by Propaganda
newspaper, the Lokal-Anzeiger, that the corpse utilization plants existed, the London Times and the Daily Mail, both owned by Lord Northcliffe, ran almost identical articles on April 17, 1917 of what purported to be a vivid, gruesome eyewitness account
of one of the corpse-rendering establishments. The story is reported as coming from
the French language Belgian paper, L’Indépendance Belge, dated April 10, 1917, which
in turn sources it in a daily newspaper La Belgique supposedly published in Leiden,
Holland though it gives no date. Following so closely the previous day’s report of
the passage in the Lokal-Anzeiger, it carries an air of authenticity. The Times reproduces the German reporter’s extract again, as a prelude to the eyewitness account.
Both Northcliffe newspapers present the story under the headings “Germans and
Their Dead,” “Revolting Treatment,” and “Science and the Barbarian Spirit,” and both
include specific details on the management of the company responsible for operating
the factory, as well as on the transportation, handling, and processing of the corpses
into material to be used in the war effort or in agriculture. The report concludes with
a description of the workers as virtual prisoners, unable to talk about the awful job
they are doing.
The nub of the deception consisted in misrepresenting the credible German
report as corroborating the—as we shall argue, fictitious—Belgian account. The mis-
representation was accomplished by mistranslating two key words in the German
reporter’s words. Karl Rosner, travelling near the front north of Reims, mentioned in
an offhand way that there was a dull smell in the air, like that of “boiling glue” ( Leim
gekocht). He went on to observe that the smell came from a carcass utilization plant
( Kadaververwertungsanstalt). The deaths of horses, used for pul ing artillery and other equipment, were a frequent occurrence on the battlefield, and the Germans had set
up plants to make use of these and other animal carcasses. But the accounts in the
Times and the Daily Mail represented Rosner as reporting a smell resembling “lime being burnt,” signaling the existence of a “corpse utilization plant.” Now, the word in
German for “corpse” is Leiche, not Kadaver, which is the word used for “animal carcass.” So the correct translation would have been “carcass utilization plants.”
Furthermore, Leim is the German word for “glue,” not “lime.” Had the correct
translation of Leim (glue) been used, a reader of the time would have been led to
think of horses. It was common in those days to think of aging horses as ready for the
“glue factory.” The translation of Leim as “lime,” would have led the reader to think of quicklime, used extensively to disinfect corpses of people who had died of contagious
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Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger (10 April, 1917).
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diseases. The double mistranslation artfully concealed Rosner’s meaning, misrepresenting it as supporting the supposed Belgian account.
Further facts should be brought into play. The French language L’Indépendance
Belge was published in London by émigré Belgians, with the address given as “5, Dane
Str., High Holborn, WC1.” There is also the evidence in the official British propa-
ganda report of September 1916, under the heading “Propaganda for the Belgian
Government,” that through connections with the Belgian Relief Committee in
London, “there is a constant interchange of views and information of every sort relat-
ing to actual or potential propaganda in the interests of Belgium.”67 That gives reason
to question the reliability of L’Indépendance Belge as a source of truth. It is notable that the newspaper did not present the story as its own but attributed it to another
paper, La Belgique, described as published in Leiden, thus making verification difficult if not impossible. It is significant that no date is given for when La Belgique supposedly published the article.
As evidence that the Northcliffe press willingly and wittingly made use of false
translations of Rosner’s account to assist in gaining public acceptance of the Belgian
story, there is first the following admission by Frederic William Wile, identified as for
10 years the Berlin correspondent of the Daily Mail:
Whatever credit or discredit attaches to it, my brilliant colleague of the “Times,” Mr.
J.E. Mackenzie, who, like myself, was stationed for many years in Germany as Berlin
correspondent, shares with me the responsibility of having brought to public notice
the activities of the Hun body-boilers. It was we who discovered conjointly in the
Government-controlled “Lokal-Anzeiger” of April 10th, 1917, the loathsome admis-
sion that the German armies in the field maintain Corpse Utilization Establishments
(Kadaver-Verwertungs-Anstalten) [sic], where soldier dead are “rendered down” for
lubricating oils, fats, and pigs’ food.68
While he presents this as a “discovery,” with his lengthy time in Germany he surely
must have known the German meanings of Kadaver and Leim. Furthermore, a cor-
rected translation about the meaning of Leim appeared in the Times two days after the April 17 revelation (although no attention was called to the earlier mistranslation).
But the same mistranslation reappears as an insert in Wile’s article of May 19, 1917.
