by Propaganda
Dominions.” Not just journalists but “the most influential men available” from all
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over the world were invited to stay there for a month to six weeks. They were “shown absolutely everything they wished to see which was not put quite out of the question by military requirements.” Often the guests would be shown around in groups
of 20. Editors of US newspapers were most frequently targeted, with other guests
being newspaper proprietors or sometimes professors or “men eminent in other ways.”
As might be expected, keeping so many guests happy for such a long period of time
could be problematic, especially since some had “long-standing antipathies” to others
in the group. With the application of “tact and patience,” few hitches occurred. The
great benefit came when the guests “went home and conducted on their own initiative
among their own people propaganda of greater value than anything we could ever have
done.” Once again, the importance of ethos and its effect on credibility is illustrated.
An additional benefit from this form of hospitality was the securing of invita-
tions from US organizations for British speakers to visit the United States. “Some dis-
abled officers went out in this way, primarily to support the Liberty Loan Campaigns.
Afterwards, through the intervention of the Ministry, they were enabled to co-operate
in Red Cross Drives and publicity campaigns of various sorts.”
The ministry also helped entertain US troops by providing sports, bands, concert
parties, and invitations to ceremonies such as investitures by the king. There were river
trips between Maidenhead and Henley with lunch and tea on board. The work was
professedly “not done from propagandist motives,” although it “had a considerable
propagandist value; for with the ordinary man from the purely propagandist stand-
point it is more important to produce an atmosphere of personal kindliness and sym-
pathy than almost anything else. Beyond this obvious hope that good-feeling would
result, the Ministry had no axe to grind, and no surreptitious introduction of improv-
ing thoughts was made” (BP 14–18).
Radio and Telegraph Propaganda
In this age of instant Internet communication, it may be difficult to envisage the
importance for British propaganda at the time of the relatively primitive radio and
telegraph services. With considerable efforts, the ministry was able to send out by
radio 8,000 words every 24 hours to counteract enemy propaganda directed at neutral
countries. The average person formed impressions “almost entirely by newspapers” and
“unless a constant stream of official wireless and cable messages is sent out, foreign
newspapers, for lack of anything better, will print faulty and misleading information.”
Against such misinformation it would be “idle to try by means of cinemas, pictures
and literature to impress the magnitude of Britain’s effort and achievement on the
stony ground of a mind that has been accustomed to watch the Germans nobly and
majestically advancing to victory day by day in the local paper.”
The ministry was concerned that in countries with restricted information sources
“the most preposterous enemy stories will obtain belief unless steps are taken to con-
tradict them before they become old and venerable.” Hence the importance of rapid
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communication: “Nor is it enough to oppose the uttered lie: one must disarm it by supplying accurate news in advance.” The point is recognized in modern public relations,
where it is referred to as a “preemptive strike,” which, incidentally, can also be used to
lessen the impact of damaging truthful information.
In pre-satellite days, messages by radio could not reach Australia directly, but many
radio operators would pass on messages of their own accord “simply because they like
operating.” Radio was valued over cable because cable lines were often blocked, largely
as a result of military needs. Radio messages were sent to Maine and then, by courtesy
of the US government, were handed to the chief press agencies (BP 19).
Publications and Press Work
The ministry’s focus shifted towards the production of articles for press consumption
from the earlier method of pamphlet production. A great variety of different writers
from many different walks of life were recruited for this purpose—soldiers and sailors,
airmen, church leaders of every denomination, novelists, publicists, journalists, dip-
lomats, civil servants, engineers, scientists, businessmen, etc. For example, about 236
articles were placed in French Swiss publications alone.
The strategy involved in these articles is fascinating for its use of more subtle
forms of persuasion. The articles turned out by the ministry
concerned themselves with every conceivable subject—academic, scientific and aes-
thetic—casually suggesting, rather than introducing, their moral. The same effect
was aimed at as in the Chinese “stop short” poem, where “only the words stop, but
the sense goes on.” The success of the articles was proved by the eagerness of papers
all over the world to print them. (BP 21)
As an example we could consider the attention given in the British medical journal The
Lancet to the commercial value of chemicals extracted from human corpses. Indirectly it conveys support for the idea that Germans did in fact carry out such extraction and further that they were therefore monsters (see page 70 below). The Germans used a similar
technique in World War II with their use of newspaper factoids, little suggestive facts
used as fillers for blank spaces at the end of articles. Cumulatively these had a huge impact (see page 85 below and R.G. Nobécourt’s observation about the suggestiveness of facts).
