THE HUMAN SAUSAGE FACTORY

Rumours about cannibalism on the battlefield are not confined to the horrors of the Western Front during World War I. In 2013 the Estonian folklorist Eda Kalmre published a study of rumours about a ‘human sausage factory’ that operated in the ruins of the Baltic country’s second largest city, Tartu, after World War II. 1 The persistence of this story was demonstrated 70 years later in testimony provided by Tartu residents that Kalmre interviewed during her research.

During WWII Estonia’s population suffered occupation first by the Soviet Union (1939-41) then by the Nazis (1941-44) until the devastated country was absorbed back into the Soviet Union, where it remained until 1991. Kalmre argues the censorship imposed during the Soviet occupation and the lack of reliable journalism encouraged false rumours to spread. She found references to the factory whilst working in the Estonia Folklore Archive and referred to them, in a newspaper interview, not as historical fact but as “clear horror stories”. This prompted some readers to protest. They insisted the story was “not folklore” because they, or their parents and friends, had personally visited the ruins of the factory and wanted to set the record straight. One Tartu resident, born in 1941, phoned the archive to “tell [Eda] the story… is, unfortunately, true, just like the human hair hanging from hooks and the brown stains on the walls, which I saw with my own eyes” as a child. Kalmre located a KGB memorandum from February 1947 that refers to rumours spread by ethnic Estonians of “persons unknown [who] were engaged in killing people” among the ruins of a building on the corner of Soola and Turu streets. It says the story emerged after one woman managed to escape and raise the alarm.

Rumours spread that the flesh of the factory’s victims had been made into sausages and soap that had been sold in the market. Militias had arrested three people: a Jew, a gypsy and an Estonian. The KGB document reveals the three persons arrested were all local Estonian women. Under interrogation they claimed to have seen human skulls and other bones among the ruins of a building, but the KGB gave no credence to their stories. As a counter-measure, the head of Tartu’s State Security Council threatened to prosecute anyone engaged in spreading what they called “provocative rumours”.

Kalmre says that what transformed a “horror story” into plausible reality for some Estonians is implicit in their stories, in that after the ruinous war “times were so bad that anything was possible, even selling sausages made from human meat”.

NOTES 1 Eda Kalmre, The Human Sausage Factory: A Study of Post-War Rumour in Tartu (2013).