Myths and Legends of the First World War

by James Hayward

  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 Liège, 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.

  Probably the strangest twist in an already tangled tale came in 1925, when Brigadier-General John Charteris paid a visit to the United States. Charteris, by then the Conservative member for Dumfriesshire, gave a speech at a private dinner function at the National Arts Club, during the course of which he claimed responsibility for originating the canard of the corpse factory.

  One day there came to the desk of General Charteris a mass of material taken from German prisoners and dead soldiers. In it were two pictures, one showing a train taking dead horses to the rear so that fat and other things needed for fertiliser and munitions might be obtained from them, and the other showing a train taking dead Germans to the rear for burial. On the picture showing the horses was the word ‘cadaver’ . . . General Charteris had the caption telling of ‘cadaver’ being sent back to the fat factory transposed to the picture showing the German dead, and had the photograph sent to a Chinese newspaper in Shanghai.

  Like Pollard, Charteris was said to have selected an oriental outlet in full knowledge of the reverence in which the Chinese held their ancestors, and against a background of uncertainty of Chinese opinion towards the Germans. China had severed relations with Germany on March 13th 1917, but did not declare war until August. The ruse was undertaken in full expectation that the story would filter back to Europe and America. The report of his speech continued:

  The controversy raged until all England thought it must be true, and the German newspapers printed indignant denials. The matter came up in the House of Commons and an interrogation was made which was referred to General Charteris, who answered that from what he knew of the German mentality, he was prepared for anything. It was the only time, he said, during the war when he actually dodged the truth.

  The matter might have gone even further, for an ingenious person in his office offered to write a diary of a German soldier, telling of his transfer from the front after two years of fighting to an easy berth in a factory, and of his horror at finding that he was to assist there in boiling down his brother soldiers. He obtained a transfer to the front and was killed.

  It was planned to place this forged diary in the clothing of a dead German soldier and have it discovered by a war correspondent who had a passion for German diaries. General Charteris decided that the deception had gone far enough and that there might be an error in the diary which would have led to the exposure of the falsity. Such a result would have imperilled all the British propaganda, he said, and he did not think it worth while, but the diary is now in the war museum in London.

  The New York Times went on to report that Charteris entertained his audience with many stories of spies, and closed with an appeal to Americans to give England their sympathy during the then-current economic crisis. However these disclosures appear to have landed Charteris in hot water back in London, for on his return from the States at the beginning of November the former Chief of Intelligence was summoned to Whitehall by Sir Laming Worthington-Evans, the Secretary of State for War. Precisely what passed between the two men is unrecorded, although it seems likely that Charteris was reprimanded for revealing that the story was a deliberate falsehood. It is interesting to note that Charteris made no mention at all of the corpse factory in his memoir At GHQ, published in 1932, despite the fact that within it Charteris chose to pass comment (though seldom helpfully) on just about every other wartime myth and legend.

  Charteris met the minister at the War Office on November 3rd, and left for Scotland later in the day. According to The Times on the 4th, upon his arrival in Glasgow Charteris issued the following statement:

  On arrival in Scotland I was surprised to find that, in spite of the repudiation issued by me at New York through Reuter’s Agency, some public interest was still excited in the entirely incorrect report of my remarks at a private dinner in New York. I feel it, therefore, necessary to give again a categorical denial to the statement attributed to me. Certain suggestions and speculations as regards the origin of the Kadaver story which have already been published in Those Eventful Years and elsewhere, which I repeated, are, doubtless unintentionally, but nevertheless unfortunately, turned into definite statements of fact and attributed to me.

  Lest there should still be any doubt, let me say that I neither invented the Kadaver story, nor did I alter the captions in any photograph, nor did I use any faked material for propaganda purposes. The allegations that I did so are not only incorrect, but absurd; as propaganda was in no way under GHQ France, where I had charge of the intelligence services. I should be as interested as the general public to know what was the true origin of the Kadaver story. GHQ France only came in when the fictitious diary supporting the Kadaver story was submitted. When this diary was discovered to be fictitious it was at once rejected.

  I have seen the Secretary of State [for War] this morning, and have explained the whole circumstances to him, and have his authority to say that he is perfectly satisfied.

  It was also noted that the War Office now regarded the incident as closed, and that no further inquiry would be held. Therefore it will probably never be known whether the account given by Charteris in New York was truthful, but swiftly censored by London as too revealing, or whether the former intelligence chief had simply concocted an entertaining afterdinner story, not expecting that it would excite the interest of the press. Prior to his return from the States, Charteris told an American newsman that he had no intention of challenging the report in The New York Times, since any errors it might contain were only of minor importance – a statement which flatly contradicts what he later said in Glasgow. Indeed it is not even possible to confirm whether or not the forged diary was ever deposited at the Imperial War Museum. Researching the matter in 1975, author Phillip Knightley was able to establish only that the museum believed the diary was probably among a number of boxes of papers lodged there by military intelligence after the end of the war, but recalled soon afterwards.

  Unsurprisingly, the hasty and inadeq
uate denial issued by Charteris was not generally accepted. According to comment in The Times on the same day:

  This paper makes the significant observation that in the course of his denial he offered no comment on his reported admission that he avoided telling the truth when questioned about the matter in the House of Commons, or on his own description of a scheme to support the Corpse Factory story by ‘planting’ a forged diary in the clothing of a dead German prisoner – a proposal which he only abandoned lest the deception might be discovered.

  The matter was again raised in the House of Commons on November 24th 1925, this time by a Lieutenant-Commander Kenworthy. After Worthington-Evans rehearsed the reports carried by the Lokalanzeiger, Indépendence Belge and La Belgique on April 10th 1917, and re-stated that German dictionaries and anatomical works appeared to confirm that the word Kadaver could be used to mean human bodies, he confirmed that on the basis of the information available to the War Office in 1917, it had had no reason to doubt the truth of the story. But Kenworthy pressed on:

  KENWORTHY: Does the Right Honourable Gentleman think it desirable, even now, to finally admit the inaccuracy of the original story, in view of Locarno and other things? WORTHINGTON-EVANS: It is not a question of whether it was accurate or inaccurate. What I was concerned with was the information upon which the War Office acted at the time. Of course, the fact that there has been no corroboration since necessarily alters the complexion of the case, but I was dealing with the information in the possession of the authorities at the time.