The Experiments of Unit 731

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We have all heard about the experiments conducted by the Nazis during World War II, but relatively little is known about the experiments by the Japanese Imperial Army. More specifically Unit 731.

The unit, also is known as, “Detachment 731” and the “Kamo Detachment.” was a covert biological and chemical warfare research and development unit of the Imperial Japanese Army that engaged in lethal human experimentation and biological weapons manufacturing during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) and World War II.

The unit began as a research unit, investigating the effects of disease and injury on the fighting ability of an armed force. One element of the unit, called “Maruta,” took this research a little further than the usual bounds of medical ethics by observing injuries and the course of disease in living patients.

I will only go into a few of their experiments.

Frostbite Testing: The picture above is of the frostbitten hands of a Chinese person who was taken outside in winter by Unit 731 personnel for an experiment on how best to treat frostbite.

Vivisection: Thousands of men, women, children, and infants interned at prisoner-of-war camps were subjected to vivisection, often performed without anesthesia and usually lethal. In an interview, former Unit 731 member Okawa Fukumatsu admitted to having vivisected a pregnant woman. Vivisections were performed on prisoners after infecting them with various diseases. Researchers performed invasive surgery on prisoners, removing organs to study the effects of disease on the human body.

Venereal Disease: To learn what they needed to know, doctors assigned to Unit 731 infected prisoners with the disease and withheld treatment to observe the uninterrupted course of the illness. A contemporary treatment, a primitive chemotherapy agent called Salvarsan, was sometimes administered over a period of months to observe the side effects.

To ensure effective transmission of the disease, syphilitic male prisoners were ordered to rape both female and male fellow prisoners, who would then be monitored to observe the onset of the disease. If the first exposure failed to establish infection, more rapes would be arranged until it did.

In other tests, subjects were deprived of food and water to determine the length of time until death; placed into low-pressure chambers until their eyes popped from the sockets; experimented upon to determine the relationship between temperature, burns, and human survival; hung upside down until death; crushed with heavy objects; electrocuted; dehydrated with hot fans; placed into centrifuges and spun until death; injected with animal blood, notably with horse blood; exposed to lethal doses of X-rays; subjected to various chemical weapons inside gas chambers; injected with seawater; and burned or buried alive. In addition to chemical agents, the properties of many different toxins were also investigated by the Unit. To name a few, prisoners were exposed to tetrodotoxin (pufferfish or fugu venom), heroin, Korean bindweed, bacterial, and castor oil seeds (ricin). Massive amounts of blood were drained from some prisoners for the study of the effects of blood loss according to former Unit 731 vivisectionist Okawa Fukumatsu. In one case, at least half a liter of blood was drawn at two-to-three-day intervals.

As stated above, dehydration experiments were performed on the victims. The purpose of these tests was to determine the amount of water in an individual’s body and to see how long one could survive with a very low to no water intake. It is known that victims were also starved before these tests began. The deteriorating physical states of these victims were documented by staff at periodic intervals.

One member of Unit 731 later recalled that very sick and unresisting prisoners would be laid out on the slab so a line could be inserted into their carotid artery. When most of the blood had been siphoned off and the heart was too weak to pump anymore, an officer in leather boots climbed onto the table and jumped on the victim’s chest with enough force to crush the ribcage, whereupon another dollop of blood would spurt into the container.

Unit 731 researchers conduct bacteriological experiments with captive child subjects in Nongan County of northeast China’s Jilin Province. November 1940.

Members of Unit 731 were not immune from being subjects of experiments. Yoshio Tamura, an assistant in the Special Team, recalled that Yoshio Sudō, an employee of the first division at Unit 731, became infected with bubonic plague as a result of the production of plague bacteria. The Special Team was then ordered to vivisect Sudō. Tamura recalled:

“Sudō had, a few days previously, been interested in talking about women, but now he was thin as a rake, with many purple spots over his body. A large area of scratches on his chest was bleeding. He painfully cried and breathed with difficulty. I sanitized his whole body with disinfectant. Whenever he moved, a rope around his neck tightened. After Sudō’s body was carefully checked [by the surgeon], I handed a scalpel to [the surgeon] who, reversely gripping the scalpel, touched Sudō’s stomach skin and sliced downward. Sudō shouted “brute!” and died with this last word.”

— Criminal History of Unit 731 of the Japanese Military, pp. 118–119 (1991)

In April 2018, the National Archives of Japan disclosed a nearly complete list of 3,607 members of Unit 731 to Katsuo Nishiyama, a professor at Shiga University of Medical Science. Nishiyama reportedly intended to publish the list online to encourage further study into the unit.

