Starting in late 1946 the USSR began to repatriate the POWs, freeing 625,000 in the following year alone. The Stalin regime declared in the spring of 1949 that just 95,000 Japanese prisoners remained in Siberia and they would be sent home by year's end (many would not actually return until well into the 1950s.)
The Soviets killed and raped civilians and looted their homes and shops while Japanese soldiers were imprisoned and put into hard labour, mostly in Siberia. The number of POWs was initially estimated at 600,000 but recent disclosures from Soviet archives have kept revising the number upward.
After World War II there were from 560,000 to 760,000 Japanese personnel in the Soviet Union and Mongolia interned to work in labor camps as POWs. Of them, it is estimated that between 60,000 and 347,000 died in captivity.
During World War II, Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany (towards Soviet POWs and Western Allied commandos) were notorious for atrocities against prisoners of war.
Between 1946 and 1950, many of the Japanese POWs in Soviet captivity were released; those remaining after 1950 were mainly those convicted of various crimes. They were gradually released under a series of amnesties between 1953 and 1956.
Many of the women and children were held in prison camps in terrible conditions and forced on death marches. Some women were killed on sight and others were raped, beaten, and forced to become sex slaves.
The POWs suffered frequent beatings and mistreatment from their Japanese guards, food was the barest minimum, and disease and injuries went untreated.
The Japanese used many types of physical punishment. Some prisoners were made to hold a heavy stone above their heads for many hours. Others might be forced into small cells with little food or water. Tom Uren described how a young Aboriginal soldier was made to kneel on a piece of bamboo for a number of days.
Of the 22,376 Australian prisoners of war captured by the Japanese, some 8,031 died while in captivity. After the end of the war, War Crimes Trials were held to investigate reports of atrocities, massacres and other causes of death.
Many were sent to logging camps in Siberia or mining in the Ural Mountains. Imprisonment was generally harsh. A young POW recalled being subjected to “brutal assaults on a daily basis, hunger, disease, and the cold.” Only by 1948 did their situation improve.
Axis powers. The Axis powers (Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan) were some of the most systematic perpetrators of war crimes in modern history.
Although the majority of these Japanese POWs were sent home at the end of World War II, a “few hundred” were kept back by the CCP to train additional Japanese soldiers to fight against Nationalist forces in Northeast China.
The Japanese murdered 30 million civilians while "liberating" what it called the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere from colonial rule. About 23 million of these were ethnic Chinese. It is a crime that in sheer numbers is far greater than the Nazi Holocaust. In Germany, Holocaust denial is a crime.
This brutality caused many in the United States to hate the Japanese way of fighting and argued that the atomic bombs were justified because they were equally brutal towards Japan. Regardless, Japan was a difficult enemy to defeat due to the commitment of its soldiers to fight to the death and resist surrender.
The Potsdam Declaration intended that all of the Japanese home islands be surrendered to US General Douglas MacArthur, rather than to the Soviets, and so Truman refused to allow the Soviets to participate in the occupation of Japan.
Nuclear weapons shocked Japan into surrendering at the end of World War II—except they didn't. Japan surrendered because the Soviet Union entered the war. Japanese leaders said the bomb forced them to surrender because it was less embarrassing to say they had been defeated by a miracle weapon.
War crimes trials, in which Japanese guards were tried for acts of brutality, were held throughout south-east Asia. In Australian trials, 922 men were tried and 641 were found guilty. Of 148 sentenced to death, 137 were actually executed.
Japanese military philosophy held that anyone surrendering was beneath contempt. As a result, their treatment of captives was harsh. Conditions varied, but in the worst camps - such as those along the Thailand-Burma 'Death Railway' - prisoners suffered terribly.
Shortly thereafter, several Japanese soldiers entered the enclosure with several cans of gasoline and started pouring gasoline on the prisoners. After they were all soaked with gasoline they started to burn them.
Crucifixion was a form of punishment, torture and/or execution that the Japanese military sometimes used against prisoners during the war. Edwards and the others were initially bound at the wrists with fencing wire, suspended from a tree and beaten with a baseball bat.
people were buried alive underground. First the soldiers would have the Chinese dig a hole in the dirt, go inside and let the soldiers bury them alive. Bayonets: Young also reported that new Japanese soldiers who joined the army, would practice bayoneting Chinese POW soldiers in order to gain experience.
Japanese plans
In early March 1942, the Japanese had debated what to do now that Japan had so easily gained her objectives. The Navy wanted to invade Australia and deny the country as a base to either America or Britain. The Army felt it did not have the strength to invade and fully occupy so vast a continent.
Both Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan committed horrifying atrocities during World War II, for example. Both also suffered greatly during World War II – Germany in fact lost a greater percentage of its population in the fighting, but Japan suffered the ill-effects of two nuclear bombs.
The Japanese treated these POWs, and civilian internees, with at best indifference and, at worst, considerable brutality. They were forced into hard labour, many shipped in dangerous conditions to work in Japan.
Japanese Destroy Nanjing
Even before their arrival, word had begun spreading of the numerous atrocities they had committed on their way through China, including killing contests, arson and pillaging. Chinese soldiers were hunted down and killed by the thousands, and left in mass graves.