Myths and Legends of the Second World War (18 page)

From this treatment result several products. The fats are broken up into stearine, a form of tallow, and oils, which require to be re-distilled before they can be used. The process of distillation is carried out by boiling the oil with carbonate of soda, and some part of the by-products resulting from this is used by German soap makers. The oil distillery and refinery lie in the south-eastern corner of the works. The refined oil is sent out in small casks like those used for petroleum, and is of a yellowish brown colour.

The fumes are exhausted from the buildings by electric fans, and are sucked through a great pipe to the north-eastern corner, where they are condensed and the refuse resulting is discharged into a sewer. There is no high chimney, as the boiler furnaces are supplied with air by electric fans. There is a laboratory and in charge of the works is a chief chemist with two assistants and 78 men. All the employees are soldiers and are attached to the 8th Army Corps. There is a sanatorium by the works, and under no pretext is any man permitted to leave them. They are guarded as prisoners at their appalling work.

Within days other fragments were revealed. On the 16th
The Times
ran a short piece translated from the a Berlin newspaper, the
Lokalanzeiger
, written by Karl Rosner, its special correspondent on the Western Front. This too had originally appeared on April 10th:

We pass through Everingcourt. There is a dull smell in the air, as if lime were being burnt. We are passing the great Corpse Exploitation Establishment (Kadaververwertungsanstalt) of this Army Group. The fat that is won here is turned into lubricating oils, and everything else is ground down in the bones mill into a powder, which is used for mixing with pigs' food and as manure. Nothing can be permitted to go to waste.

The Times
added, by way of corroboration:

It will be remembered that one of the American Consuls, on leaving Germany in February, stated in Switzerland that the Germans were distilling glycerine for nitro-glycerine from the bodies of their dead, and thus were obtaining some part of their explosives.

The following day
The Times
ran the longer descriptive piece said to have appeared in the
Indépendence Belge
, albeit ‘omitting some of the most repulsive details', and from this point on the story snowballed rapidly. One reader suggested the story should be spread in neutral countries and the east, where it would be likely to horrify Buddhists, Hindus and Mohammedans. Other correspondents questioned the translation of the German word
Kadaver
, suggesting that it was not applicable to human corpses. The
Lancet
published an article in which certain technical aspects of the process were considered, it being calculated that 1,000 bodies at an average weight of 10 stones might yield about two tons of fat (on an average of 3 per cent basis of fat per body weight), which in turn could be converted into a tenth of this weight in glycerine. Elsewhere both the Chinese Ambassador and the Maharajah of Bikanir issued public expressions of horror at German treatment of the dead, the latter promising that if the bodies of Indian soldiers were exploited in like fashion, such an atrocity would never be forgotten or forgiven in India.

The story travelled quickly in America, and over the course of the next fortnight other accounts, held to be corroborative, entered into circulation. On April 20th
The Times
reported:

Among the stories told by men who have come from the front is the following, which affords unexpected confirmation of the account of the Corpse Utilization Company's enterprise. The soldier who tells the story is Sergeant B-of the Kents. Describing the prisoners taken in the recent fighting, he said:

One of them who spoke English told me – mind, I don't know that it's true, but he told me – that even when they're dead their work isn't done. They are wired together in batches then, and boiled down in factories as a business, to make fat for munition making and to feed pigs and poultry, and God knows what else besides. Then other folk eat the pigs and poultry, so you may say it's cannibalism, isn't it? This fellow told me Fritz calls his margarine ‘corpse fat', because they suspect that's what it comes from.

The very next day, in its daily review of foreign press reports and intercepted letters, the Ministry of Information included one from the Hague which seemed to confirm several details contained in the original report from
La Belgique
. The letter told of a German freight car observed in a railway siding on the Dutch frontier, which became a focus of attention after it began to give off a vile smell. When opened, the wagon was found to be packed tight with dead soldiers, roped in bundles of four, stood on end and fully clothed. The car, the letter continued, had been diverted to Holland by mistake, and was supposed to be routed to Liége, where the Germans had established their corpse utilization plant. The story first appeared in a Belgian newspaper, whose editor had learned of the incident from a Belgian officer, and formed the basis of an unusually subtle (but still chilling) illustration by the celebrated Dutch cartoonist Louis Ramaekers.

The Germans protested loudly that such ‘loathsome and ridiculous' reports were the result of deliberate mistranslation of the piece in the
Lokalanzeiger
, in which the word
Kadaver
referred only to animal remains, chiefly horses. In Britain, several sceptical MPs pressed the government for clarification, including the Irish member John Dillon and the member for Hanley, R.L. Outhwaite. On April 30th a heated exchange in the Commons included the following:

DILLON: Has their attention been turned to the fact that it is not only a gross scandal, but a very great evil to this country to allow the circulation of such statements, authorised by Ministers of the Crown, if they are, as I believe them to be, absolutely false?

OUTHWAITE: May I ask if the Noble Lord is aware that the circulation of these reports has caused anxiety and misery to British people who have lost their sons on the battlefield, and who think that their bodies may be put to this purpose, and does not that give a reason why he should try to find out the truth of what is happening in Germany?

The reply provided by Lord Robert Cecil, the Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs, appeared to lend substance to the original report without the responsibility of actually doing so:

LORD CECIL: In view of other actions by German military authorities there is nothing incredible in the present charge against them … I confess I am not able to attach very great importance to any statements made by the German government.

