Unit 731
Japan's army secretly tests biological weapons on people
From 1936, after a decree by Emperor Hirohito, General Shirō Ishii's Unit 731 operated at Pingfang near Harbin, with 3,000 staff and a prison for 600 people used to test disease agents. Some 14,000 are estimated to have died in its experiments; in 1949 the USSR tried 12 members at Khabarovsk, while the US granted Ishii immunity for his data.
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Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1918–1920 Spanish flu pandemic — 18 years earlier
- 1939–1945 World War II — 3 years later
- 1947–1991 Cold War — 11 years later
- 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights — 12 years later
- 1949 Founding of NATO — 13 years later
Europe
- 1919 Treaty of Versailles — 17 years earlier
- 1928 Discovery of penicillin — 8 years earlier
- 1933 Hitler comes to power — 3 years earlier
- 1936–1939 Spanish Civil War — same year
- 1941–1945 The Holocaust — 5 years later
Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1929–1933 Collectivization in the Soviet Union — 7 years earlier
- 1936–1938 Great Purge — same year
- 1941–1944 Siege of Leningrad — 5 years later
- 1942–1943 Battle of Stalingrad — 6 years later
- 1945 German surrender and Victory Day — 9 years later
Middle East
- 1915–1917 Armenian genocide — 21 years earlier
- 1916 Sykes–Picot Agreement — 20 years earlier
- 1932 Kingdom of Saudi Arabia proclaimed — 4 years earlier
- 1941 Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran — 5 years later
- 1948 Founding of the State of Israel — 12 years later
Africa
- 1922 Discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb — 14 years earlier
- 1935–1937 Italy invades Ethiopia — 1 year earlier
- 1948 Apartheid begins in South Africa — 12 years later
- 1952 Egyptian revolution of 1952 — 16 years later
- 1956 The Suez Crisis — 20 years later
Americas
- 1914 Opening of the Panama Canal — 22 years earlier
- 1929 Wall Street Crash — 7 years earlier
- c. 1930–1936 Dust Bowl — 6 years earlier
- 1933–1939 New Deal — 3 years earlier
- 1945 ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic computer — 9 years later
Oceania
- 1936 Death of the last thylacine — same year
- 1941 Attack on Pearl Harbor — 5 years later
- 1942 The Battle of Midway — 6 years later
- 1954 The Castle Bravo test at Bikini — 18 years later
- 1959 The Antarctic Treaty — 23 years later
Alive at the time
- Nikola Tesla (aged 80)
- Mahatma Gandhi (aged 67)
- Ernest Rutherford (aged 65)
- Winston Churchill (aged 62)
- Joseph Stalin (aged 58)
- Albert Einstein (aged 57)
- Pablo Picasso (aged 55)
- Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (aged 55)
- Adolf Hitler (aged 47)
- Charlie Chaplin (aged 47)