Names, information of germ warfare unit disclosed

HARBIN, July 7 - The names of 1,242 members of Japan's Unit 1855, another Japanese germ warfare unit during the World War II, have been disclosed by a Chinese museum.

Written on Aug 29, 1945, the list has all the member names, dates of birth, nationalities, addresses, close relatives, and army service records. "It is the most complete name list ever disclosed of the unit," according to Jin Chengmin, curator of the Museum of Evidence of War Crimes by the Japanese Army Unit 731.

Unit 731 was the other known Japanese germ warfare unit.

"The disclosure of the list has academic and historical value for drawing a complete picture of the Unit 1855, especially its size, structure, organization, membership, and the commission and location of its major crimes," said Jin of the museum, which was located in Harbin, capital of Northeast China's Heilongjiang province.

The name list was collected from the National Archives of Japan in 2016.

Yang Yanjun, a researcher with Harbin Academy of Social Sciences, said the name list, newly-collected and first-hand, is a core archive for studying the human experiments and germ warfare carried out by the Japanese troops during the Second World War.

Unit 731 was a top-secret biological and chemical warfare research base established in Harbin as the nerve center of Japanese biological warfare in China and Southeast Asia during WWII.

At least 3,000 people were used for human experimentation by Unit 731 and more than 300,000 people in China were killed by Japan's biological weapons.