A picture album exposing the crimes committed by Unit 731 of the invading Japanese troops in China during the World War II will be published within the year, according to the Unit 731 Crimes Exhibition Hall based in Harbin, capital of northeast China's Heilongjiang Province.

Wang Peng, curator of the exhibition hall, said the 120-page picture album contains materials exposing Unit 731's crimes in carrying out germ experiments on live people in China and lawsuits lodged by Chinese victims after the end of the war.

In 1939, Japan's Unit 731 of the Kwantung Army set up a top-secret, germ-warfare research base in what is today's Pingfang district of Harbin City. The army's medical officers made experiments on Chinese civilians, and on Soviet, Korean, British and other prisoners.

At the experimental base, some people were frozen to death or injected with bubonic plague syphilis virus. Many were roasted alive in furnaces. It is said more than 200,000 people were killed or injured in the germ warfare launched by Japan.

The Japanese blew up the base in 1945. The secret remained undiscovered after a Japanese journalist exposed the truth in the 1980s.

Source: Xinhua