MOSCOW, August 30. /TASS/. By the 85th anniversary of the battle on Khalkhin Gol, Russia’s Federal Security Service (the FSB) has for the first time made public testimonies by a prisoner of war to the effect that Japan used bacteriological weapons against the Red Army already during those hostilities.

At the end of August 1939, the active fighting in the border conflict on the Khalkhin Gol River ended. The Red Army together with Mongolian units defeated the Japanese invaders who had intruded into the territory of the Mongolian People's Republic.

The FSB has for the first time published the transcript of an interrogation of a senior non-commissioned officer of the Japanese army, Hayashi Kazuo, who was taken prisoner alongside more than 640,000 Japanese soldiers after the defeat of the Kwantung Army in 1945. He confessed that from October 1938 to February 1941 he served as a finance officer in the Ishii Shiro unit, named after its commander, which was developing bacteriological weapons near Harbin for use against Soviet troops.

"In 1939, during the clash between the Japanese troops and the Soviet troops on the border of Mongolia, on orders from the Japanese military command the Ishii Shiro unit carried out three experiments to contaminate the terrain with the aim to inflict losses on enemy troops," the Japanese POW told the interrogators on January 15, 1947.

He himself was appointed as an administrative and supply officer of a detachment operating on the Mongolian border.

"On July 3, 1939, the detachment went to the Mongolian border to the area of combat operations and stopped at a site east of Lake Mohorehi. In that area the detachment changed position several times. Nighttime experiments to contaminate the area with typhoid bacteria were made on August 29, 30, and 31, 1939. The first two experiments were staged on the orders from Colonel-General Ueda [Kenkichi], the commander of the Kwantung Army, while the third experiment was made on the orders of Ishii Shiro himself," Kazuo testified. "During the retreat of the Japanese army, an area was selected where Red Army units were supposed to be concentrated, and the area was infected. The waters of the Kharukha and Khorusten rivers were used to spread the bacteria," he said.

Use of bacteriological weapons

According to Kazuo, in 1936 a military camp was established 30 kilometers south of Harbin in the village of Kheibo as part of the Ishii Shiro unit. It was engaged in experiments in the development of weapons using plague, typhoid, dysentery and other bacteria. A four-storey laboratory building in the center of the camp was the place where experiments on the effects of bacteria on living organisms were conducted and methods for using bacteria in future warfare were developed. Moreover, non-commissioned officers from Kwantung Army units were sent there for six-month training courses in both decontamination of bacteria-infested areas and contamination of terrain. As Kazuo noted, special artillery shells for bacteriological weapons were developed at a military factory in Mukden. Bacteria were tested on convicts from a Harbin prison.

As the FSB said, after the defeat of the main forces of the Japanese Kwantung Army during the Manchurian strategic operation (August 9-19, 1945), the Soviet Union’s state security agencies combed the camps of Japanese prisoners of war in order to identify persons involved in the development of bacteriological weapons.

At the international military tribunal in Tokyo, held from May 3, 1946 to November 12, 1948, 25 Japanese war criminals were convicted. By the moment the trial began, both US and Soviet intelligence agencies had obtained evidence of Japan's bacteriological weapons.

"At first, the American side expressed interest in the information received from Japanese prisoners of war in the Soviet Union. However, at the end of 1946, the American prosecution decided against taking into account the evidence collected by the Soviet side," the FSB said.

At a trial held in Khabarovsk on December 25-30, 1949 12 former Japanese military servicemen who had been engaged in the development, production and testing of bacteriological weapons during the Second World War were sentenced to various prison terms. Some members of units 731 and 100 who participated in inhuman experiments on citizens of China, the Soviet Union and Korea in late 1939 were convicted by the Military Tribunal of the Primorsky Military District. The senior non-commissioned officer, finance officer of Unit 731 Hayashi Kazuo Among them was one of them.