“Unearthing the Dark Secrets of Germany’s WWI Corpse Factories: What History Has Forgotten”
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:
