The Justice Department today barred 16 Japanese men from ever entering the United States because they allegedly conducted inhumane medical experiments and ran forced sex centers for the Imperial Army during World War II.

The men were the first Japanese to be placed on the government’s “watch list” since it was established in 1979 to keep out people who committed acts of persecution on behalf of Nazi Germany or any of its allies during the war.

More than 60,000 people associated with Nazi persecution in the European theater of the war have been placed on the list since that time, including Kurt Waldheim, a former United Nations Secretary-General and former Austrian president.

“A veritable explosion in interest in these crimes on the part of scholars and the international human rights community made it possible to conclusively identify suspects,” said Eli M. Rosenbaum, director of Justice’s Office of Special Investigations, which hunts Nazis in this country and enforces the law that established the watch list.

Some of the men being barred from entering the United States were members of “Unit 731,” an infamous Japanese Army detachment in Manchuria that conducted inhumane and frequently lethal pseudo-medical experiments, including vivisection, on thousands of non-volunteer prisoners of war and civilians.