2023-10-03 05:17:00
The men of the Kempetai, the Japanese Gestapo, taking control and devastating a town in China. What was born as a military police became a force in which torture, rape and executions were the norm (Grosby)
The Kempeitai is known as the Japanese Gestapo. Born as an elite military police unit, as it gained power, gaining greater influence, it expanded its powers. At first he was in charge of persecuting those considered anti-Japanese and discovering spies. Then it became an enormous and cruel force that spread terror in the occupied territories, made torture its trademark – so much so that it created several hitherto unknown methods -, devastated populations, recruited and kidnapped women to be raped by the Japanese troops, executed thousands of citizens of the invaded countries, managed the concentration camps and even took charge of Unit 731 in which experiments of inconceivable cruelty were carried out on human beings, only comparable to those of Josef Mengele.
The Kempeitai was created in 1883. In its beginnings its function was clear and limited. A military police that controlled internal discipline. Its members were elite, chosen from the best in the army. Incorruptible and with great training. Only 368 members. Shortly after, its functions were extended. This special body was destined to track down throughout Japanese territory those who evaded military service and the call to be recruited. In general, this reluctance of citizens was not due to a lack of patriotism or cowardice: their daily work was essential to work the land and ensure the survival of the family.
The number of men involved in the organization grew over the years. Also their tasks. They began to dedicate themselves to intelligence tasks and to silence what they called “anti-Japanese tasks” in the occupied territories.
As its powers grew, the organization gained power and also cruelty. Every time he moved further away from ethical principles. Pressure, threats, arbitrary arrests, torture and murders.
A Kempeitai officer in his uniform. Its members were greatly feared in Japan and especially in the invaded populations.
The usual thing happened. The more firepower (and damage) he had, the greater the corruption of his high command. The idea of impunity pushed them to cross any limits, not only with prisoners. The leaders enriched themselves, looted goods from the places they reached and also abused their subordinates.
The Kempeitai was used by the Empire as a shock force and as a way to secure conquered territories, discipline and terrorize its inhabitants and to persecute dissidents and opponents. As Japan advanced its conquests in China and the rest of the East, the organization became increasingly voluminous, influential, and its criminal power increased.
In each prison camp run by the Kempeitai and in each of its units in the occupied countries, this organization had a special facility to carry out torture. Stripped, with just a chair – to have the victim at an accessible height, for the comfort of the perpetrator – and a table full of torture elements. Shackles, heaters with metal plates taking temperature, barrels full of water, mittens, electrical elements, pointed tweezers, tongs, ropes, bags and any other object that could hurt the person being interrogated.
The torture was so frequent that, at a certain point, it was no longer expected to obtain information from these interrogations. They were a routine, a sadistic procedure, that was incorporated into the Kempeitai menu. Habituality also led to unthinkable methods being developed and cruelty increasing in each one. Many times the cruelty caused the prisoners to die. His torturers conceived that session as a success regardless of whether or not they obtained the information sought.
Comfort Women from Korea. They were kidnapped and then turned into sexual slaves to satisfy the Japanese soldiers.
Another of the activities of the Japanese Gestapo was to organize and supply Comfort Women or Comfort Girls to the troops while they were on the front or in occupied territory. The word about Comfort Women is nothing more than a euphemism. The members of the Kempeitai kidnapped them from the invaded towns and subdued them. They turned them into slave sex workers. They had to satisfy the Japanese soldiers in the field.
Some say that these women numbered several tens of thousands. Other Japanese historians multiply that figure by twenty. They talk about 410,000 women enslaved and forced into prostitution. After the Second War they were recognized as victims and were known as Forced Sexual Slaves by the Imperial Japanese Army.
Women were taken from their homes. Sometimes they were tricked into saying that they should work in restaurants or a factory. On many other occasions, they did not even make an effort to create a lie; They only forcibly dragged them to a truck that would take them to a Consuelo Station. There they would have to endure dozens of Japanese soldiers a day abusing them.
The logic of the Japanese high command was to try to prevent their soldiers from raping the women of the places they invaded so as not to negatively predispose their inhabitants. In this way, they were responsible for bringing women from other places to the front so that they could be raped by their men. The only difference was the place from which the victims came.
