t.g theologie.geschichte herausgegeben von der Universität des Saarlandes Beiheft 6: The German Corpse Factory The Master Hoax of British Propaganda in the First World War Joachim Neander The German Corpse Factory The Master Hoax of British Propaganda in the First World War universaar Universitätsverlag des Saarlandes Saarland University Press Presses Universitaires de la Sarre © 2013 universaar Universitätsverlag des Saarlandes Saarland University Press Presses Universitaires de la Sarre Postfach 151150, 66041 Saarbrücken ISSN 2191-1592 gedruckte Ausgabe ISSN 2191-4745 Online-Ausgabe ISBN 978-3-86223-117-1 gedruckte Ausgabe ISBN 978-3-86223-118-8 Online-Ausgabe URN urn:nbn:de:bsz:291-universaar-t.g.beihefte.v60 Gestaltung und Satz: Dr. August Leugers-Scherzberg, Julian Wichert Projektbetreuung universaar: Müller, Alt Gedruckt auf säurefreiem Papier von Monsenstein & Vannerdat Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek: Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen National bibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über <http://dnb.d-nb.de> abrufbar. TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ................................................................. 7 I. ATROCITIES, DENIAL, AND ANTI-DENIAL ............. 25 II. THE ROOTS OF THE LEGEND ............................... 43 III. A PROPAGANDA BLITZ: THE “CORPSE FACTORY” CONQUERS THE WORLD ...................................... 131 IV. “KEEP THE HOME FIRES BURNING” .................... 179 V. THE “CORPSE FACTORY” GOES GLOBAL . ........... 221 VI. THE “CORPSE FACTORY” IN SCIENCE AND THE ARTS .......................................................... 261 VII. THE “CORPSE FACTORY” BETWEEN THE WARS .... 283 VIII. NO “END OF HISTORY” FOR THE “CORPSE FACTORY” ........................................................ 317 APPENDIX . ................................................................... 331 REFERENCES ..............................................................339 INTRODUCTION A Dubious Legacy Of the First World War Early in the morning of Wednesday, September 2, 1942, the teletypewriter at the Polish embassy in Washington, DC spewed out a telex sent from Switzerland. Its beginning read as follows: “ACCORDING TO RECENTLY RECEIVED AUTHENTIC INFORMATION THE GERMAN AUTHOR ITIES HAVE EVACUATED THE LAST GHETTO IN WARSAW STOP BESTIALLY MURDERING ABOUT HUNDRED THOUSAND JEWS STOP MASS MURDERS CONTINUE STOP FROM THE CORPSES OF THE MURDERED SOAP AND ARTIFICIAL FERTILIZERS ARE PRODUCED STOP.1” It was the famous “Sternbuch cable” set up by Recha Sternbuch, Swiss representative of the Orthodox Jewish relief and rescue organization Va’ad Hatsalah, and directed to Jacob Rosenheim at the Agudath Israel office in New York. The communication channels of the Legation of the Polish Government-in-Exile in Bern had been used to circumvent U.S. censorship. The Sternbuch cable was not the first news about the ongoing destruction of Polish Jewry by the Germans which reached the U.S., but it was the first that told what was allegedly done with the corpses of the murdered. Two days later, on September 4, 1942, Jan Ciechanowski, the Polish ambassador in Washington, visited his British colleague, Lord Halifax, and handed a copy of the Sternbuch cable over to him. With regard to the corpse utilization mentioned there, Lord Halifax confided to his diary: “I 1 Quoted from Kranzler 2000:21. Sometimes Sternbuch is partially misquoted: “. how Jewish babies were being used to produce soap and fertilizer . .” (emphasis added), which makes the crime appear still more heinous. See e.g. http://www.aish.com/ho/h/48019462.html, the Web site of AISH, an influential (Orthodox) Jewish organization, or the “educational” sites http://www.datesinhistory.com/big.php?v1=sep02 and http://hisdates.com/months/september-historical-events/02.html. All last accessed November 6, 2010. 8 JOACHIM NEANDER wonder whether this horror is true. A good deal more likely to be true, I fancy, than it was in the last war.”2 He undoubtedly remembered the stories spread for months during the Great War about a “Corpse factory” - or factories - in which the Germans allegedly were boiling down their fallen soldiers for lubricants, soap, fertilizer and pigs’ food. It took seven years after the end of fighting until the British government publicly admitted that the whole story had had no foundation and was thought up by Allied propagandists, and formally apologized to the German people. In the weeks and months following the Sternbuch cable, more ghastly news about the mass killings of Jews arrived in Great Britain and the U.S. from Poland. On the one hand, they were telling the bitter and horrible truth about the ongoing destruction of the European Jews, today known as “The Holocaust.” On