This is a pretty common myth that I feel needs to be addressed here. The cruel torture of unit 731 and the many medical "experiments" they performed on unwilling Prisoners of war did not in themselves produce any breakthroughs in medicine. After the war Doctors combing through their records were able to salvage SOME of the information in practical ways when combined with other information from ACTUAL research and experimentation. To attribute these medical breakthroughs to Unit 731 is to rob credit from the hundreds of dedicated doctors and researchers who ACTUALLY developed the treatments.
EDIT**
Clarifying the uselessness of Unit 731 and the hard work of the medical community for those who can't bother to do their own research. (Seriously a cursory Google search will tell you how useless the information produced by unit 731 was in isolation. Their experiments were bad and documentation was shit)
The way I’ve heard it was that the US became aware of the human test experiments and vivisections that were taking place in Japan but let it keep happening if they could have access to the data that it produced. So it directly led to many medical breakthroughs but not directly the research of the surgeons.
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u/ThatFatGuyMJL 2d ago
OLLIE HERE.
JAPAN HAD A TERRIBLE MEDICAL UNIT IN WW2 CALLED UNIT 731.
THEY MADE THE NAZIS LOOK TAME.
THEY FROZE PRISONERS OF WAR INTO HUMAN POPSICALS AND TREATED THEN FROM FROSTBITE.
IT WAS PURE EVIL AND HAS SAVED MANY LIVES.
OLLIE OUT