On the 25th of April, 1917, the British satirical magazine Punch ran an evocative political cartoon. In it, a stern Kaiser Wilhelm II, dressed in full regalia, stands before a young German army recruit. Pointing out the window to a giant factory belching black smoke, he declares: “And don’t forget that your Kaiser will find a use for you—alive or dead.” The ominous image referred to a disturbing rumour which had been circulating since the beginning of the Great War: that Germany, chronically short of fats and other raw materials, had taken to processing the corpses of its own fallen soldiers to produce soap, candles, lubricants, explosives and other vital war materiel. The facilities where this gruesome process was carried out – known as Kadaververtungsanstalten or “corpse factories” – became symbolic of the brutality, callousness, and depravity of Imperial Germany, and did much to inspire the Allies to fight on until the end. There was only one problem: the corpse factories didn’t actually exist. Starting as a morbid soldier’s rumour and stoked by British and French propaganda, the corpse factory myth was a stark example of how a big enough lie, told often enough, can come to be accepted as truth. This is the fascinating story of the Great War’s biggest hoax.

Rumours of Germans were rendering battlefield corpses to extract raw materials first began circulating in mid-1915, with British socialite Lady Cynthia Asquith writing in a diary entry dated June 16:

“Quite a pleasant dinner. We discussed the rumour that the Germans utilise even their corpses by converting them into glycerine with the by-product of soap. I suggested that [politician Richard] Haldane should offer his vast body as raw material to [Minister of Munitions David] Lloyd George.”

Similar stories soon began to appear in British, American, and French newspapers. In 1916, Dutch cartoonist Louis Raemaekers published a book of satirical cartoons, one of which depicted bodies of German soldiers being tied into neat bundles and loaded onto a cart. The caption, written by British essayist Horace Vachell, claimed:

“I am told by an eminent chemist that six pounds of glycerine can be extracted from the corpse of a fairly well nourished Hun… These unfortunates, when alive, were driven ruthlessly to inevitable slaughter. They are sent as ruthlessly to the blast furnaces. One million dead men are resolved into six million pounds of glycerine.”

These rumours, however, largely died down until February 26, 1917, when the Shanghai newspaper The North China Herald reported on a meeting between Chinese President Feng Guozhang and German Admiral Paul von Hintze, stating that the President was horrified when:

“…the Admiral triumphantly stated that they were extracting glycerine out of dead soldiers!”

Later, on April 10, the England-based Belgian newspaper l’Independence Belge ran a lengthy article describing, for the first time, the location and operation of a corpse factory in grisly detail:

“We have known for long that the Germans stripped their dead behind the firing line, fastened them into bundles of three or four bodies with iron wire, and then dispatched these grisly bundles to the rear… the chief factory of which has been constructed 1,000 yards from the railway connecting St Vith, near the Belgian frontier, with Gerolstein, in the lonely, little-frequented Eifel district, south-west of Coblenz. The factory deals specially with the dead from the West Front. If the results are as good as the company hopes, another will be established to deal with corpses on the East Front… The trains arrive full of bare bodies, which are unloaded by the workers who live at the works. The men wear oilskin overalls and masks with mica eyepieces. They are equipped with long hooked poles, and push the bundles of bodies to an endless chain, which picks them with big hooks, attached at intervals of two feet. 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 automatically carried into a digester or great cauldron, in which they are dropped by an apparatus which detaches them from the chain. In the digester they remain for six to eight hours, and are treated by steam, which breaks them up while they are slowly stirred by machinery.”

Six days later, the first english-language description of a corpse factory appeared in London Times and the Daily Mail. Titled Through German Eyes, the short article quoted from a piece in the German newspaper Berliner Lokal-Anzinger, in which reporter Karl Rosner recounted:

“We pass through Evergnicourt. There is a dull smell in the air, as if lime were being burnt. We are passing the great Corpse Utilization 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.”

From here, the story spread rapidly with Rosner’s account appearing in dozens of Allied newspapers along with translations of the April 10 l’Independence Belge article. By April 30, it had even reached the floor of the British House of Commons, where Robert Outhwaite, Member of Parliament for Hanley, asked:

“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?”

Officially, the Government stated that it had no evidence to either confirm or deny the rumours, and refused to endorse the story. However, Lord Robert Cecil, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, rather pointedly admitted that:

“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.”

This tacit – but unofficial – endorsement only helped to fan the flames, and the story continued to circulate throughout the Allied powers – especially the United States, which had just entered the War. One of the most widely-read accounts was the anonymously-written pamphlet A ‘Corpse-Conversion’ Factory: A Peep Behind the German Lines, published by Darling & Son in mid-1917. The story was a propagandists’ dream, not only painting the Germans in a suitably barbaric light, but indicating that the British naval blockade of German ports – the cause of the nation’s severe fat and glycerine shortages – was having the intended effect. Indeed, despite the frequent protestations of the German government, the story was widely believed up until the end of the war and, along with other, better-documented German atrocities, likely influenced the harsh terms imposed on Germany by the 1919 Treaty of Versailles.

With the end of the war, the story soon faded from the public consciousness, only to dramatically reemerge nearly a decade later. On October 26, 1925, the New York Times reported that Brigadier John Charteris, Conservative MP and former Head of British Military Intelligence, had admitted to fabricating the entire story. Charteris, who was speaking at a private dinner of the National Arts Club in New York City, allegedly stated that the hoax had been concocted in early 1917 to get China to join the war against Germany. Stumbling upon two photographs – one showing the bodies of German soldiers being gathered for burial and another showing a train car full of horse carcasses bound for processing into fertilizer – Charteris had swapped the captions to make it seem like the Germans were processing their own dead soldiers. He then dispatched the photographs to various Chinese newspapers and let the story grow from there. An underling even suggested forging the diary of a German soldier to further sell the ruse, but this idea was rejected. In any case, this clever piece of black propaganda ultimately proved effective, for on August 14, 1917 China joined the war on the side of the Allies.

Indeed, when the corpse factory story first began to circulate, the German government immediately suspected it was the product of accidental or deliberate mistranslation. In German, the word Kadaver refers to the carcasses of animals and not human bodies, which are instead known as Leichnam. On May 11, 1917, one day after the detailed corpse factory article appeared in l’Independence Belge, Foreign Secretary Arthur Zimmerman addressed the German Reichstag or parliament, claiming:

“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.”

Several Allied newspapers – including the French Paris-Midi and American New York Times – also clued in on the mistranslation, and thus refused to credit the story. Several outlets also suggested that the whole story was an April Fool’s joke – a long-held tradition of German newspapers. Similarly, in June 1917 the London Times published a captured German Army order which made reference to a Kadaver factory. The order was issued by an organization abbreviated as VsdOK, which the Times interpreted as Verordnungs-telle or “instructions department.” Soon after, however, the German newspaper Frankfurter Zeitung revealed that it actually stood for Veterinar-Station or “veterinary station” – further suggesting that the Germans were processing horse carcasses, not human bodies.

Charteris’s alleged confession caused outrage in Britain and Germany, with key Government figures like Charles Masterman, former head of the War Propaganda Bureau, also denied that the story was a deliberate fabrication:

“We certainly did not accept the story as true, and I know nobody in official positions at the time who credited it. Nothing suspect as this was made use of in our propaganda. Only such information as had been properly verified was circulated.”

Brigadier Charteris himself claimed that he had been misquoted, explaining that:

“Certain suggestions and speculations as regards the origin of the Kadaver story which have already been published in [Bertrand Russell’s book] 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.”