Only 12 of them were ever brought to justice, and the longest jail term served was seven years.

sources

https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/unit-731

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/17/japan-unit-731-imperial-army-second-world-war

https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/east-asia/article/2141877/japans-unit-731-conducted-sickening-tests-chinese-perpetrators

https://www.pacificatrocities.org/human-experimentation.html

https://allthatsinteresting.com/unit-731

The Manchurian plague

Before I go into the history of the The Manchurian plague, I would like to say something about Dr. Wu Lien-teh. Google is honoring him today with a Google Doodle, it is his 142 birthday today.

Dr. Wu Lien-teh. was a Malayan physician renowned for his work in public health and particularly, the Manchurian plague of 1910–11. Scientific personal protective equipment is generally believed to have begun with the cloth facemasks promoted by Wu Lien-teh during the Manchurian pneumonic plague outbreak, although many Western medics doubted the efficacy of facemasks in preventing the spread of disease.

Long before the coronavirus pandemic which broke out in the city of Wuhan .wreaked havoc on the planet, it was the Great Manchurian Plague that brought life to a standstill in China.

Like the Covid virus ,which currently is still causing problems globally, the virus which caused the Manchurian plague was also caused by an animal.

The deadly epidemic spread through China and threatened to become a pandemic. Its origins appeared to be related to the trade in wild animals, but at the time no one was sure. In the autumn of 1910, humans encountered the bacillus that causes plague, Yersinia pestis, when markets spurred exploitation of animals on another Asian borderland, a part of northeastern China on the border with Russia and Mongolia known as Manchuria. This region is home to a burrowing groundhog-like animal, the Tarbagan marmot. which became an attractive source for furs at the turn of the 19th century. The trapping and skinning of millions of marmots resulted in the transfer of Yersinia pestis directly into the lungs of humans and gave rise to the pneumonic plague.

Trying to find the source and the initial outbreak of the plague is hard, but it was first officially noted by Russian doctors in Manzhouli, an Inner Mongolian town on the Chinese-Russian border, which had developed around the China Eastern Railway . The symptoms were alarming — fever followed by haemoptysis (the coughing up of blood). In Manzhouli, the dead were left in the street and railway freight cars were turned into quarantine wards.

The epidemic hit international headlines when it reached the northeastern city of Harbin, which was then part of the area known as Manchuria , in today’s Heilongjiang province. The majority of the territory was Chinese-governed. While Japan controlled the port area around Dalian, Russia ran Manchuria’s railways.

In 1911, scientists working in Asia had only recently identified the microorganism that caused plague (Yersinia pestis, then known as Bacillus pestis), and many unanswered questions remained about the plague’s ecology, epidemiology, and infectivity, the same questions scientists today are asking about SARS-CoV-2.

Teams of researchers from different nations came to Manchuria to study these questions through work in laboratories, clinics, and the field, as well as through investigations into the plague.

Just as viruses spread fast along airline routes today, back then the railways facilitated the spread. Fear in Manzhouli meant many people followed the routes the marmot hides had taken along the CER to the Heilongjiang city of Qiqihar, and then on to Harbin.

At the time, Doctor Wu Lien-teh, was managing to contain the outbreak. Wu began post-mortem exams of victims and crucially established that the disease was pneumonic plague and not bubonic.

Legend has it that there was a French medical professor from Peiyang Medical College in Tianjin, Dr Girard Mesny, who believed Wu’s diagnosis was incorrect and wanted to replace him as the man leading the operation against the epidemic. Believing that it was a disease of the glands, he examined four patients without a facemask. He contracted the virus and died on January 11.

Wu knew he was working towards a looming deadline l. Chinese New Year was officially January 30 and He knew that limiting travel would be almost impossible during the annual migration home for so many Chinese people.
If the infection rate wasn’t brought down, then it risked becoming a nationwide epidemic.
The response was sometimes harsh ,any lodging house where an infection appeared was burnt to the ground. But overall Wu’s anti-plague measures worked. So-called “sanitary zones,” quarantines, lockdowns, isolation, travel restrictions and face masks were all implemented. Quarantine centres were established, mostly in converted rail freight cars. If the quarantined didn’t show symptoms within five-to-ten days they were released with a wire wristband fastened with a lead seal stating they were plague free. The measures appeared to have brought the infection rate in Harbin down by the end of January.
However, unfortunately Infections had spread along the rail line. By the start of January 1911, Shenyang had over 2,571 deaths. Eventually, quarantining and travel restrictions in Shenyang began to take effect and the infection rate fell. But the rail line extended onwards and several towns close to the major port city of Dalian reported cases.

