of an underground group (he sits on the right, in handcuffs) with his radio station in a suitcase. In the center sits the chief of the Kristiansand Gestapo, SS Hauptsturmführer Rudolf Kerner - I’ll tell you about him later.

In this display case are things and documents of those Norwegian patriots who were sent to the Grini concentration camp near Oslo - the main transit point in Norway, from where prisoners were sent to other concentration camps in Europe.

System for designating different groups of prisoners in the Auschwitz concentration camp (Auschwitz-Birkenau). Jew, political, gypsy, Spanish Republican, dangerous criminal, criminal, war criminal, Jehovah's Witness, homosexual. The letter N was written on the badge of a Norwegian political prisoner.

School excursions are conducted to the museum. I came across one of these - several local teenagers were walking along the corridors with Toure Robstad, a volunteer from local residents who survived the war. It is said that about 10,000 schoolchildren visit the museum at the Archives per year.

Toure tells the kids about Auschwitz. Two boys from the group were there recently on an excursion.

Soviet prisoner of war in a concentration camp. In his hand is a homemade wooden bird.

In a separate showcase are things made by the hands of Russian prisoners of war in Norwegian concentration camps. The Russians exchanged these crafts for food from local residents. Our neighbor in Kristiansand still had a whole collection of these wooden birds - on the way to school, she often met groups of our prisoners going to work under escort, and gave them her breakfast in exchange for these toys carved from wood.

Reconstruction of a partisan radio station. Partisans in southern Norway transmitted information about movements to London German troops, dislocations military equipment and ships. In the north, the Norwegians supplied intelligence to the Soviet Northern Sea Fleet.

"Germany is a nation of creators."

Norwegian patriots had to work under conditions of intense pressure on the local population from Goebbels propaganda. The Germans set themselves the task of quickly Nazifying the country. The Quisling government made efforts for this in the fields of education, culture, and sports. Even before the war, Quisling's Nazi party (Nasjonal Samling) convinced the Norwegians that the main threat to their security was military power. Soviet Union. It should be noted that the Finnish campaign of 1940 contributed greatly to intimidating the Norwegians about Soviet aggression in the North. Since coming to power, Quisling only intensified his propaganda with the help of Goebbels' department. The Nazis in Norway convinced the population that only a strong Germany could protect the Norwegians from the Bolsheviks.

Several posters distributed by the Nazis in Norway. “Norges nye nabo” – “New Norwegian Neighbor”, 1940. Pay attention to the now fashionable technique of “reversing” Latin letters to imitate the Cyrillic alphabet.

“Do you want it to be like this?”

The propaganda of the “new Norway” strongly emphasized the kinship of the two “Nordic” peoples, their unity in the fight against British imperialism and the “wild Bolshevik hordes.” Norwegian patriots responded by using the symbol of King Haakon and his image in their struggle. The king's motto “Alt for Norge” was ridiculed in every possible way by the Nazis, who inspired the Norwegians that military difficulties were a temporary phenomenon and Vidkun Quisling was the new leader of the nation.

Two walls in the gloomy corridors of the museum are devoted to the materials of the criminal case in which the seven main Gestapo men in Kristiansand were tried. There have never been such cases in Norwegian judicial practice - Norwegians tried Germans, citizens of another state, accused of crimes on Norwegian territory. Three hundred witnesses, about a dozen lawyers, Norwegian and foreign press. The Gestapo men were tried for torture and abuse of those arrested; there was a separate episode about the summary execution of 30 Russians and 1 Polish prisoner of war. On June 16, 1947, all were sentenced to death, which was first and temporarily included in the Norwegian Criminal Code immediately after the end of the war.

Rudolf Kerner is the chief of the Kristiansand Gestapo. Former shoemaker teacher. A notorious sadist, he had a criminal record in Germany. He sent several hundred members of the Norwegian Resistance to concentration camps, and was responsible for the death of an organization of Soviet prisoners of war discovered by the Gestapo in one of the concentration camps in southern Norway. He, like the rest of his accomplices, was sentenced to death, which was later commuted to life imprisonment. He was released in 1953 under an amnesty declared by the Norwegian government. He left for Germany, where his traces were lost.

