WWII docs could show war crimes

Sixty-two years after the end of World War II, approximately 100,000 pages of recently… Sixty-two years after the end of World War II, approximately 100,000 pages of recently declassified documents have been released that may shed light on Japanese war crimes previously kept under wraps.

Pitt professor and World War II scholar Donald Goldstein has yet to read the documents, but he predicts the documents’ widespread release could severely affect foreign policy for Japan with particularly detrimental effects on the country’s relations with Korea and China.

“I haven’t seen the papers, so it might not be anything, but I don’t know. If they contain what it is alleged they do, there will be some serious implications,” Goldstein, an expert on Pearl Harbor and faculty member within the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, said.

Goldstein said the papers were uncovered along with several Holocaust documents. They detail war atrocities committed by the Japanese that history has generally overlooked.

“The bottom line is that [the Japanese] have gotten off scott-free on this, so now people are going to start saying, ‘Hey, you guys were bad,’ and in Japan, people are going to be saying, ‘Did we really do all this?'” Goldstein said.

He suggests that if these documents are made public, it will not only change other countries’ perceptions of World War II, but also Japan’s.

“People know Hitler was bad, but they forget the Japanese were just as bad,” Goldstein said.

“[The documents] could change their whole curriculum in Japan,” Goldstein said. “In Japan, there’s very little said about World War II. Over there, World War II begins with the dropping of a bomb.”

Japanese brutality was intense and varied, according to Goldstein, but was largely excused and kept secret. Japan’s relative immunity was achieved through negotiations with the United States, which determined that the war crimes committed by the Japanese Imperial Army, including experiments on prisoners of war, were easier to keep secret for U.S. national security purposes than prosecuting the army members, called Unit 731, for war crimes.

“Unit 731 was a biological-chemical experiment unit in which they took people like you and put you in a cold unit to see how much cold you could take. And they did this with heat to see how much of that you could take, and they injected prisoners of war with typhoid and other diseases to see how much they could take,” Goldstein said.

The results of such tests on the effects of biological warfare were considered important enough to U.S. intelligence to decline prosecution of those involved.

Goldstein believes the greatest impact will be felt in Korea and China if the documents implicate Japan for war crimes committed by Unit 731. Japan still has strained relations with both Korea and China regarding the war.

“The Koreans and the Japanese are still arguing about World War II,” Goldstein said. “[The documents] will give ammunition to the Chinese and Koreans because now they will have documentary evidence to support their claims about the war.”

On the home front, Goldstein predicts the Japanese will suffer a blow to their national conscience because of the documents.

“I see implications later for the younger Japanese,” Goldstein said, “because they don’t know what happened.”