Khabarovsk war crimes trials

The Khabarovsk war crimes trials were the Soviet hearings of twelve Japanese Kwantung Army officers and medical staff charged with the manufacture and use of biological weapons, and human experimentation, during World War II. The war crimes trials were held between 25 and 31 December 1949 in the Soviet industrial city of Khabarovsk (Хабаровск), the largest in the Russian Far East.

The Soviet Union and the United States allegedly gathered data from the Unit after the fall of Japan. While twelve Unit 731 researchers arrested by Soviet forces were tried at the December 1949 Khabarovsk war crimes trials, they were sentenced only to the Siberian labor camp from two to 25 years, seemingly in exchange for the information they held. Those captured by the US military were secretly given immunity, while being covered up with stipends to the perpetrators. The US was purported to have co-opted the researchers' bioweapons information and experience for use in their own warfare program (resembling Operation Paperclip), so did the Soviet Union in building their bioweapons facility in Sverdlovsk using documentation captured from the Unit in Manchuria. In 1956, those still serving their sentences were released and repatriated to Japan.