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Lessons from the Corpse Factory
How disinformation corrodes political discourse
In the spring of 1917, the terrible stalemate of the First World War was giving signs of rattling loose. U-Boats were sinking noncombatant ships, the Russian government was disintegrating, and Woodrow Wilson was preparing to declare war on Germany. It felt like the news was moving a mile a minute.
Then a blockbuster story emerged in the Chinese press: the German government was doing something monstrous. It had established a Kadaververwertungsanstalt — a cadaver processing plant — to process the bodies of dead soldiers into glycerine, soap, and margarine. Their bones were crushed and fed to pigs. The story was picked up by English papers like the Times and Daily Mail. Their headlines spoke of “Revolting Treatment,” “Universal Horror,” and “Cannibalism.” Their articles cited the testimony of correspondents who described the sickening smell of the bodies being burnt.
The story was, like so much “news” during the First World War, not true.
In this case, it had been deliberately fabricated — a Conservative British MP had taken the caption from a photo of dead horses and placed it on a photo of deceased German soldiers to make it look like the humans, not the horses, were being sent to the rendering plant. He sent the doctored photo to a…