Among the texts obscuring the London connection with L’Indépendance Belge
is James Morgan Read’s Atrocity Propaganda where he writes that the Times took the corpse factory story “from a Belgian paper published in Holland.”69 Not so: the
Times took the story from the London Indépendanc e Belge, which gave as its source La Belgique, allegedly published in Leiden, Hol and. Read assumes what needs to be proven: that the L’Indépendance Belge correctly identified its source.
Further things to consider are that the English translation in the Times does
not exactly match the French version in L’Indépendance Belge. Also, a check with the
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Regional Archives in Leiden reveals no evidence of a paper titled La Belgique being edited in that city at the time. A local regional archivist uncovered no evidence of such
a publication: “As far as I can see, there wasn’t a journal La Belgique, which was edited in Leiden.”70 A check with the Royal Belgium Library holdings in Brussels showed that
there was a paper with the title La Belgique published in Brussels at the time, but inspection of all copies published up to three months prior to April 17, 1917 revealed no corpse
factory story. There is also the statement by Bertrand Russell, directly implicating both
British propagandists and Lord Northcliffe:
After the U.S. entry into the war, British propaganda, under the direction of Lord
Northcliffe, was able to adopt more direct and ambitious methods. The [corpse fac-
tory] story was set going cynically by one of the employees in the British propa-
ganda department, a man with a good knowledge of German, perfectly aware that
“Kadaver” means “carcase,” not “corpse,” but aware also that, with the Allied com-
mand of the means of publicity, the misrepresentation could be made to “go down.�
�71
As further evidence of a made-up story, we can look to internal improbabilities in
the account that was supposedly a translation from L’Indépendance Belge. Here are
excerpts from the published translation (or what was represented as such) in the Times
on April 17, 1917:
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 eighth Army
Corps. There is a sanatorium by the works, and under no pretext is a man permitted
to leave them. They are guarded as prisoners at their appal ing work.72
The reader has to wonder how the eyewitness reporter was able to make these
detailed observations and escape to tell the story, given the tight security described.
Secondly, while the German reporter’s story supposedly provided corroboration, he
located the factory quite far from its location in the Belgian report. The reader was
encouraged by the Northcliffe press to confuse the German and Belgian stories, and,
indeed, the New York Times three days later reported, “The French press is greatly
stirred over an article, taken from the Berlin Lokal-Anzeiger and reproduced by the
L’Indépendance Belge, about a German factory for extracting chemical products from
the corpses of German soldiers.”73
That the scheme was deliberate propaganda seems undeniable, given Lord
Northcliffe’s intimate involvement with the official British propaganda organization
(he later headed propaganda directed against the enemy). As already indicated, this story
was most likely an invention, either by the British or by Belgian expatriates, or conjointly.
To fully appreciate the propaganda value of this story, it is worth taking note of
the list of seven requirements for successful propaganda set out by A.J. Mackenzie in
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his book Propaganda Boom, published in 1938.74The first is repetition. The argument
about the meaning of Kadaver provided an excuse to carry the story day after day. The detailed description derived from the Belgian newspaper was sure to provoke letters in
response, which it did. The second is colour, the need to grab the imagination rather
than simply stating the bald facts of an atrocity. The supposed eyewitness provides this
colourful detail. Third, propaganda should always contain a kernel of truth. In this case,
the Germans were boiling down animals for oils, pig food, and the like; this was wel -
established by the German reporter. Fourth, propaganda should be built around a slo-
gan. The “corpse factory” story lent itself to numerous slogans, such as “The Germans
are ghouls,” found as part of a banner headline in the War Illustrated.75Fifth, propaganda should be directed towards a specific objective, in this case, to increase hatred of the
Germans, encourage recruitment, and raise morale generally. Sixth, the motive of the
propaganda should be concealed. Here the appearance of merely reporting on what
others had said tended to obscure the propaganda motive. Seventh, timing is the key to
propaganda success. The timing of the L’Indépendence Belge report so close to the Lokal-Anzeiger passage provided just the right impact, as described earlier.
