During the 2^nd World War, the Japanese army occupied Harbin for 13 years and killed millions of civilians and prisoners. The Japanese Germ Warfare Base Museum gives the details of the brutal treatment to those victims.
 
The Japanese army took the city in 1932. In 1939 the Japanese army set up a top-secret, germ warfare research centre in Harbin, where medical experts performed gruesome experiments on Chinese, Soviet, Korean, Mongolian and British prisoners of war. The base was set up to “research”, presumably, the capabilities of the soul and the endurance of human body. Run by the Japanese army’s 731 Division, over 3,000 people were exterminated in the most horrific way: frozen, bombed, roasted, infected, injected, dissected...alive until dead.
 
Many Japanese historians even today refute much of the evidence that has been mounting up since the war years, although it is now fairly commonly accepted that the strictly drilled Japanese forces and seemingly polite civilians were less than civil. From Auschwitz to Nanjing, the Germ Warfare Experimental Base nowadays shows little of the grisly senselessness that its recent past should emphasize.
 
Almost as chilling and sad as the events themselves is the umbrella of denial that now has spread over much of this period of history, with allegations and misinformation coming from many sides. Just before the 1945 retake of the city by the Soviets the Japanese apparently did their utmost to cover up the evidence of this area, blowing up the site. Allegedly, the Americans also gave the Japanese scientists who worked in the base, prominent in their respective fields, immunity from prosecution in return for research findings. It was not until in the 1980s that a tenacious Japanese journalist dragged out the truth.