In 1911, there was no WHO. The response to the epidemic, hence, was left to individual nations.

The shutdown of Dalian port stopped the spread out from Manchuria to major destinations in Japan, Korea, Hong Kong and elsewhere in Asia.

Wu’s draconian methods had also proved to be successful. The last case was recorded on March 1, 1911.

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sources

https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.2105/AJPH.2020.305960

https://www.wionews.com/world/of-the-great-manchurian-plague-of-1911-and-its-lessons-293564

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/18/china/great-manchurian-plague-china-hnk-intl/index.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchurian_plague

Toilet Paper

When I first started doing my blogs I never though I would be writing about toilet paper one day, but due this upsurge in the fascination with toilet paper , caused by the Covid 19 crisis, I felt compelled to have a quick look at the history of toilet paper.

Below are just some key events in relation to the evolution of the paper that has become such a popular item recently.

Prior to the use of paper these implements were used to clean one’s behind.

The use of toilet paper in human history dates back to the 6th century AD, in early medieval China. In 589 AD the scholar-official Yan Zhitui (531–591) wrote about the use of toilet paper:

“Paper on which there are quotations or commentaries from the Five Classics or the names of sages, I dare not use for toilet purposes”

During the later Tang dynasty (618–907 AD), an Arab traveller to China in the year 851 AD remarked:

.”the Chinese] do not wash themselves with water when they have done their necessities; but they only wipe themselves with paper”

The rise of publishing by the eighteenth century led to the use of newspapers and cheap editions of popular books for cleansing. Lord Chesterfield, in a letter to his son in 1747, told of a man who purchased

“a common edition of Horace, of which he tore off gradually a couple of pages, carried them with him to that necessary place, read them first, and then sent them down as a sacrifice to Cloacina; thus was so much time fairly gained”

Other times political manifestos were used to wipe one’s bum as a matter of protest.

Joseph Gayetty is widely credited with being the inventor of modern commercially available toilet paper in the United States. Gayetty’s paper, first introduced in 1857, was available as late as the 1920s. Gayetty’s Medicated Paper was sold in packages of flat sheets, watermarked with the inventor’s name. Original advertisements for the product used the tagline “The greatest necessity of the age! Gayetty’s medicated paper for the water-closet.”

Seth Wheeler of Albany, New York, obtained the earliest United States patents for toilet paper and dispensers, the types of which eventually were in common use in that country, in 1883.Toilet paper dispensed from rolls was popularized when the Scott Paper Company began marketing it in 1890.

The rolled toilet paper that we use today, which is perforated, was created in the 1880’s. Toilet paper varies immensely; size, roughness, weight, resistance, residues, water-absorption, etc.

The bigger companies invest time and money in surveys to figure out which requirements sell best. This can lead to the adding of aloe in the paper, for a softer feeling paper.

The manufacturing of this product had a long period of refinement, considering that as late as the 1930s, a selling point of the Northern Tissue company was that their toilet paper was “splinter free” Imagine that up until 1935 cleaning your butt was a dangerous business.

 

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Sources

Vintage News

Wikipedia

 

Time Magazine Person of the Year.

Here are just some examples of people who were awarded the title “person of the year” by Time magazine. As you can see that doesn’t always equate of having a positive impact in the world.

Above : Pierre Laval, Man of the Year | Jan. 4, 1932. Had been a FrEnch politician and had held the role of prime miniters. During WWII collaborated withe the Nazi regime, while he held positions in the Vichy government. Was executed in 1949 for his role in WWII

Adolph Hitler, Man of the Year | Jan. 2, 1939. There are 2 covers for that edition . There is another one with Hitler himself , displaying a Swastika on his arm.

Joseph Stalin: 1939, 1942

Richard Nixon, Man the Year | Jan. 3, 1972

Deng Xiaoping, Man of the Year 1979 and 1986. the supreme leader of the People’s Republic of China from 1978 until his retirement in 1992..

Ayatullah Khomeini, Man of the Year | Jan. 7, 1980. Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

To be honest I don’t know why anyone would think there is anything honorable in receiving the title. I would not want to be associated with any of these men in any way or shape or  form.

