BEIJING, Sept. 3 (Xinhua) — Known as “oriental Auschwitz,” the previous Mukden (now Shenyang) POW camp was established by the Japanese military throughout WWII in northeast China’s Liaoning Province.
The Mukden camp was one of many largest POW websites in Asia and infamous for its brutality. From November 1942 to August 1945, greater than 2,000 Allied prisoners from the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, the Netherlands and France have been held there. Nearly 300 detainees died earlier than Japan’s give up.
Under strict Japanese guidelines that banned written data, a number of American POWs, together with William Wuttke, Barton Franklin Pinson and Malcolm Fortier, risked extreme punishment to secretly draw cartoons documenting the conflict crimes on the camp.
These drawings vividly captured the tragic experiences of Allied prisoners within the Mukden camp and its department, the Zhengjiatun camp, offering uncommon testimony of this little-known historical past.