Russia's FSB Unveils Evidence of Japan's 1945 Plan to Wage Biological Warfare Against USSR

MOSCOW (Sputnik) - Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) has declassified documents bearing evidence that Japan was preparing to start a biological war against the Soviet Union in June 1945, despite the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact allowing the two nations to fight against each other's allies but not against each other during World War II.

Most of Japan’s biological warfare labs were concentrated in Manchuria. Notably, the Red Army's Manchurian Strategic Offensive Operation ended on 20 August 1945, liberating the Chinese region from the Japanese. The Soviet troops have, therefore, saved the world from another catastrophe.

Among the archival materials, including trophy one seen by Sputnik, there is a protocol of interrogation of the former Japanese second lieutenant of the medical service, an employee of Unit 731 — the Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army.

The serviceman had confessed during interrogation at the end of May 1950 that he was looking for ways to maintain the long-term resistance of the mycobacterium tuberculosis (the causative agent of tuberculosis) and Paratyphi B "for use in germ warfare."

"All research of the mycobacterium tuberculosis and Paratyphi B, which I personally conducted ... were carried out to use them as weapons in the war against the Soviet Union, which, ... was supposed to begin in June 1945," the declassified testimony read.

The FSB also revealed that Japanese Prince Takeda Tsuneyoshi, a first cousin of Emperor Hirohito and treasurer of the Kwantung Army during WWII, was shown a top-secret documentary film about the development and production of biological weapons in Tokyo.

On 15 August 1945, just three months after the Soviet army and the Allied troops had defeated Nazi Germany in Europe, Japan surrendered following the US bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The Instrument of Surrender that brought WWII to a close was formally signed by then-Japanese Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu on 2 September 1945, aboard the USS Missouri battleship which was anchored at the time in Tokyo bay.