Film
The power of movies to influence opinion was greatly appreciated by the ministry, and
extensive efforts were made to utilize the medium. The BP Report estimates the size of
weekly attendance at cinema theatres as 20 million, with about the same proportion
of the population attending in other countries. What impressed the ministry was the
wide range of appeal of this medium, wider “than any other medium of propaganda,”
speaking to small children and people from widely differing cultural backgrounds and
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sometimes, depending on the film, having as great an effect on mature and educated audiences. Moreover, the “fact that the cinema is incapable of argument is, from the
point of view of promiscuous propaganda, an advantage.” For example, it is easy to
convey by pictures the operations on a huge scale of men and guns.
For propaganda to home audiences, the ministry invented an “entirely new spe-
cies” of film, namely, the “film-tag”—a short film, taking about two minutes to show,
and embodying, usually in story form, “some useful moral such as ‘Save Coal’ or ‘Buy
War Loans.’” They were called “tags” because they were attached to résumés of the
latest news. These were mainly designed for home audi
ences, and distribution was
facilitated by three firms, which controlled topical, longer length films. “Tags” were
very popular with government departments concerned to get a message out to the
public; each was seen by 10 million people.
A regular supply of films was sent out to “practically every country in the world,”
with titles such as Repairing War’s Ravages, Woman’s Land Army, and London—Fact and Fiction,” the latter refuting claims about which buildings in the city had been
destroyed by air raids. Exhibitions of films were particularly well-received in Italy,
where audiences in one two-month period consisted of nearly 200,000 soldiers and
sailors and 50,000 civilians (BP 22–23).
Still Photography
Nowadays, television has stolen much of the attention formerly given to pictorial
magazines, so an effort of imagination may be needed to envisage the power and
influence exerted by these publications in the early part of the twentieth century.
The Ministry of Information was very proud of its own War Pictorial, an illustrated
monthly magazine, produced in colour by the latest processes. The BP Report claimed
it was without doubt “one of the most important instruments of propaganda” (BP
25). The total of Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch-French (for the Netherlands,
Belgium, Dutch East Indies, etc.), Anglo-Dutch (for South Africa), and Greek distri-
bution was about half a million per month; and “Banks, shops, professional men such
as dentists, and so on were always glad to have it on their waiting-room tables or in
other prominent places, knowing that it would offend none of their clients.” The War
Pictorial contained both photographs and drawings. Other illustrated publications
produced for Oriental readers contained only photographs, for the curious reason
that “the Oriental trusts the camera and mistrusts drawings.”59 Success of the fort-
nightly Chinese version, Cheng Pao, was claimed on the basis of “reliable testimony”
that it had engendered among the Chinese masses “such a respect for Al ied aims that
it became possible for the Chinese Government to declare war against Germany” (BP
27). Fortnightly journals were published in Arabic, Turkish, Persian, Hindustani,
Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese, Greek, Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, and Gujerati.
By the end of 1916, over a million copies of all these papers put together were being
circulated, and there was a continuous increase (BP 6, 7).
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Atrocity Propaganda
The aim of British propaganda was to persuade its various audiences that the cause of
war against Germany was just, that the Al ies were going to win, and that civilization
depended on their winning. A key element of this propaganda was a constant harping
on the theme of German barbarity. A never-ending series of reports relating to that
theme were fed to the media, who seemed prepared to suspend their critical faculties,
either out of a sense of contributing to the war effort or simply because these stories
appealed to their readers. We know now that the thirst of the media for fresh atrocity
stories was so great that journalists sometimes embellished or invented them.60
As with virtually all atrocity stories, an undisputed factual background provides
fertile grounds for belief. On August 3, 1914, the Germans invaded neutral Belgium;
as expected, some Belgian civilians resisted and were shot by the Germans. However,
stories about this resistance emphasized wantonness on the part of the Germans, who
allegedly engaged in mass killings, pointless burning of villages, raping, pillaging, and
mass slaughter.
