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