The book Charteris referred to is Those Eventful Years by philosopher Bertrand Russel, in which he speculated that:

“Any fact which had a propaganda value was seized upon, not always with strict regard for truth. For example, 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. This story was widely used in China when that country’s participation was desired, because it was hoped that it would shock the well-known Chinese reverence for the dead… 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 well aware that “Kadaver” means “carcase,” not “corpse,”

Despite these vehement denials, the revelation that the feared ‘Corpse Factories’ were a complete hoax angered the British public, with the Richmond Times Dispatch reporting on December 6, 1925:

“A few years ago the story of how the Kaiser was reducing human corpses to fat aroused the citizens of this and other enlightened nations to a fury of hatred. Normally sane men doubled their fists and rushed off to the nearest recruiting sergeant. Now they are being told, in effect, that they were dupes and fools; that their own officers deliberately goaded them to the desired boiling-point, using an infamous lie to arouse them… In the next war, the propaganda must be more subtle and clever than the best the World War produced. These frank admissions of wholesale lying on the part of trusted Governments in the last war will not soon be forgotten.”

While the London Evening Standard demanded:

“It is vital that he deny the statement instantly. . .  Its effect is to discredit British propaganda past, present and future.”

In Germany, fury over the corpse factory hoax reached such a pitch that in December 1925 British Foreign Secretary Austen Chamberlain was forced to issue an official statement that there was no truth to the story.

But if the hoax didn’t originate with Charteris, where, then, did it come from? Despite the British Government’s denials, it is still possible that the hoax was at least partially propagated by British Military Intelligence the War Propaganda Bureau. Indeed, during the war both organizations employed large numbers of established or up-and-coming writers, including John Buchan, author of The 39 Steps, and Winnie-the-Pooh creator A.A. Milne, who in 1918 penned the following poem:

In MI7B

Who loves to lie with me

About atrocities

And Hun Corpse Factories

Come hither, come hither, come hither

Here shall we see

No enemy

But sit all day and blather

Later, another member of MI7, Major Hugh Pollard, would claim that he invented the corpse factory myth to amuse his cousin.

Most modern historians, however, doubt that the corpse factory story was deliberately concocted, with propaganda historian Randal Martin speculating that:

“…the real source for the story is to be found in the pages of the [newspapers owned by Lord] Northcliffe…The corpse-rendering factory was not the invention of a diabolical propagandist; it was a popular folktale, an ‘urban myth’, which had been circulated for months before it received any official notice.”

This is not to say, however, that the story wasn’t occasionally embellished and circulated by official sources as a convenient piece of propaganda. For example, an official investigation conducted in 1925 revealed that in 1917, the German newspaper Berliner Lokal-Anzinger had reported on the discovery of a railway carriage filled with dead German soldiers destined for Liege, Belgium, but which was accidentally diverted to the Netherlands. A Belgian newspaper immediately picked up the story, but deliberately distorted it to suggest that the bodies were destined for a soap factory. This deliberate lie formed the basis for the infamous article in l’Independence Belge.

While today the corpse factory hoax might seem like a laughable story from a more gullible time and a trivial event in a war that claimed nearly 40 million lives, this particular piece of propaganda would go on to have tragic real-world consequences. When the Second World War broke out and the first reports of the Nazi Holocaust began to leak out of Germany, lingering doubts over alleged German atrocities during the previous war led many to dismiss these new allegations. This was especially true of rumours that the Nazis were processing the bodies concentration camp victims into soap and other goods, with the American magazine The Christian Century reporting in 1942:

“The parallel between this story and the ‘corpse factory’ atrocity tale of the First World War is too striking to be overlooked.”

Indeed, according to Historian Joachim Neander :

“There can be no doubt that the reported commercial use of the corpses of the murdered Jews undermined the credibility of the news coming from Poland and delayed action that might have rescued many Jewish lives.”

Even after the Nazis surrendered and Allied troops entered the death camps, many still refused to accept the true, horrific scale of the Holocaust. This refusal persists to this day, with the widely-believed – but now thoroughly debunked – myth of death camp victims being rendered into soap being one of the favourite rhetorical devices used by Holocaust Deniers. It is a chilling reminder of the very real and very dangerous power of misinformation.