Another atrocity attributed to its members was the one known as the Pig Cage Massacre. In Java, Japanese forces trapped two hundred British soldiers. After torturing them, they were put in bamboo cages originally intended for pigs. There they left the men in the sun for days. They endured temperatures of 40 degrees and a lack of water and food. Then those cages were put on trucks and again under the overwhelming sun they were taken towards the sea. There, the Japanese threw the bamboo constructions into the water so that their prisoners, already dying, would be devoured by sharks.
Lieutenant Robert L. Hite, a United States airman, was detained and tortured. In the image he is taken blindfolded for interrogation. He spent 40 months in a prison camp and managed to survive the war (AirmanMagazine)
After Japanese forces took Singapore and changed its name to Syonan, the Kempeitai was in charge of cleaning up the city. They called all men between 18 and 50 years old. The objective was to clean the place of people considered dangerous. The enumeration of those who were considered as such is Borgesian: communists, nationalists, those who spoke English, those who had once spoken ill of Japan, school teachers, criminals, orientals who also had European blood, war veterans, members of secret societies. The list is not exhaustive.
Only a few were released, those considered harmless (and not so weak as to be despised and killed on the spot). The passport to never be disturbed again was a seal that was stamped on your forehead, an arm or clothing depending on the mood of the Japanese in charge. Those who did not pass the screening were executed a few days later. There were so many that the methods applied were varied. Shot in the back, beheaded, bayoneted, forced to go into the sea.
A modus operandi was revealed on several islands and occupied cities. Sometimes the Japanese suffered a revolt from local residents who tried to regain control. There were clashes, moments of anxiety and several victims of the Japanese army taken by surprise by the insurrection. Soon members of the Kempeitai were sent to impose order. And if, due to the distances and not-so-immediate communication of the time, when they arrived the rebellion was quelled, it did not matter much. They unleashed terror, set in motion the lesson and multiplied by six the casualties that the Japanese had suffered. They destroyed everything they could, raped women, destroyed homes. They wanted to make sure it didn’t happen again.
Around 50 Kempeitai men surrender to British forces at the end of the war (AP Photo/British Official Photo)
The Kempetai, driven by the arrogance and impunity of the force, left no atrocities to commit. If his work was compared to the Gestapo, Unit 731, of which his men were in charge, was the equivalent of what Mengele did in Auschwitz.
The list of Unit 731’s aberrations is nauseating. Vivisections without anesthesia, inoculation of viruses and diseases in healthy patients, organ ablation, amputations, hyperbaric chamber testing, and many other atrocious experiments performed on prisoners of war and other detainees. Some were used as human dummies to find out how many bayonets and what parts of the body a human being could withstand. They even shot the prisoners at different distances, always aiming at the upper and lower limbs, to appreciate the destructive power of the weapons they were developing; Afterwards, they did not attend to them immediately because they also studied the different healing times.
Hideki Tojo was the head of the Armed Forces of the Japanese Empire and also Prime Minister. He had previously been in charge of one of the Kempeitai departments.
Right there they created various methods to unleash chemical warfare. In a conquered town they unleashed a tetanus epidemic, infecting a considerable number of inhabitants in order to see the possibilities of the vaccine (and the lethal and torturous power of the disease). When Unit 731 didn’t have what they needed, the Kempeitai men went out to look for it. This is how they experimented on children, adolescents, pregnant women and adolescents. Babies born to women raped by their men were often used as guinea pigs in the laboratory.
Many of the officers responsible for the Kempeitai had successful careers in the Japanese army. They were promoted and occupied privileged positions during the most important moments of World War II. They were men who had shown their loyalty, their hardness of spirit, the lack of scruples to do what was necessary to avoid being defeated, the lack of humanity essential to conducting a war. The most extreme example was that of Hideki Tojo, General Commander of the Forces and Prime Minister of Japan.
After the Japanese capitulation, the Kempeitai evaporated. Perhaps the most accurate term to discover what happened is disbandment. Its officers and members were divided throughout Japanese territory – after destroying all possible evidence of their involvement in the atrocities -, denying their participation in the organization, trying to camouflage themselves among the citizens. As if nothing had happened. Very few were arrested and tried.
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