1945: Dr. Achmad Mochtar, quiet hero
July 3rd, 2012 Headsman
On this date in 1945, Japanese forces occupying Indonesia cut off Dr. Achmad Mochtar’s head for a medical experiment gone horribly awry.
Officially, Dr. Mochtar had been responsible for a supposed vaccine whose administration killed hundreds of Indonesian forced laborers.
Latter-day research, however, indicates that it was the Japanese military who administered the vaccine (Indonesian link), an experimental tetanus-cholera-typhoid-dysentery combination shot, getting a trial run before it was administered to Japan’s own soldiers. When this drug proved lethal to most of its recipients, Mochtar and his staff at the Eijkman Institute were arrested in 1944 and subjected to harrowing torture.
According to Jakarta-based British researcher Kevin Baird, Mochtar agreed to take the fall for the experiment in exchange for the release of his colleagues.
“We think of this sort of heroism as the reserve of military men and not learned intellectuals,” Baird told the Guardian. “Achmad Mochtar was not only a hero of Indonesia, but a hero of science and humanity.”
Present-day Eijkman Institute director Sangkot Marzuki (right), and two descendants of the executed man, Monique Mochtar (left) and Jolanda Mochtar (center) lay flowers at a 2010 memorial event after the doctor’s location in a mass grave was discovered. Achmad Mochtar’s name also graces a Sumatran hospital.
On this day..
- 1936: Saburo Aizawa, incidentally - 2020
- 1623: Claes Michielsz Bontebal, Maurice murder moneybags - 2019
- 1941: 3,500 Jews at the Khotyn Fortress ... but not Adolph Sternschuss - 2018
- 1939: Ramiro Artieda, Bolivian serial killer - 2017
- 1741: Prince, Tony, Cato, Harry and York - 2016
- 1865: Okada Izo, barbarian-expeller - 2015
- 1817: Two-fifths of the condemned in Valenciennes - 2014
- 1969: Lee Soogeun, North Korean defector - 2013
- 1648: The leaders of the Salt Riot - 2011
- 1972: Three Somali officers for an attempted coup - 2010
- 1931: Ernesto Opisso - 2009
- 1570: Aonio Paleario, Italian religious reformer - 2008
Entry Filed under: 20th Century,Beheaded,Capital Punishment,Death Penalty,Doctors,Drugs,Execution,History,Indonesia,Innocent Bystanders,Japan,Murder,Occupation and Colonialism,Ripped from the Headlines,Torture,War Crimes,Wartime Executions,Wrongful Executions
Tags: 1940s, 1945, achmad mochtar, july 3, medicine, vaccines, world war ii, wrongful confessions
