THE CORPSE FACTORY
‘Fake News’ is nothing new and false stories were widely spread by soldiers, civilians and propagandists during World War I. DAVID CLARKE investigates a gruesome rumour of factories used for converting human corpses into fat and oil that has been called “
World War I and the birth of fake news
That Germans boil dead soldiers down for fat; And he was horrified. “What shameful sin! O Sir, that Christian souls should come to that!” 1 Siegfried Sasson, The Tombstone Maker
During World War I, Allied soldiers were the source of a gruesome rumour that the Germans were boiling down the bodies of their own dead – an atrocity that was used by British propagandists to blacken the name of the enemy. “Out of their own mouths, the military masters of Germany stand convicted of an act of unspeakable savagery which has shocked the whole civilised world,” proclaimed a pamphlet produced by British military intelligence for worldwide distribution in 1917. “Attila’s Huns were guilty of atrocious crimes, but they never desecrated the bodies of dead soldiers – their own flesh, as well as the fallen of the enemy – by improvising a factory for the conversion of human corpses into fat and
2 oils, and fodder for pigs”.
The ‘Corpse Conversion Factory’ or Kadaveranstalt was just one of a series of rumours and fake news that spread through Allied countries during the war. Some originated in gossip and rumour before they appeared in print. Others were encouraged by false news reports passed by the censor. From 1914 the German Army was demonised by influential sections of the British media, which accused the Kaiser’s forces of a series of atrocities. Examples include the massacre of Belgian civilians and, following the Second Battle of Ypres at Easter 1915, the crucifixion of a Canadian soldier. For the first two years of the war these stories – some true, some demonstrably false and others unresolved – encouraged new recruits to join the fight against the brutality and ‘frightfulness’ of the German military machine.
But the failure of the Somme campaign, launched by the Allied armies in 1916 to break the stalemate on the Western Front, meant the grinding attrition of trench warfare would continue. The British military realised that a different type of warfare
LEFT: A report on the ‘corpse factory’ from an English regional newspaper. OPPOSITE: “Cannon Fodder – and after”. In a Punch cartoon from April 1917. The German Emperor addresses a new recruit with the words “…and don’t forget that your Kaiser will find a use for you – alive or dead”. was required to damage the German war effort – one that substituted shells with words. After three years of war and an Allied naval blockade, Germany was desperately short of some of the most basic materials. Meanwhile, the Allies were plotting to bring China and other neutral countries in the Far East into the war against the Central Powers.
THE RUMOUR MILL
Where did the unlikely story of the corpse factory originate? Rumours had been circulating since 1915, both in Flanders and on the Home Front, that claimed the Germans had secret installations behind their front line where the bodies of dead soldiers were rendered down into fats. Depending upon which source you believed, the Kadaveranstalt utilised these fats to manufacture industrial munitions, lubricants, fertiliser, candles, boot dubbing, animal feed and soap.
The rumour was so well known on the Home Front that by June 1915 Cynthia Asquith, the daughter-in-law of the British Prime Minister, referred to it glibly in her diary. One day after a “pleasant dinner”, she notes how “we discussed the rumour that the Germans utilise even their corpses by converting them into glycerine with the by-product of soap”. She suggested, jokingly, that Lord Haldane “should offer his vast body as raw material” to David Lloyd George, who at that time was Minister of
3 Munitions.
It is impossible to trace the story to its
“THE MILITARY MASTERS OF GERMANY STAND CONVICTED”
source, but Adrian Gregory suggests “the disturbing disparity between visible British corpses after the first day of the Somme, and the near absence of German dead on many parts of the front” may have led some troops to resort to “a folkloric explanation”
4 to explain what happened to them. The horrible ‘Corpse Factory’ or ‘Tallow Works’ was hiding in plain sight, in a poem by Siegfried Sasson written in October 1916 that refers to the bodies of German soldiers boiled down to extract their fat. Its source, like many rumours, did not originate with one person or organisation but sprang up in many varied locations. Paul Fussell in The Great War and Modern Memory refers to an analogous legend of the sinister Corpse Reducer or Destructor that was located on the British side of the front, at the notorious British training camp in Etaples. One of his sources refers to this as “the largest Destructor the British Army possessed. Everything that could come under the head of refuse was brought here… to be reduced to ashes – even, according to a sinister report, the arms and legs of human
5 beings”.
But the enemy were accused not just of
reducing their soldiers to ashes. The Germans drew upon the most advanced science and technology to help dispose of human remains with Teutonic efficiency. As one soldier interviewed by the Daily Express put it, when the corpses are recycled into animal feed “other folk eat the pigs and poultry, so you may say it’s cannibalism. Fritz calls his margarine ‘corpse fat’ because they suspect that’s what it comes from.”
