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