Their
patron was Brigadier General Charles Willoughby, head of the G2
intelligence unit of the US occupation forces in Japan. In his reports
to his superiors, Willoughby waxed lyrical on the cost-efficient
benefits of his war-criminal wooing. The killers’ “data on human
experiments may prove invaluable,” and was “only obtainable through the
skilful, psychological approach” to the torturers – i.e., buying them
off.
“All of these actions did not amount to more than 200,000
yen, netting the [United States] the fruit of 20 years’ laboratory
tests and research,” Willoughby wrote. The cost of obtaining the data,
said the general, was “a mere pittance.”
The “cost” of this
information, of course, was not the money, booze and broads that
Willoughby laid on for these wretched preservers of medicine and
science; the cost was 3,000 human beings subjected to unimaginable
anguish and vicious destruction. But then, human life is always
considered “a mere pittance” to those caught up in the great engines of
power, in the vast inhuman structures – military, political, economic –
that grind through individual lives like combine harvesters winnowing
chaff. Even the agents of these structures – the high and mighty
drivers of the engines – are reduced to desiccated husks, their own
humanity hollowed out and drained away to grease the gears of the
Machine.
And why did Willoughby and his agents so assiduously
pursue the evil fruits of the torturers’ work? In order to inflict
unimaginable anguish and vicious destruction on other victims, on a
mass scale, in some future conflict. The “information procured will
have the greatest value in future development of the US BW
(bacteriological warfare) program,” Willoughby enthused to the brass.
This
was part of a larger operation that saw the United States incorporate
the fruits of Nazi medical experiments, Nazi methodology – even Nazi
agents – into its biological and “psychological” warfare programs and
its intelligence apparatus. One particularly illuminating – and
chilling – example of this process can be found in the piece below.
(Apologies for an earlier link to the wrong story; the link is now
correct.)
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