And so allegation and counter-allegation continued to fly back and forth between London and Berlin.
John Bull
and
Punch
printed mordant cartoons, while the
Daily Mail
published an article by a colonel which traced the Germans back to a wolf tribe who fed their corpses to dogs. The same piece reminded readers that German heroes ate corpses at their banquets in Valhalla. The poet Rudyard Kipling was inspired to pen a black parody of Thackeray's
Sorrow of Werther
, in which Charlotte spread her dead lover ‘lightly on her bread'. The usually sceptical magazine
Truth
became convinced of the reality of the story after Welsh troops, storming the Messines Ridge, were reported to have discovered ‘unsavoury German corpses done up in bundles of three'. On May 4th
The Times
reported that:

Among the prisoners captured in the recent fighting was a German army doctor, who seems to have talked very interestingly on the subject of the conversion of corpses … saying that it was an entirely natural thing to do to convert human bodies, but, of course, not horses, as these were too valuable for food purposes. Horses' bones only might be used. He was of the opinion that probably the censors did not permit the German people to know too much about it. The doctor was quite serious, and took a merely scientific and utilitarian view of it.

On May 11th, the German Foreign Secretary, Herr Zimmerman, firmly denied to the Reichstag that the bodies of German soldiers were being used in the production of fat stuffs, and threatened editors in neutral territories with libel proceedings if the story was circulated further:

No reasonable person among our enemies can have been in any uncertainty about the fact that this has to do with the bodies of animals and not of human beings. The fact that the word ‘cadavre' in French is used for human beings and animals has been exploited by our enemies. We have rectified this subtle misunderstanding, which, against its better knowledge, has been used by the enemy press to mislead public opinion. In neutral countries, in so far as there is a tangible slanderous intention, criminal proceedings will be taken.

The source of the original story remains shrouded in purposeful mystery. Although both
La Belgique
and
Indépendence Belge
existed in April 1917, a clearly British-originated report that Germany was ‘extracting glycerine out of dead soldiers' for use in munitions appeared in an English-language newspaper in Shanghai, the
North China Herald
, as early as March 3rd. It is possible that the Belgian papers sourced the story there, but more likely that the copy came direct from London. Ironically, the Department of Information at Wellington House initially declined to circulate the story. Its director, C.F.G. Masterman, rightly doubted the likelihood of the German censor permitting the publication of the article in the
Lokalanzeiger
which admitted that human corpses were being used for this purpose, and feared the damaging propaganda boomerang of an exposed falsehood. However, at the Foreign Office a number of officials were inclined to believe it. In an official minute dated 26 April 1917 the Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, acknowledged that the documentary evidence was inconclusive, but added:

While it should not be desirable that His Majesty's Government should take any responsibility as regards the story pending the receipt of further information, there does not, in view of the many atrocious actions of which the Germans have been guilty, appear to be any reason why it should not be true.

The relevant Foreign Office file lodged at the Public Record Office also reveals that R. McCleod, MP, claimed to have received a letter from a senior British officer serving in France. According to Brigadier Morrison, the Germans had been observed removing bodies from the vicinity of Vimy Ridge, where German graves were conspicuous by their absence. From there, so it was said, the corpses were transported to the notorious
Kadaver
factory. In consequence, Wellington House was instructed to proceed with the preparation of pamphlets in Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish and Dutch. A four-page pamphlet entitled
A Corpse-Conversion Factory
was also published in London. Despite this, Masterman continued to maintain after the war that the Department of Information had rejected the story.

In his authoritative book
The Great War and Modern Memory
, Paul Fussell notes an analogous legend concerning a fictional Reducer (or Destructor) constructed by the British at Etaples, although the story is probably an echo of the
Kadaveranstalt
myth. In 1924 the waters were muddied by the pacifist philosopher Bertrand Russell, in an essay on propaganda included in
These Eventful Years
, a war record published by the Encyclopaedia Britannica Company. By his account, the corpse factory story was released in China when that nation's participation in the war was desired, in the hope that it would shock the population:

Worldwide publicity was given to the statement that the Germans boiled down human corpses in order to extract from them gelatine and other useful substances … The story was set going cynically by one of the employees in the British propaganda department, a man with a good knowledge of German, perfectly aware that ‘Kadaver' means carcass not corpse, but aware also that, with the Allied command of the means of publicity, the misrepresentation could be made to ‘go down.'

Russell did not identify his sources, and appears to have relied in part on inaccurate guesswork: the linguistic debate around the word
Kadaver
began only after the publication of the
Lokalanzeiger
article on April 10th, whereas the
North China Herald
piece had appeared more than a month earlier.

However, Russell was almost certainly correct in stating that the story was a deliberate British invention. Several sources identify a section of military intelligence as the author. In his autobiography, published in 1970, Ivor Montagu recalled that during the war his family were visited periodically by a favoured cousin, Major Hugh Pollard, then an intelligence officer

In the First World War … how we laughed at his cleverness when he told us how his department 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. He explained that he had originally thought up the idea himself 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 it everywhere. The tears ran down his cheeks as he told us of the story they had circulated of a consignment of soap from Germany arriving in Holland and being buried with full military honours. But, even for us, the taste of some of his tales began to grow sour after he became a Black and Tan.

Given that Montagu wrote his account a half-century after the fact, there is no way of knowing which elements were relayed by Major Pollard, and which the author may have subsequently absorbed from elsewhere. Besides which, by 1917 the very same rumour had been in limited circulation for two years, and had reached the ear of the Prime Minister, as the diary of Cynthia Asquith makes clear.