Officials from the Auschwitz Concentration Camp Museum in Poland visited the Japanese germ warfare site in northeast China Sunday.
Auschwitz museum officials discussed with their Chinese counterparts on exchanging respective exhibitions some time in the future.
This is the first time that staff of Auschitz museum has ever visited the site of Unit 731, a secretive Japanese detachment which experimented on live humans in order to develop germ weapons, such as bubonic plague, typhoid, anthrax and cholera.
At least 3,000 people, including Chinese civilians, mostly, and Russians, Mongolians and Koreans, died in the experiments between 1939 and 1945. Outside the site, thousands of other Chinese, estimated at more than 200,000, were killed by biological weapons produced in the laboratories of Unit 731.
Deputy director of the Auschwitz museum Krystyna Oleksy, deeply impressed by what she saw at the Unit 731 exhibition hall, said both sites are the witnesses of the history of Fascism persecuting other ethnic groups.
She said, those who created the tragedy should get the trial of the history, and expressed the hope that the tragedy would never happen again.
Teresa Suiebocka, director of the information center of the Auschwitz museum, said the Unit 731 Exhibition Hall preserves many original materials evidence, pictures and documents, which are very important and valuable.
She suggested that the Chinese side should establish a modern information system and collect more evidences of the Fascists' crimes.
Curator of the Unit 731 Exhibition Hall Wang Peng said the two sites share a lot in common, and the exchange of exhibitions will help people know more about the crimes committed by the Nazi forces and Japanese invaders to China. "That can remind people of taking warnings from history and cherishing peace," said Wang.
The Auschwitz museum was established on the ruins of the Auschwitz Concentration Camp in 1947. The former Nazi concentration camp was where thousands upon thousands of Jews were slaughtered.
(Xinhua News Agency August 15, 2005)