Next to the Archive building there is a modest monument to the Norwegian patriots who died at the hands of the Gestapo. In the local cemetery, not far from this place, lie the ashes of Soviet prisoners of war and British pilots shot down by the Germans in the skies over Kristiansand. Every year on May 8th, the flags of the USSR, Great Britain and Norway are raised on flagpoles next to the graves.

In 1997, the Archive building, from which state archive moved to another location, it was decided to sell it privately. Local veterans public organizations came out sharply against it, organized themselves into a special committee and ensured that in 1998 the owner of the building, the state concern Statsbygg, transferred the historical building to the veterans' committee. Now here, along with the museum I told you about, there are offices of Norwegian and international humanitarian organizations - the Red Cross, Amnesty International, the UN.

Bone fragments are still found in this land. The crematorium could not cope with the huge number of corpses, although two sets of ovens were built. They burned poorly, leaving fragments of bodies - the ashes were buried in pits around the concentration camp. 72 years have passed, but mushroom pickers in the forest often come across pieces of skulls with eye sockets, bones of arms or legs, crushed fingers - not to mention decayed scraps of striped "robes" of prisoners. The Stutthof concentration camp (fifty kilometers from the city of Gdansk) was founded on September 2, 1939, the day after the outbreak of World War II, and its prisoners were liberated by the Red Army on May 9, 1945. The main thing that Stutthof became famous for was These were "experiments" by SS doctors who, using humans as guinea pigs, made soap from human fat. A bar of this soap was later used at the Nuremberg trials as an example of Nazi savagery. Now some historians (not only in Poland, but also in other countries) are speaking out: this is “military folklore”, fantasy, this could not have happened.

Soap from prisoners

The Stutt-Hof museum complex receives 100 thousand visitors a year. Barracks, towers for SS machine gunners, a crematorium and a gas chamber are available for viewing: small, for about 30 people. The premises were built in the fall of 1944, before that they “coped” with the usual methods - typhus, exhausting work, hunger. A museum employee, taking me through the barracks, says: on average, the life expectancy of the inhabitants of Stutthof was 3 months. According to archival documents, one of the female prisoners weighed 19 kg before her death. Behind the glass I suddenly see large wooden shoes, as if from a medieval fairy tale. I ask: what is this? It turns out that the guards took away the prisoners’ shoes and in return gave them these “shoes” that abraded their feet to bloody blisters. In winter, prisoners worked in the same “robe”, only a light cape was required - many died from hypothermia. It was believed that 85,000 people died in the camp, but EU historians have recently re-estimated the number of prisoners who died to 65,000.

In 2006, the Institute of National Remembrance of Poland conducted an analysis of the same soap presented at the Nuremberg trials, says the guide Danuta Ochocka. - Contrary to expectations, the results were confirmed - it was indeed made by a Nazi professor Rudolf Spanner from human fat. However, now researchers in Poland claim: there is no exact confirmation that the soap was made specifically from the bodies of Stutthof prisoners. It is possible that the corpses of homeless people who died of natural causes, brought from the streets of Gdansk, were used for production. Professor Spanner indeed visited Stutthof at different times, but the production of “soap of the dead” was not carried out on an industrial scale.

Gas chamber and crematorium in the Stutthof concentration camp. Photo: Commons.wikimedia.org / Hans Weingartz

"People were skinned"

