What is the puzzle which has been bothering you about ?

The Treaty of San Francisco in effect exonerated Japanese from any further war crime trials in return for co-operation of their biological warfare scientists.

When Unit 731 abandoned Harbin in the face of a Soviet attack, they took with them a trainload of documents about how to culture and use biological weapons, the effects on real live human guinea pigs. USA wanted it's hands on that technology.

The Soviet Union wanted it's hands on nuclear weapons technology from the Imperial 8th Army Laboratory in Hungnam. Numerous of Japan's leading nuclear scientists came back to Japan and were rehabilitated.

Some even began trying to enrich uranium after the US occupation. when McArthur learned of this he had their cyclotrons dismantled and dumped in the sea. Nishina wrote his memoirs long after the war and in common with many Nazis tried to downplay his personal role and the advancement of his project.

I rather suspect from all my reading of both Nazi and Japanese nuclear projects that the SS cut a deal with USA in October 1944 to capitulate the Nazi nuclear project.

I believe that in the Cold War tensions after the fall of Berlin, the West did everything possible to hush up evidence of the AXIS nuclear program, or mislead history how advanced it was.

Prof Werner Heisenberg was promoted as the father of AXIS nuclear projects and his failure to create nuclear fission was held up as proof that there never was any project of any note. This was as much to silence Stalin's paranoia as anything else.

The Rosenbergs were lambs to the slaughter and their execution was used to explain how come russia got hold of the A-bomb so quickly.

If you hunt for a book called "Major Jordan's diaries" you will find evidence that Roosevelt was deliberately helping Stalin acquire nuclear technology through lend lease. That too was hushed up after the war.

[edit on 5-6-2007 by sy.gunson]

Sy the puzzle that has been bothering me since 1963 is: Why have the majority of Japanese war criminals escaped the firing squad or the hangman's noose?

At boarding school during the 60's, I learnt about Nuremburg and the Nazi War Crimes Trials. I watched on TV and saw documentary films. I think the trials lasted right up to 1948 or 1949.

Yet, in the same period, we heard next to nothing about the Japanese War Crimes Trials and I can only remember three or four Japanese being sentenced to death.

Your account about secret deals with the Americans does shed some light on the subject and a few pieces of the puzzle are now firmly in place.

Many thanx

Well it was not just four convictions. There were about six senior people like Prime Minister Tojo and General Kawashima (head of the nuclear project), but in total there were about 1,000 hangings and 4,000 convictions.

en.wikipedia.org...

What also happened was the Korean War. USA decided it needed an ally in Japan to stop communism in the Korean Peninsula. In the Treaty of San Francisco, Japan was guaranteed no further recrimination. The treaty imposed a statute of limitations in 1952.