 

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Sources

Time Magazine

The Nanking Massacre-The Rape of Nanking

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Officially World War II started on September 3 1939,but in all earnestly it had really already started in 1937 with Japan attacking China.

We often hear about the atrocities committed by the Nazi regime, however the Japanese were as brutal if not more brutal and evil.

The Nanking Massacre was an episode of mass murder and mass rape committed by Japanese troops against the residents of Nanjing (Nanking), then the capital of the Republic of China, during the Second Sino-Japanese War. The massacre is also known as the Rape of Nanking.

The massacre occurred over a period of six weeks starting on December 13, 1937, the day that the Japanese captured Nanjing. During this period, soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army murdered Chinese civilians and disarmed combatants who numbered an estimated 40,000 to over 300,000, and perpetrated widespread rape and looting.

Some of the pictures below are graphic, but it shows the brutality of the Japanese Imperial Army.

A 16-year-old girl who had been gang-raped and infected with venereal disease by Japanese soldiers during the Nanking Massacre.

A young Chinese civilian kneels down, his hands tied behind his back, awaiting execution by beheading at the hands of a Japanese soldier.

Dead bodies lay next to Qinhuai River.

Chinese victims being forcibly buried alive during the Rape of Nanking.

Chinese prisoners being used as live target practice for Japanese soldiers trying out their bayonets.

A grinning Japanese soldier holds the severed head of a victim in his hand.

Young Chinese men with their hands bound together are piled into a truck. After this photo was taken, the group was driven out to the outskirts of Nanking and killed.

Although these pictures are graphic in nature John Gillespie Magee  an American Episcopal priest, shot pictures and a film which was  much more graphic then the pictures in this blog. One photograph  showed the body of a woman with a stick or some other sharp object inserted in her private parts.

I deliberately not include that picture because I will probably have a sleepless night after seeing it and I don’t want to cause that distress to anyone else.

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USS Panay incident-Act of war before the war.

A bright Sunday in December Japanese planes blazed out of the sky to strafe and bomb an American warship while it lay at anchor.

You’d be forgiven to think this was the Pearl Harbor attack, but you’d be wrong.

The sinking of the USS Panay is pretty much forgotten now. But it was one of the biggest news stories of 1937.

 

In the 1930s, the United States had something that would be unthinkable today — a treaty with China allowing American gunboats to travel deep up the Yangtze River. It was a major trade route for U.S. commerce in China, and it was notorious for pirate attacks.

The crews of these ships were small.  Panay for example carried four officers and forty-nine enlisted men, along with a Chinese crew of porters.  The vessel only drew about five feet of water, and resembled more of a Mississippi riverboat than a destroyer.  Yet it had a definite role to play, one summed up on a bronze plaque located in the wardroom: “Mission: For the protection of American life and property in the Yangtze River Valley and its tributaries, and the furtherance of American goodwill in China.”

By 1937, the Yangtze faced a much bigger threat than pirates: The Japanese army had launched an invasion of China, and by December, the Japanese were fighting for the city of Nanking. The fight became known as the Rape of Nanking.

The USS Panay, with 55 men aboard, was sent to rescue any Americans left, including embassy staff and journalists — most notably War correspondent Norman Alley a newsreel photographer who recorded what was to come.

 

The Panay, with its civilians aboard, escorted the oil tankers 20 miles upstream to wait out the Battle for Nanking. They anchored in the middle of the river and waited. Then, on Dec. 12, a quiet Sunday afternoon, Japanese planes appeared suddenly and bombed the American vessel.

After the Panay was sunk, the Japanese fighters machine-gunned lifeboats and survivors huddling on the shore of the Yangtze. Two U.S. sailors and a civilian passenger were killed and 11 personnel seriously wounded, setting off a major crisis in U.S.-Japanese relations.

Although the Panay‘s position had been reported to the Japanese as required, the neutral vessel was clearly marked, and the day was sunny and clear, the Japanese maintained that the attack was unintentional, and they agreed to pay $2 million in reparations. Two neutral British vessels were also attacked by the Japanese in the final days of the battle for Nanking.

 

The aftermath of the Panay sinking was a nervous time for the American ambassador to Japan, Joseph C. Grew.

Grew, whose experience in the foreign service spanned over 30 years, “remembered the Maine,” the US Navy ship that blew up in Havana Harbor in 1898. The sinking of Maine had propelled the US into the Spanish–American War, and Grew hoped the sinking of Panay would not be a similar catalyst for the severance of diplomatic ties and war with Japan.

