German Corpse Factory

The German Corpse Factory or Kadaververwertungsanstalt (literally "Corpse-Utilization Factory"), also sometimes called the "German Corpse-Rendering Works" or "Tallow Factory" was one of the most notorious anti-German atrocity propaganda stories circulated in World War I.

According to the story, the Kadaververwertungsanstalten was a special installation supposedly operated by the Germans in which, because fats were so scarce in Germany due to the British naval blockade, German battlefield corpses were rendered down for fat, which was then used to manufacture nitroglycerine, candles, lubricants, and even boot dubbing. It was supposedly operated behind the front lines by the DAVG-Deutsche Abfall-Verwertungs Gesellschaft ("German Offal Utilization Company").

Piers Brendon has called it "the most appalling atrocity story" of World War I, while Phillip Knightley has called it "the most popular atrocity story of the war." After the war John Charteris, the British former Chief of Army Intelligence, allegedly stated in a speech that he had invented the story for propaganda purposes, with the principal aim of getting the Chinese to join the war against Germany. This was widely believed in the 1930s, and was used by the Nazis as part of their own anti-British propaganda.

Recent scholars do not credit the claim that Charteris created the story. Historian Randal Marlin says, “the real source for the story is to be found in the pages of the Northcliffe press”, referring to newspapers owned by Lord Northcliffe. Adrian Gregory says that the story originated from rumours that had been circulating for years, and that it was not "invented" by any individual: “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.”

Rumours that the Germans used the bodies of their soldiers to create fat appear to have been circulating by 1915. Cynthia Asquith noted in her diary on 16 June 1915: “We discussed the rumour that the Germans utilise even their corpses by converting them into glycerine with the by-product of soap.” Such stories also appeared in the American press in 1915 and 1916. The French press also took it up in Le Gaulois, in February, 1916. In 1916 a book of cartoons by Louis Raemaekers was published. One depicted bodies of German soldiers being loaded onto a cart in neatly packaged batches. This was accompanied with a comment written by Horace Vachell: “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." A later cartoon by Bruce Bairnsfather also referred to the rumour, depicting a German munitions worker looking at a can of glycerine and saying "Alas! My poor Brother!".

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