The Institute of National Remembrance of Poland is the same “glorious” organization that advocates for the demolition of all monuments to Soviet soldiers, and in this case the situation turned out to be tragicomic. Officials specifically ordered an analysis of the soap in order to obtain proof of the “lies of Soviet propaganda” in Nuremberg, but it turned out the opposite. About industrial scale- Spanner produced up to 100 kg of soap from “human material” in the period 1943-1944. and, according to the testimony of his employees, he repeatedly went to Stutthof for “raw materials.” Polish investigator Tuvya Friedman published a book where he described his impressions of Spanner’s laboratory after the liberation of Gdansk: “We had the feeling that we had been in hell. One room was filled with naked corpses. The other is lined with boards on which skins taken from many people have been stretched. Almost immediately they discovered a furnace in which the Germans were experimenting in making soap using human fat as a raw material. Several bars of this “soap” lay nearby.” A museum employee shows me a hospital used for experiments by SS doctors; relatively healthy prisoners were placed here under the formal pretext of “treatment.” Doctor Carl Clauberg went to Stutthof on short business trips from Auschwitz to sterilize women, and SS Sturmbannführer Karl Wernet from Buchenwald cut out people's tonsils and tongues, replacing them with artificial organs. Wernet was not satisfied with the results - the victims of the experiments were killed in a gas chamber. There are no exhibits in the concentration camp museum about the savage activities of Clauberg, Wernet and Spanner - they “have little documentary evidence.” Although during the Nuremberg trials that same “human soap” from Stutt-Hof was demonstrated and the testimony of dozens of witnesses was voiced.

"Cultural" Nazis

I draw your attention to the fact that the liberation of Stutt-Hof Soviet troops We have an entire exhibition dedicated to May 9, 1945,” says the doctor Marcin Owsiński, head of the museum's research department. - It is noted that this was precisely the release of prisoners, and not the replacement of one occupation with another, as is now fashionable to say. People rejoiced at the arrival of the Red Army. Regarding the SS experiments in the concentration camp, I assure you that there is no politics here. We work with documentary evidence, and most of the papers were destroyed by the Germans during the retreat from Stutthof. If they appear, we will immediately make changes to the exhibition.

In the cinema hall of the museum they are showing a film about the entry of the Red Army into Stutthof - archival footage. It is noted that by this time only 200 exhausted prisoners remained in the concentration camp and “then the N-KVD sent some to Siberia.” No confirmation, no names - but a fly in the ointment spoils the barrel of honey: clearly there is a goal - to show that the liberators were not so good. At the crematorium there is a sign in Polish: “We thank the Red Army for our liberation.” She is old, from the old days. Soviet soldiers. They say that the atrocities of the SS doctors have not been confirmed, fewer people died in the camps and, in general, the crimes of the occupiers have been exaggerated. Moreover, this is stated by Poland, where the Nazis destroyed a fifth of the entire population. To be honest, I would like to call " ambulance”, so that Polish politicians would be taken to a psychiatric hospital.

As a publicist from Warsaw said Maciej Wisniewski: “We will still live to see the time when they will say: the Nazis were a cultured people, they built hospitals and schools in Poland, and the war was started by the Soviet Union.” I wouldn't want to live to see these times. But for some reason it seems to me that they are not far off.

We all remember what horrors Hitler and the entire Third Reich committed, but few take into account that the German fascists had sworn allies, the Japanese. And believe me, their executions, torments and tortures were no less humane than the German ones. They mocked people not even for any gain or benefit, but simply for fun...

Cannibalism

In that terrible fact very difficult to believe, but there is a lot of written evidence and evidence about its existence. It turns out that the soldiers who guarded the prisoners often went hungry, there was not enough food for everyone and they were forced to eat the corpses of prisoners. But there are also facts that the military cut off body parts for food not only from the dead, but also from the living.

Experiments on pregnant women

“Unit 731” is especially famous for its terrible abuse. The military was specifically allowed to rape captive women so that they could become pregnant, and then carried out various frauds on them. They were specially infected with sexually transmitted, infectious and other diseases in order to analyze how the female body and the fetus would behave. Sometimes on early stages women were “cut open” on the operating table without any anesthesia and the premature baby was removed to see how it copes with infections. Naturally, both women and children died...

Brutal torture

There are many known cases where the Japanese tortured prisoners not for the sake of obtaining information, but for the sake of cruel entertainment. In one case, a captured wounded Marine had his genitals cut off and stuffed into the soldier's mouth before he was released. This senseless cruelty of the Japanese shocked their opponents more than once.

