🗓 On December 25, 1949, the #KhabarovskTrial began over a group of 12 former Japanese Kwantung Army servicemen who were found guilty of developing and testing bacteriological weapons on living people.

During World War II, the Japanese militarists began to show increased activity in the manufacturing of bacteriological weapons, considering them as one of the key weapons in the fight against the USSR.

🕯 In the secret structures created on the territory of Mongolia and China, Unit 731 and other combat units of the Japanese army experimented inhumanly on prisoners of war and ordinary people. There was evidence that causative agents of typhoid, paratyphoid, dysentery, and blistering gas were used. The Chinese, Koreans, Manchus, Soviet people, and Russian emigrants were sent to the bacteriological units as test subjects.

❗️ Despite existing information from Japanese prisoners of war, in 1947 the United States under far-fetched pretexts denied the Soviet Union its request to include Japan, who by that time were already under the wing of Washington, in their indictment at the Tokyo Trial for developing bacteriological weapons.

In order to restore justice, the Soviet government held a trial over the Japanese in the USSR in 1949. In open sessions of the military tribunal of the Primorsky Military District, irrefutable evidence was presented to the commission of militarist crimes Japan had committed against humanity and its preparation of bacteriological warfare.

The defendants confessed that they had carried out inhumane experiments and were sentenced to imprisonment for various terms on December 30.

☝️ Though the Khabarovsk Trial was not international, in terms of its political and legal significance it can be compared with the Nuremberg Tribunal and the Tokyo trial.