READ ALL ABOUT IT
Until 1917 these stories had never received official confirmation from any official source. That was until two newspapers owned by one of the most powerful Press barons, Lord Northcliffe, published the story as a proven fact. Alfred Harmsworth, firstViscount Northcliffe, had launched the million-selling Daily Mail in 1896. His political influence and pre-war anti-German vitriol had proved so effective that he was offered the post of director of propaganda by David Lloyd George, who succeeded Herbert Asquith as Prime Minister in 1916. The newspaper baron was hated so much by the enemy that at one point the German navy sent a cruiser to shell
his home in Kent.
On the same day, 17 April 1917, his papers the Times and the Daily Mail published what they claimed was conclusive evidence the ‘corpse factory’ did exist. The Times ran the story under the headline ‘Germans and their Dead’, attributing the claim to two separate sources, a Belgian newspaper published in England and a story that originally appeared in a German newspaper, Berliner Lokalanzeiger. The latter was a short account by reporter Karl Rosner who described an unpleasant smell “as if lime was being burnt” as he passed a factory behind the German lines. He said the fats that were rendered there were turned into lubricating oils and manure, adding that “nothing can be permitted to go to waste”. Rosner used the word Kadaver, which referred to the bodies of animals – mainly horses – not human bodies.
But the Daily Mail described this as a “callous admission” by the Germans that the factory was used for “extracting oils, fats and pig-food from the bodies of German private soldiers killed in battle”. The Times said Rosner’s story was corroborated by what it called “a striking account of this horrible German industry” that appeared in the Independence Belge, published in Holland, on 10 April. “Omitting some of the most repulsive details,” the account quotes an anonymous source who says “the factory is invisible from the railway… it is placed deep in forest country, with a specially thick growth of trees around it.” Bodies arrived on trains where they were unloaded by staff who “wear oilskin overalls and masks with mica eyepieces”. James Hayward in Myths and Legends of the First World War says the account that follows “reads like a nightmarish parody of Jules Verne or HG Wells”. The workers were “… equipped with long hooked poles used to push the bundles of bodies to an endless chain, which picks them up with big hooks… The bodies are transported on this endless chain into a long, narrow compartment, where they pass through a bath which disinfects them. They then go through a drying chamber, and finally are carried into a digester or great cauldron, in which they are dropped by an apparatus …In the digester they remain for six to eight hours, and are treated by steam, which breaks them up while they are slowly
6 stirred by machinery”.
Soon afterwards the Daily Express published a story that directly accused the Germans of cannibalism. The paper claimed the “fat farm”, as it was known by German soldiers, was established soon after the slaughter on the Somme in 1916. “Some people believe that there is only one German factory for this damnable work out of which Germans are making handsome dividends,” it claimed. “This is not so. The factories are established in each army area, including Rumania.
7 This the Germans have admitted”. A cartoon published by Punch soon afterwards imagined the horrific scene under the caption “CANNON FODDER – AND AFTER”. It shows the German Emperor addressing a new recruit, a young private: “… and don’t forget that your Kaiser will find a use for you – alive or
8 dead”.
The German government protested against what they called “these loathsome and ridiculous claims”, which were the result of a deliberate mistranslation of the German word Kadaver. On 11 May, the German Foreign Secretary threatened newspapers in neutral countries with libel proceedings if they republished the lie. But their protests fell on deaf ears as both the Chinese Ambassador and the Maharajah of Biikanir issued public expressions of horror at German treatment of their dead, the latter warning if the bodies of Indian soldiers were treated in this way it “would be regarded as an atrocity that would never be forgotten or forgiven”.
In the House of Commons, in response to questions from MPs, Lord Robert Cecil, the Under Secretary of State at the Foreign Office, refused to deny the story, saying: “In view of other actions by the German military authorities there is nothing incredible in the present charge against them”. Officially, the Department of Information at Wellington House – the HQ of the British government’s propaganda bureau – refused to circulate
THE GERMAN GOVERNMENT PROTESTED AT THESE CLAIMS
the story. But files show that a number of officials at the Foreign Office believed the corpse factory was a fact. At a meeting of the British War Cabinet on 2 May, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General (later Field Marshal) Sir William Robertson told the Prime Minister that he had obtained a copy of the German Order for the 6th Army, “giving details relative to the despatch of corpses, which indicated clearly that the corpses in
9 question referred to human beings”.
BLACK PROPAGANDA
But despite the certainty of such highlyplaced believers, the German Corpse Factory did not exist. It began as a rumour with no single source, but by 1917 it had been repackaged as a piece of black propaganda designed to demonise the Germans and entice the Chinese and others to join the Allied forces. Sociologist Randal Marlin believes the story was so successful because “it had a powerfully persuasive effect on many people around the world [and] it was
10 cleverly presented to maximise credibility”.