Sadistic curiosity

During the war, Japanese military doctors not only carried out sadistic experiments on prisoners, but often did this without any, even pseudoscientific, purpose, but out of pure curiosity. This is exactly what the centrifuge experiments were like. The Japanese were interested in what would happen to the human body if it was rotated for hours in a centrifuge at high speed. Tens and hundreds of prisoners became victims of these experiments: people died from bleeding, and sometimes their bodies were simply torn apart.

Amputations

The Japanese abused not only prisoners of war, but also civilians and even their own citizens suspected of spying. A popular punishment for spying was cutting off some part of the body - most often a leg, fingers or ears. The amputation was carried out without anesthesia, but at the same time they carefully ensured that the punished survived - and suffered for the rest of his days.

Drowning

Immersing an interrogated person in water until he begins to choke is a well-known torture. But the Japanese moved on. They simply poured streams of water into the prisoner's mouth and nostrils, which went straight into his lungs. If the prisoner resisted for a long time, he simply choked - with this method of torture, literally minutes counted.

Fire and Ice

Experiments on freezing people were widely practiced in the Japanese army. The limbs of prisoners were frozen until they were solid, and then skin and muscle were cut from living people without anesthesia to study the effects of cold on tissue. The effects of burns were studied in the same way: people were burned alive with burning torches, skin and muscles on their arms and legs, carefully observing tissue changes.

Radiation

Still in the same notorious unit 731, Chinese prisoners were driven into special cells and subjected to the most powerful x-ray radiation, observing what changes subsequently occurred in their body. Such procedures were repeated several times until the person died.

Buried alive

One of the most cruel punishments for American prisoners of war, rebellion and disobedience meant burial alive. The person was placed upright in a hole and covered with a pile of earth or stones, leaving him to suffocate. The corpses of those punished in such a cruel way were discovered more than once by Allied troops.

Decapitation

Beheading an enemy was a common execution in the Middle Ages. But in Japan this custom survived until the twentieth century and was applied to prisoners during the Second World War. But the most terrible thing was that not all executioners were skilled in their craft. Often the soldier did not complete the blow with his sword, or even hit the executed man on the shoulder with his sword. This only prolonged the torment of the victim, whom the executioner stabbed with a sword until he achieved his goal.

Death in the waves

This type of execution, quite typical for ancient Japan, was also used during World War II. The executed person was tied to a pole dug in the high tide zone. The waves slowly rose until the person began to choke, and finally, after much suffering, drowned completely.

The most painful execution

Bamboo is the fastest growing plant in the world; it can grow 10-15 centimeters per day. The Japanese have long used this property for ancient and terrible executions. The man was chained with his back to the ground, from which fresh bamboo shoots sprouted. For several days, the plants tore apart the sufferer’s body, dooming him to terrible torment. It would seem that this horror should have remained in history, but no: it is known for certain that the Japanese used this execution for prisoners during the Second World War.

Welded from the inside

Another section of experiments carried out in part 731 was experiments with electricity. Japanese doctors shocked prisoners by attaching electrodes to the head or torso, immediately giving a large voltage or for a long time exposing the unfortunate people to less stress... They say that with such exposure a person had the feeling that he was being fried alive, and this was not far from the truth: some of the victims’ organs were literally boiled.

Forced labor and death marches

The Japanese prisoner of war camps were no better than Hitler's death camps. Thousands of prisoners who found themselves in Japanese camps worked from dawn to dusk, while, according to stories, they were provided with very little food, sometimes without food for several days. And if slave labor was needed in another part of the country, hungry, exhausted prisoners were driven, sometimes a couple of thousand kilometers, on foot under the scorching sun. Few prisoners managed to survive the Japanese camps.

Prisoners were forced to kill their friends

The Japanese were masters of psychological torture. They often forced prisoners, under threat of death, to beat and even kill their comrades, compatriots, even friends. Regardless of how this psychological torture ended, the will and soul of a person were forever broken.