Published in spring 1915, the Bryce Report—the Report of the Committee on
Alleged German Outrages—carried a high level of credibility among the general pub-
lic. Viscount James Bryce, former British Ambassador to the United States, was a
greatly respected speaker and writer. His committee consisted of three prominent
lawyers, an eminent historian, the editor of the prestigious Edinburgh Review, and the renowned jurisprudential theorist, Sir Frederick Pollock. The report discounts the idea
that Belgian witnesses might have made up stories out of vindictiveness, saying that
it was rare for them to describe what they had seen or suffered.61 After the war, many
of these stories were discredited, but at the time the report claimed that hearsay evi-
dence was distrusted and used only after careful sifting. Nevertheless, the stories were
sensational, and, as so often happens, they were very effective in producing the desired
result, namely, a sense of revulsion against Germany that strengthened the resolve of
the Al ies and helped to bring about the support of neutral nations. Wellington House
ensured the widest circulation of this report, and versions were printed that departed
from the objective tone of the original. For example:
It is the duty of every single Englishman who reads these records, and who is fit, to
take his place in the King’s army, to fight with all the resolution and courage he may,
that the stain, of which the following pages are only a slight record, may be wiped
out, and the blood of innocent women and children avenged.
The report accused German soldiers of, among other things, decapitating babies,
cutting off women’s breasts (BR 25–26), publicly raping women in the marketplace
(BR 48), bayonetting children and hoisting them in the air (BR 52), cutting off chil-
dren’s hands and ears while forcing parents to watch (BR 47), and nailing a child to
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a farmhouse door (BR 28). These acts impress the imagination, but the report itself placed more emphasis on the systematic killing of noncombatants, which it claimed
to be the “gravest charge against the German Army” (BR 40, 42). The systematic kill-
ings were divided into two kinds—hostage-taking and reprisal killings. The latter
it claimed were “altogether unprecedented.” In its concluding statement, the report
viewed the outrages, such as the large-scale murders, rapes, looting, house-burning,
hostage-taking, and abuse of the Red Cross and white flags as “fully established by the
evidence” and hoped that the disclosures would “rouse the conscience of mankind”
(BR 60–61).
How much of the Bryce Report was true, and how much was founded on nothing
more than lying or perhaps over-imaginative witnesses? Were the eminent members
of the Bryce Committee deliberately setting out to authenticate what they knew were
falsehoods? Or were they actually persuaded by the witnesses, so that they themselves
wrote the report in good faith? The difficulty of establishing the truth in such matters
can be seen when we subject to careful scrutiny what Phillip Knightley calls “the most
popular atrocity story of al ,”62 namely, the corpse factory story of April 1917.
The Corpse Factory Story
The story of the German corpse factory is worthy of detailed study for many rea-
sons. It was successful, in the sense that it had a powerfully persuasive effect on many
people around the world. It was cleverly present
ed to maximize credibility. A model
for atrocity propaganda generally, the way it was handled illustrates the basic rules of
propaganda. Arthur Ponsonby concluded his account of it in Falsehood in Wartime by
quoting from an editorial that appeared in the Richmond, Virginia Times-Dispatch on
December 6, 1925: “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.”63 The
newspaper was wrong. Atrocity propaganda continues to fuel wars today, and the
means used are often no more subtle than those that successfully raised hatred of the
Hun to a new pitch in 1917.64
What was the story, why was it so effective, what basis was there for it, and how
did it get disseminated?
Simply put, the story claimed that the Germans were boiling their own dead sol-
diers to extract from their bodies lubricating oil, fats, soap, glue, glycerine for explosives, bonemeal for animal feed, and fertilizer (the list tends to vary with different versions of
the story). The story gained widespread currency in 1917 and was taken as particularly
graphic evidence of German barbarity. It is alleged to have had a key role in turning
China against the Germans, but the basis for this claim rests on a doubtful report about
German Ambassador Admiral von Hintze triumphantly telling a horrified Premier Tuan
Chi-jui that Germans were extracting glycerine out of dead soldiers. It seems unlikely
that von Hintze, a former career Navy officer and an experienced diplomat, should have
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boasted before the Chinese premier about a story that could only provoke deepest contempt for his country. The possibility of British propaganda instigating this report must
be borne in mind.65 It was not until December 2, 1925, that British Foreign Secretary Sir
Austen Chamberlain referred to the corpse factory story in the House of Commons as a
“false report” and expressed his hope that it “will not again be revived.”66
Following a very brief mention by a Times columnist on April 16, 1917 of a sup-
posed admission by a German reporter in the officially sanctioned German Berlin