China is considering getting Unit 731, a major site of Japan's notorious germ warfare during World War II, included on the United Nations Educational, scientific and Cultural Organization(UNESCO)'s World Heritage List.

"We will apply for world heritage status to let more people in the world know the truth, which may serve to remind us of the barbarity of war," Wang Peng, curator of the 731 Exhibition Hall, was quoted by Tuesday's China Daily as saying.

Located about 20 km south of Harbin, capital of northeast China 's Heilongjiang Province, the site, where some of the most horrible wartime atrocities were carried out on Chinese by a secretive Japanese detachment called Unit 731, shocked the whole world when it was first uncovered nearly 60 years ago.

It was notorious for experimenting on humans who were still alive 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.

"Unit 731 would have had the capability to wipe out all human beings on earth if it had kept up full production of its weapons for merely one year," Wang said. "They destroyed most of their germ warfare facilities to cover their crimes when they pulled out of China in August 1945."

The original complex, completed in 1939, had more than 150 buildings, including two secret prisons and three crematoriums, and the exhibition hall occupies just a small portion and the core area of it.

Preparations for the application started in 2002 and local experts have since made a plan to triple the exhibition area to 400,000 square meters.

Jin Chengmin, a researcher with the Harbin Municipal Academy of Social Sciences, said there are precedents for war ruins to be given world heritage status.

In 1979, the former Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz in Poland, where thousands upon thousands of Jews were slaughtered, was listed as a World Heritage site.

And in 1996, UNESCO also included Hiroshima Peace Memorial in Japan as a reminder of the first atomic bomb explosion in August 1945.

"The Unit 731 site should also qualify as a world heritage site, " Jin said. "The remaining ruins can serve as a reminder of the horrible atrocities Japanese troops committed in China."

Amid heated international protests, the Japanese education ministry approved on April 5 a new edition of a history textbook which was widely criticized as glorifying Japan's invasion of neighboring countries and covering up wartime crimes.