the other hand, they were incorrect in many important details. What is more, most reports presented as facts atrocity legends such as the processing of human bodies into soap, lubricants, and fertilizer. “They incorporated stories which were obviously left over from the horror tales of the last war,” Paul C. Squire, American Consul at Geneva, Switzerland, critically remarked in a memorandum, forwarded to Washington on September 28, 1942.3 Still a year later the reports from Poland reminded Victor Cavendish-Bentinck, the chairman of the British Joint Intelligence Committee, “of the stories of employment of human corpses during the last war for the manufacture of fat, which was a grotesque lie.”4 Even in September 1944, after 2 Quoted from http://www.fpp.co.uk/History/antisemitism/HalifaxonJews. html. Last accessed December 27, 2010. Edward Frederick Lindlay Wood, First Earl of Halifax (1881-1959), British Conservative Politician, held several senior ministerial posts, Foreign Secretary from 1938 to 1940, during the war British Ambassador to the United States. 3 Quoted from Novick 2000:23. 4 Cavendish-Bentinck Minute, 27 August 1943, Public Record Office (now The National Archives), files FO 371/34551. Quoted from van Pelt 2002:127. Victor Cavendish-Bentinck (1897-1990), 9th Duke of CORPSE FACTORY 9 news from the recently liberated Majdanek camp had made headlines worldwide, The Christian Century, a conservative, Protestant periodical, expressed doubts as to the veracity of the reports: “The parallel between this story and the ‘corpse factory’ atrocity tale of the First World War is too striking to be overlooked.”5 There can be no doubt that the reported commercial use of the corpses of the murdered Jews undermined the credibility of the news coming from Poland and delayed action that might have rescued many Jewish lives. It is ahistorical, however, to take, with the benefit of hindsight, the moral high ground and sweepingly accuse the decision makers of the time of “passivity.”6 Syndicated columnists and staff writers of leading newspapers, as well as senior officials in the diplomatic and intelligence services vividly remembered how they, during the Great War, had been led astray through mendacious propaganda cooked up in their own and allied countries. The shock that the debunking of the “Corpse factory” story as a hoax had created worldwide in December 1925 was still fresh in their memories and let them act cautiously. Who was able to sift the wheat from the chaff? As historian Walter Laqueur aptly remarked: “No one wanted to be misled for the second time within one generation.”7 The general inclination among the professionals, therefore, was to dismiss the reports as “Polish-Jewish propaganda” and to refuse to take them seriously, frequently with reference to “lessons learned from Portland, was a British diplomat, from 1939 to 1945 chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, after the war ambassador to Poland. 5 Charles Clayton Morrison, “Biggest Atrocity Story Breaks in Poland,” The Christian Century, September 13, 1944, p. 1045. 6 This is, in short, a position held by the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Research in Washington, DC. See its home page, http://www. wymaninstitute.org. Main targets of the Institute are the U.S. media and the Roosevelt administration, reproached for a restrictive immigration policy and failure to bomb Auschwitz. 7 Laqueur 1982:9. Laqueur refers explicitly to the “Corpse factory” in this context. Ibid., p 8. 10 JOACHIM NEANDER history.” Precisely twenty-five years after, the “German corpse factory,” an Allied propaganda lie from the First World War, had fired back. Nevertheless Rabbi Stephen Wise, head of both the World Jewish Congress and the American Jewish Congress and President Roosevelt’s advisor for Jewish affairs, in a press conference on November 24, 1942 pronounced the manufacture of “war-vital commodities as soap, fats, and fertilizer” from the bodies of the slain Jews as “a fact” vouched for by the U.S. State Department. The news quickly made the rounds of the media worldwide.8 Told and retold again and again and never officially denied, “Jewish soap,” allegedly made by the Germans in factories where they rendered down the corpses of their Jewish victims, became emblematic of the Holocaust.9 Although never credited by serious Holocaust scholars and long ago debunked as a myth, “Jewish soap” has become a stock phrase in Holocaust remembrance and a favorite subject of Holocaust related arts and literature, and year in year out it is told to millions of students worldwide as “a fact” in Holocaust education lessons.10 The Scope of the Study Let us, therefore, cast a look at “the ‘corpse factory’ atrocity tale of the First World War,” which was