Why today is Auschwitz and the experiments of Josef Mengele more well known than Unit 731?

[u/[deleted]]

[u/ausrandoman]

Do you mean known world-wide well known to people of European descent? You might also like to ask which is more well known in China.

[u/commiespaceinvader]

Ok, so please note that I will tackle this question from a European context approach since it is my strong suspicion that in an Asian or specifically Chinese context these crimes might be better known than the Nazi medical experiments.

Within these European context, the question why one is better known than the other has several reasons. The first and most obvious one being publicity and sources.

The knowledge about and horror of the Nazi medical experiments, whether those of Mengele or others spread almost immediately with the end of the war. They were a big topic at the Nuremberg Trials and the first Nuremberg successor trial was the doctor's trial, which shocked the world.

What shocked the world was not only the cruelty and horror of these experiments as well as their underlying ideology, seeing as most of them were based on flawed and racist premises but also the fact that doctors, the profession of healers, would put their knowledge in the service of what was essentially seen as evil. It was during this and the preceding IMT trial that the cultural image of the especially evil Nazi doctor originated – an image that found its way into pop culture and was thus perpetuated massively.

Consider probably one of the best known examples of this: The movie Marathon Man featuring Dustin Hoffman and Laurence Olivier as Dr. Szell, Nazi dentist hiding in South America, and at some point torturing Hoffman's character. Not only was the movie (and the novel it was based on) massively successful, including an Oscar Nomination and Golden Globe Win for Olivier's portrayal of Szell. It also had a profound cultural impact, with the AFI ranking the Szell character as #34 of their 100 greatest Heroes and Villains in movies in the last century. Similar and also successful depictions of Nazi doctors can also be found in The Boys from Brazil with Gregory Peck portraying Mengele and even going so far back as The Stranger, a movie from 1946 with Orson Wells portraying a fugitive Nazi doctor.

Mengele also occupies a special place in this whole narrative. Like Eichmann, he was able to escape at the end of the war and his name was frequently referenced during the trials. Also, his experiments struck the world as especially gruesome, seeing as such things like injecting one twin with a new eye color, seeing if the other twin's eye color would change was even to the layman recognizable as bogus. Like with Bormann before the discovery of his death or Eichmann before his capture, a whole cultural trope developed around Mengele, making him the yellow press Elivs of the fugitive Nazis: Always popping up somewhere with a myriad of legends developing around him. For example see this one among many others.

Unit 731 never receive comparable publicity within the European public eye. During the already little known Tokyo Military Tribunal, none of them was indicted because of a deal they struck with US authorities to share their findings because US authorities saw the promise of a useful outcome. Some of their files are still not opened to the public or have been misplaced thus making assessment of the full extent of these medical crimes difficult. While there were – interestingly enough – some Soviet publications about these crimes from the 1950s which have been translated in English and German, they never made a comparable splash to the publications about Nazi doctors in exciting the public and pop cultural imagination.

Another, more profound and underlying reason for this can be found in what place Nazi crimes occupy in the Western historical Meta-narrative. Before the Holocaust and the crimes of the Nazis, the West told a story of itself that was one of progress and civilization, a classical narrative of modernization in which the more advanced a society became, the better it became. For obvious reasons, the Holocaust and the crimes of the Nazi shook that narrative to its very core. Like with the Nazi doctors, where the shock was that a profession held in high regard for healing would do something like that, the shock that a whole society, which had previously been seen as advanced and civilized would engage in genocide was huge.

Furthermore, what was an integral part of this shock and going back to Unit 731: It was Europeans doing horrible things to other Europeans. This was what set the Nazi crimes apart from previous colonial crimes in the Western Meta Narrative. Historian Mark Mazower sums this up when he writes, that the true horror the British establishment felt about the Nazis during the war was that they used colonial methods on non-colonial people such as the Poles. Crimes such as Unit 731 were easy to relegate to a realm of uncivilized peoples doing uncivilized things to each other in Western imagination, while for the Nazis no such "easy" rationalization was to be found.

So, in short: Nazi medical crimes received more publicity and produced more readily available sources with the always underlying factor of how these crimes fit into the Western meta-narrative of itself or didn't fit in there.

[u/cinemashow → u/[deleted]]

With the Cold War intensifying, the government of President Harry S. Truman felt that Japan needed to be moulded into an American ally and a bulwark against the spread of communism. Truman believed that these aims would be difficult to achieve if the Japanese people were alienated by continuing prosecutions of their war criminals. For this reason, the United States called a halt to further war crimes prosecutions when twenty-five "Class A" war criminals had been sentenced to death or imprisonment at the end of 1948. The decision to halt the prosecutions was entirely based on political expediency. It had nothing to do with issues of legality, morality, or humanity. Source: http://www.pacificwar.org.au/JapWarCrimes/USWarCrime_Coverup.html