Some historians entirely blamed the Northcliffe press for giving official credence to this most false of all WWI fake news stories. Newspapers with massive circulations took an idea that had, until 1917, lacked credibility and made the ‘evidence’ for it appear convincing by the use of eyewitness testimony. But who provided the ammunition and encouraged them to fire it? In 1928 the Labour MP Arthur Ponsonby, in his book Falsehood in Wartime, pointed the finger of blame at the British government, which he claimed had both “encouraged and connived” with its friends in the Press to set this hare running.
For its part, the government failed to issue a complete denial until 1925 when Sir Austen Chamberlain admitted, in a House of Commons statement, there was “never any foundation” for what he called “this false report”. But in the same year the Conservative MP John Charteris, who as a Brigadier General had served as Chief of Army Intelligence under Douglas Haig during the Great War, caused political embarrassment after he said it had indeed been used for propaganda purposes 11.
Whilst on a lecture tour of the USA in 1925, Charteris reportedly admitted his intelligence branch at GHQ France had played a role in spreading the story. The New York Times revealed how, at a dinner meeting of the National Arts Club, he confessed to having transposed captions from one of two photographs found on captured German soldiers. One showed a train taking dead horses to be rendered. The other showed a train taking dead soldiers for burial. The photo of the horses had the word ‘cadaver’ written upon it and Charteris “had the caption transposed to the picture showing the German dead, and had the photograph sent to a Chinese newspaper in Shanghai”. According to the Times report, the story was planted in the full knowledge that it would be followed up by European newspapers and generate
12 horror and anti-German feelings.
On his return to Britain, Charteris denied making the remarks, and since that time no one has been able to discover any clear evidence that might link military intelligence with the press campaign of 1917. But I found what I believe could be one of the photographs referred to by Charteris in Foreign Office files at The National Archives in Kew. The black and white image, dated 17 September 1917, clearly shows bodies of German soldiers, tied in bundles, resting on a train as Charteris had described in 1925. The covering letter, from an MI7 officer at Whitehall, is addressed to the Director of Information, Lt Col John Buchan, author of the espionage novel The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915). It offers Buchan “a photograph of Kadavers, forwarded by General Charteris for propaganda purposes”. A handwritten note urges caution but says the photograph should be placed in “the Kadaver
13 file”.
THE REPORT WAS USED FOR PROPAGANDA PURPOSES
There is no evidence that any newspaper in China printed this or any other photograph showing ‘Kadavers’, but early in May the Daily Mail published a similar image under the headline ‘The Kadaver Horror’, captioned: “In view of the ghastly revelations of the utilisation of their dead, this photograph, found by a British cavalry officer on the body of a German near Delville Wood, is sufficient indication of the Huns’ treatment of those
14 who have died that “Kultur” may live”. MI7 were a military intelligence branch that specialised in anti-German propaganda in neutral countries. One of its tasks was to censor captions from captured photographs. In 1917, its writers produced a four-page pamphlet called A Corpse-Conversion Factory: A Peep Behind Enemy Lines that was published by Wellington House. The Foreign Office files show that officials authorised its translation into a number of foreign languages and for distribution in Europe and the Far East. MI7 was disbanded in 1918 because its work had been accomplished and its records were destroyed on the grounds they could be incriminating.
Surviving histories show that in 1917 MI7 employed 13 officers and 25 paid writers, some of whom also worked as ‘special
15 correspondents’ for national newspapers. One of the most talented was Major Hugh Pollard, whose WWII SOE file reveals he combined his secret work as a propagandist with a reporting role on the staff of the Daily Express. The paper’s proprietor, Lord Beaverbrook, became Minister of Information in the War Cabinet during 1918.
After the war, Pollard boasted of his role in the corpse factory saga to his cousin Ivor Montagu, who writing in 1970, recalled “… how we laughed at his cleverness when he told us how his department [MI7] had launched the account of the German corpse factories and of how the Hun was using the myriads of trench-war casualties for making soap and margarine”. According to Montague, Pollard claimed full credit for the original invention of the story, intended “to discredit the enemy among the populations of Oriental countries, hoping to play upon the respect for the dead that goes with ancestor-worship. To the surprise of the authorities it had caught on, and they were now making propaganda out of
16 it everywhere”. Pollard’s claim to be the sole author of the
17 legend must be questioned, but philosopher Bertrand Russell, in his account of wartime propaganda, attributes the corpse factory to “one of the employees in the British propaganda department, a man with a good knowledge of German, perfectly aware that ‘Kadaver’ means ‘carcase’ not ‘corpse’ but aware also that, with the Allied command of the means of publicity, the misrepresentation
18 could be made to ‘go down’”. For those who spread fake news in World War I, the Germans were so evil that anything could be used as a propaganda weapon against them – and that included rumours, lies and what we would today call fake news.