Such was the mood of the time that even a respected scientific journal did its part,
wittingly or unwittingly, to further British propaganda aims. In its April 21, 1917 edi-
tion, The Lancet, a top British medical journal, provided a detailed scientific description of the chemicals available from human bodies, noting, for example, that 1,000
bodies would yield approximately 400 pounds of glycerine to make soap. “The divi-
dends of the enterprising company known as the Kadaververwertungsanstalt (Corpse
Utilization Establishment) may, according to this calculation, be quite satisfactory to
the directors and shareholders, enabling them to face criticism with complacency.”76
This kind of article greatly benefited propaganda, because of its scientific factualism; it
presupposed that human corpses were rendered for fats and explained the economics
of doing so. When falsehoods are communicated as presuppositions, the communi-
catee is less likely to be on guard against the deceptions than if they were presented as
assertions. It is not surprising that The Lancet item also appeared in the Times.
The corpse factory story had tremendous impact on opinion around the world.
The seeming authoritativeness attached to its supposed derivation from a German
reporter for a German government newspaper, combined with the luridness of the
Belgian newspaper’s account, gave it force. By sourcing the story in a Belgian paper
that supposedly reproduced it from another Belgian daily newspaper, British propa-
ganda made authentication difficult.
The corpse factory story is a particularly elaborate, intricate, and instructive exam-
ple of a kind of propaganda that is ubiquitous today, namely, that of faking credentials.
The Northcliffe press represented a highly credentialed German source as support-
ing the Belgian account. But the credentials were falsely invoked or applied, because
the German source did not endorse the message conveyed by the mistranslations.
Pharmaceutical companies today produce studies favouring a new drug and look for
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some recognized prominent name to endorse the study, even though the endorser may have had little or no involvement in the actual scientific research. “Author to be determined” is a phrase frequently encountered in connection with such studies.77 Other
examples abound. Retired high-ranking armed services personnel have the appearance
of neutrality and hence credibility, but they are often on the receiving end of lucra-
tive contracts with the Pentagon, so that the credentials attached to the perception of
neutrality are spurious.
The fallout in terms of ill-will was enormous. The Frankfurter Zeitung condemned
the propaganda in a front-page editorial entitled “Moral Insanity” on April 29, 1917,
saying that the hatred fomented by such atrocity stories would cause the war to last a
long time. Not only that, one might add, but hatred produces a hateful response, and
the propaganda of one war can sow the seeds for a further one. When Hitler wrote
about the British making use of the “big lie,” he might well have been thinking of this
kind of atrocity story. A Nazi propaganda booklet, Britische Propaganda, by Hans
Bühr, published in 1940, devotes two full pages to the story and the official admission
of its untruth. Hatred and related stereotypes tend to linger even when war is over and
propaganda has abated. The thirst for revenge, and the harsh reparations payments
demanded in the Treaty of Versailles, led to economic dislocation in Germany, creat-
ing conditions suitable to the rise of Hitler.
The irony is that in World War II Hitler was to introduce atrocious instal ations,
far more repugnant than the fictitious corpse factory. But the striking similarity made
decision-makers brush the news aside as mere Polish Jewish propaganda: “[N]o one
wanted to be misled for the second time within one generation.”78 It appears that the
co
rpse factory story contributed to the deplorable fact that decisions that might have
rescued many Jewish lives were taken hesitantly and often too late.
The atrocity story continues to be used to foment war and revolution today. There
are still missing pieces to the jigsaw puzzle about the “corpse factory,” but its intrica-
cies make it an excellent focal point for any discussion of the ethics of propaganda.79
LEnInIST PRoPAgAnDA
Bolshevik propaganda theory did not begin with Lenin, but he successfully linked
theory with practice both in achieving and maintaining power. Earlier theorists of
propaganda contributing to Lenin’s views included Peter Tkachev, Georgi Plekhanov,
and Arkadi Kremer.80 Their problem was how to build a revolutionary movement
among disparate classes and interests: the industrial workers (each with their separate
trades and shops), the peasantry, and the intelligentsia and sympathetic elements of
the bourgeoisie. Workers were in danger of accepting the path of trade unionism and
incremental improvements in working conditions. The peasantry already practiced
a communal existence to a large extent and lacked the education to understand the
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benefits of joining a total revolutionary movement. One group of intellectuals, called Narodniks, saw little commonality with industrial workers in the fight of the intel igentsia and the peasants for social justice. Plekhanov, on the contrary, came to believe
that “The workers’ party alone is capable of solving all the contradictions which now
condemn our intelligentsia to theoretical and political impotence.” He felt that the
hope of revolution was to be found in joining together the interests of peasantry and
industrial workers through a philosophy of socialism, the propagation of which was
being facilitated in areas where village communes were breaking up as a consequence of
industry becoming more developed. His idea was that “the forces which are being freed
by the disintegration of the village commune in some places in Russia can safeguard it