The Japanese government took full responsibility for sinking Panay but continued to maintain that the attack had been unintentional. Chief of Staff of Japanese naval forces in northern China, Vice Admiral Rokuzo Sugiyama, was assigned to make an apology.

The formal apology reached Washington, D.C. on Christmas Eve.

Although Japanese officials maintained that their pilots never saw any American flags on Panay, a US Navy court of inquiry determined that several US flags were clearly visible on the vessel during the attacks.At the meeting held at the American embassy in Tokyo on 23 December, Japanese officials maintained that one navy airplane had attacked a boat by machine gun for a short period of time and that Japanese army motor boats or launches attack the Chinese steamers escaping upstream on the opposite bank. However, the Japanese navy insisted that the attack had been unintentional. The Japanese government paid an indemnity of $2,214,007.36 to the US on 22 April 1938, officially settling the Panay incident.

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Hisao Tani-Japanese War Criminal

Tani was born 22 December 1882 in Okayama Prefecture. He graduated from the 15th class of the Imperial Japanese Army Academy in 1903 and from the 24th class of the Army War College, where he became an instructor in 1924. The College used his texts on strategy and tactics as required readings.

He saw service during the Russo-Japanese War and during the First World War, as official observer for the Japanese government in Great Britain.

From 1935 to 1937, Tani was commanding officer of the 6th Division (Imperial Japanese Army), which was assigned to the China Expeditionary Army in December 1937 under the overall command of General Matsui Iwane. The 6th Division fought in North China during the Peiking – Hankow Railway Operation. Shipped south with the Japanese 10th Army, it took part in the end of the Battle of Shanghai, and the Battle of Nanking.

His troops took Nanking on 13 December 1937. The Chinese army had evacuated the city just before it was taken. The ensuing occupation was therefore that of a defenceless city. The Japanese troops nevertheless carried out unspeakable atrocities: massacre, rape, pillaging and destruction were routinely committed.

During a six to seven week period, more than 100’000 civilians were killed and thousands of women raped. Against this backdrop, Matsui marched triumphantly into Nanking on 17 December 1937 and remained there for several days.

He then served as Commander in Chief of the Central Defence Army before retiring. For the Second World War, he was recalled from retirement to the command of the IJA 59th Army and Chugoku Army District.

After the end of War, Tani was extradited to the Chinese government to stand trial for war crimes at the Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal.

After the end of World War II, the Chinese government demanded that Tani be extradited to China to stand trial for war crimes at the Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal. Tani denied all charges, blaming Korean soldiers for the massacre.

Hundreds of survivors as well as several foreigners who witnessed the atrocity from Nanking Safety Zone, including Miner Searle Bates from the University of Nanking, testified against Hani. He was found guilty of instigating, inspiring and encouraging the men under his command to stage general massacres of prisoners of war and non-combatants and to perpetrate such crimes as rape, plunder and wanton destruction of property, during the Battle of Shanghai, the Battle of Nanking and early in its occupation, the Rape of Nanking, and he was consequently executed on 26 April 1947.

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St. Stephen’s College massacre-Japanese Hong Kong atrocity

The St. Stephen’s College massacre  involved a series of acts of extreme cruelty committed by the Imperial Japanese Army on 25 December 1941 during the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong at St. Stephen’s College.

Several hours before the British surrendered on Christmas day at the end of the Battle of Hong Kong,

Japanese soldiers entered St. Stephen’s College, which was being used as a hospital on the front line at the time.The Japanese were met by two doctors, Black and Witney, who were marched away, and were later found dead and mutilated.They then burst into the wards and bayoneted a number of British, Canadian and Indian wounded soldiers who were incapable of hiding.The survivors and their nurses were imprisoned in two rooms upstairs. Later, a second wave of Japanese troops arrived after the fighting had moved further south, away from the school. They removed two Canadians from one of the rooms, and mutilated and killed them outside. Many of the nurses next door were then dragged off to be gang raped, and later found mutilated. The following morning, after the surrender, the Japanese ordered that all these bodies should be cremated just outside the hall. Other soldiers who had died in the defence of Stanley were burned with those killed in the massacre, making well over 100 altogether

When the college and the grounds of Stanley Prison became a civilian internment camp, the internees gathered up the burnt remains, shards of bones, buttons and charred effects from the cremation, and then buried them. A gravestone marks the spot where these items were interred at Stanley Cemetery.

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Excuse me I am Chinese,not Japanese!

