Finian Cunningham at Strategic-Culture.org:

Medical scientists Shiro Ishii and Kurt Blome were respectively the commanders of the biological and chemical warfare research efforts by Japan and Germany during the war. Ishii commanded the notorious Unit 731 which was based in Manchuria in Japanese-occupied China. Blome was the lead scientist in testing biological weapons and poisonous gases on inmates at Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps.

Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany collaborated intensively in the sharing of experimental data on new bioweapons, including the spreading of anthrax, typhoid, cholera, smallpox, bubonic plague, and botulism.

Ishii’s Unit 731 is estimated to have caused up to 500,000 deaths during the war from the use of biological warfare by dropping pathogens from airplanes on Chinese cities in Hunan and Zhejiang provinces. The unit also carried out diabolic forced experiments on Chinese and Russian prisoners of war to study the epidemiology of diseases and vaccines. Inmates were infected with pathogens and subjected to horrible agonizing deaths.

Shiro Ishii and his criminal network were never brought to trial following the war despite earnest Soviet requests. Instead, the Americans who occupied mainland Japan granted him and his team of doctors immunity from prosecution in exchange for exclusive access to the biological and chemical warfare experiments. The Pentagon assigned its experts from Fort Detrick, Maryland, to tap the Japanese trove of data.

General Douglas MacArthur, the Allied Supreme Commander, personally intervened to ensure that Washington did not allow prosecution of Ishii or any other Japanese wartime specialist in those fields. Ishii died in 1959 in Tokyo at the age of 67 never having faced justice for the mass deaths he had supervised.

Meanwhile, Kurt Blome, the Wehrmacht chief of biological and chemical warfare, was brought to trial at the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trials but he was acquitted in 1947 primarily because of American intervention to let him walk free.

Blome was just one of over 1,000 Nazi scientists and engineers who were recruited by the U.S. as part of Operation Paperclip. They would go on to be vital contributors to developing American missile technology and the NASA space program.

Again Fort Detrick, the Pentagon’s biological warfare center, tapped Blome’s expertise in weaponizing anthrax and other pathogens. His knowledge of nerve agents such as Tabun and Sarin was also harnessed by the CIA and its MK-Ultra program for assassinating political opponents. Blome worked closely with Sydney Gottlieb who headed up the CIA’s biological and chemical warfare unit. Gottlieb was known as the agency’s “poisoner-in-chief” and was personally involved in repeated efforts to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Ironically, the CIA man who was the son of Jewish Hungarian immigrants ended up working with a Nazi scientist who had experimented at Auschwitz.

Read the rest at Strategic-Culture.org