World War II brought momentous change to America’s Chinese community. For decades, Chinese were vilified in America, especially in California, the center of the U.S.’s anti-Chinese feelings. The Chinese had initially come to California for the Gold Rush and later the building of the Transcontinental Railroad, but public sentiment quickly turned against them. Competition for jobs and a depression in the 1870s all led to a racist backlash against Chinese. Eventually Chinese immigration was ended with the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. The Chinese in America found themselves a hated minority segregated in Chinatowns. The attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941 changed all of that.

After Pearl Harbor perceptions of China and Chinese Americans were suddenly transformed. China went from being known as the “sick man of Asia” to a vital ally in the United States’ war against the Japanese. Likewise, Chinese went from the “heathen Chinese” to friends. In 1943 a congressman said if not for December 7, America might have never known how good Chinese Americans were.

Motivated by fear and indignation, Chinese Americans also tried to distinguish themselves as much as possible from the Japanese and “prove their undivided loyalty to the American war effort”. Mere days after Pearl Harbor, the Chinese consulate in San Francisco started issuing identification cards, and Chinese Americans began wearing buttons and badges with phrases like “I am Chinese” on them. Hoping to prove their loyalty to the United States beyond any doubt, Chinese periodicals also adopted the inflammatory anti-Japanese rhetoric and racial epithets used by the mainstream press.

Although there was some sentiment of pan-Asian solidarity, it was definitely not the norm. Chinese Americans, fueled by anger at Japanese aggression in their home country, their American patriotism, and their desire to be seen as American patriots, were, consciously or not, complicit in the persecution of their Japanese neighbors.

The internment of the Japanese was more or less ignored by the Chinese community, with the exception of a few individuals. In fact, Chinese periodicals also participated in spreading the belief that Japanese Americans were guilty of treason or aiding Japan .
Japanese internment actually presented an opportunity for economic and social advancement to the Chinese. Chinese merchants moved into formerly Japanese-owned businesses. And when the Japanese were removed from their farm jobs, the United States Employment Service issued a call for Chinese Americans to replace them.

World War II was an opportunity for the Chinese to gain economic and social standing in mainstream American society; however, the shift in white America’s perceptions of the Chinese Americans must also be remembered as a consequence of racist attitudes directed towards the Japanese Americans and the ensuing internment of a whole ethnicity. Tides quickly shifted after World War II, when the United States declared another war, this time on communism. Power, given rather suddenly to the Chinese during the war, was just as quickly taken away afterwards.

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May 1944 Gestapo raid in Hamburg’s Chinatown- The forgotten victims

This is a little known story which took place on the 13th of May 1944. The victims were Chinese citizens, not tortured and killed by Japanese but by the Gestapo in Hamburg,Germany.

It requires a lot of imagination to recollect the past history that the Schmuckstraße as the center of a lively Chinese district of St. Pauli. Today only two houses of that time are still standing with an emptied site next to it, nothing remained or reminds the once lively Chinese district that connected close between Talstraße and Grosse Freiheit, one of the popular street in the red light district of St. Pauli, Hamburg.

In the early 20’s, a small Chinese colony had formed in Hamburg as a result of the employment of Chinese in the German merchant shipping. Soon Chinese infrastructure were arisen in some of the European’s harbor cities. The Chinese have settled down there and opened up restaurants, Marine equipment stores, laundries. At that time, it had as many as about 2000 Chinese living in Hamburg.  They were hard-working, well-educated, went to dance and sports clubs, some were married to German women and had children with them.

The harmony living with one another were ended abruptly when the Nazis came. 165 Chinese were detained on 13 May 1944, in the so called “Chinese action” under the pretext of collaboration with the enemy. In the Langer Morgan labor camp in Hamburg-Wilhelmsburg, 17 of them died. All that remains today of the camp is a plaque.

More then a 100 people died in the camp due to inhuman conditions.

One of the Chinese victims was Woo Lie Kien  He died in the Allgemeinen Krankenhaus Barmbek(General Hospital Barmbek) as result of torture by the gestapo on the 23rd of November 1944.

Many of the Chinese left Germany for America or have gone back to their homeland China eventually ,as the 2nd World War ended. A few stayed back in Hamburg , leaving a forgotten chapter of Hamburg History behind

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sources

https://www.hamburg-travel.com/see-explore/historic-hamburg/chinatown/?PageSpeed=noscript&cHash=2204095e23aa4a8baf79d97366f9916a

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