World War I Atrocity Propaganda and the Holocaust

Dr. Robert Jan van Pelt, a professor of architecture at the University of Waterloo (Canada), has undoubtedly written one of the most important anti-Holocaust revisionist tomes ever penned.[1] Revisionist academic Samuel Crowell put his finger on the reasons as to why The Case for Auschwitz: Evidence from the Irving Trial is such an important work:[2]

During the First World War, false anti-German atrocity propaganda was utilized by the Allied leaders to attain their goals, such as bolstering the morale of the rank and file of the Allied nations.[3]

Recruitment poster of the U.S. Army
during World War I

One of the most notorious pieces of anti-German propaganda was the gruesome account of the “corpse exploitation establishment” operated behind the front lines by a German company. The “evil Germans” supposedly used the corpses of their own fallen soldiers for the manufacture of soap. Professor van Pelt notes that the author of this piece of lying propaganda was the Chief of Intelligence of the British Army, Brigadier General J.V. Charteris. Apparently, one of his aims was to turn the Chinese, who revere the dead, against the Germans.[4]

U.S. Army Recruitment Poster from World War I

A detailed account of the “corpse exploitation establishment” appeared in the respected British newspaper, The Times, on April 17, 1917. According to the story, trains full of corpses arrived at a large factory. The bodies were attached to hooks connected to an endless chain. The article states:[4]

The article continues:

The reader should note the meticulous detail! Dr. van Pelt emphasizes:[4]

In the years following the First World War, there was an expose of these false atrocity stories, and many of these legends were put to rest. van Pelt claims:[4]

One of van Pelt's key arguments in the first part of the book is as follows:[3]

The intellectual from the University of Waterloo then concludes:[5]

In summary, van Pelt is arguing that people of the Western democracies were very much aware of how they were fooled by anti-German propaganda in WWI, and thus, would not be fooled by it again. Ergo, the Allied powers of WWII had nothing to gain and everything to lose by attempting to use false atrocity stories to attain their ends. Any atrocity claims made by the Allies had to be based upon facts, because the masses retained a skeptical outlook.

In order to bolster his argument, van Pelt quotes respected sources from the era of the Second World War that were indeed skeptical of 'Nazi' atrocity stories precisely for these reasons.[6]

Professor van Pelt's whole viewpoint is undermined by the empirical facts. The Soviets, Zionists, Americans and British in the Second World War did use false propaganda claims to further their ends. In fact, some of the Allied atrocity propaganda from the First World War found its mirror image in anti-German atrocity propaganda promoted by Zionist groups and other Allied sources in the Second World War.

In the August 21, 1944 issue of Time, there was the “first eyewitness description” of the “Nazi extermination camp” at Majdanek concentration camp in Poland. Professor van Pelt claims that in spite of the climate of skepticism that surrounded these “Hitler gas chamber” stories, the editors of Time believed that they were indeed true. Here is his description of the article:[7]

Dr. van Pelt committed a sin of omission. He failed to mention the obvious false statements in the article, perhaps knowing full well that to inform the reader of the contents of the entire article would have undermined his entire argument. Let us examine Time's and Karmen's claims. The article reads:

Further on, “eyewitness” Karmen claims:[8]

The Holocaust lobby now claims that Majdanek inmates were murdered with Zyklon B/hydrogen cyanide and carbon monoxide, so the allegation that chlorine gas was the killing agent is false.[9] Although the Majdanek camp did have a crematorium, it only had five incineration muffles with a max. capacity of 100 corpses per day, which is anything else but “the world's biggest crematorium.”[10]

But even more importantly, consider Time's and Karmen's description of how the corpses of the “murdered ones” were put to use:[8]

This is false propaganda, as there is not one iota of credible evidence to support it. To be sure, the Holocaust lobby no longer claims that there was a “fertilizer factory/corpse exploitation establishment” at Majdanek, where human remains were processed, canned, and then sent back to Germany to be used as fertilizer. Yet, the reader should note how the story is strikingly similar to the aforementioned “corpse exploitation establishment” story of the First World War that van Pelt admits to be a lie. In the WWI version the corpses were utilized to make soap; the WWII version claims the bodies were used for fertilizer.

Here we have an excellent example of Soviet-Communist propaganda that was simply accepted as fact and repeated by a very respected American news source. Like I said, Professor van Pelt failed to mention the false claim about the fertilizer factory at Majdanek, probably because it would have undermined his line of argumentation.

At the risk of sounding redundant, let us repeat and examine Professor van Pelt's claims:[5]

An important study by revisionist historian Mark Weber proves this claim false.[11] He noted that the wartime rumor that the Germans were manufacturing soap from the corpses of slaughtered Jews was “spread so widely in 1941 and 1942 that by late 1942 German authorities in Poland and Slovakia were expressing official concern about their impact.”[12]

Weber further pointed out that although a similar charge during the First World War that the Germans manufactured soap from corpses was exposed as a hoax, “it was nevertheless revived and widely believed during the Second. More important, this accusation was 'proven' at the main Nuremberg trial of 1945-1946, and has been authoritatively endorsed by numerous historians in the decades since.”[13]

Weber went on to list Allied and Zionist sources that were promoting the propaganda lie during the Second World War that the Germans were manufacturing soap from the bodies of their victims.

A secret US Army military intelligence report quoted a Polish source that alleged the Germans were operating a “human soap factory” in 1941 in Turek, Poland.[14]

In November of 1942 Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, wartime head of both the World Jewish Congress and the American Jewish Congress, publicly asserted that the Germans were processing Jewish corpses into soap, fats and fertilizer.[15]

In late 1942, an American Jewish Congress publication, Congress Weekly, claimed the 'Nazis' had two special factories in Germany that processed soap, glue and train oil from the bodies of Jewish deportees from France and Holland.[16]

The highly respected and influential American publication, New Republic, reported in 1943 that the Germans were “using the bodies of their Jewish victims to make soap and fertilizer in a factory at Siedlce.”[17]

Finally, the myth the Germans manufactured soap from the bodies of their victims was “authoritatively proven” at the main Nuremberg Trial of 1945-1946. In their final judgment, the Nuremberg Tribunal stated:[18]

Once again, we quote the key claim of Dr. van Pelt:[3]

In view of the evidence presented in this article alone (there is more to come), van Pelt's conclusion must be rejected. The atrocity propaganda of the First World War served as a model for the Allied and Zionist atrocity propaganda of the Second World War, and the attitude of the public was such that people were conditioned to accept these wartime propaganda lies as “the truth.”

It is already wrong to claim, the masses in England, France, the USA, and other western nations had been informed about the falsehood of WWI atrocity stories in general during the time between both wars. Such an educational campaign might have existed in Germany which had a vested interest in it. The discussion about the falsehood of these WWI atrocities stories in the western Allied nations, however, was restricted to narrowly defined academic circles, and even there, the revelations about “our own” lies was not a popular topic. Important evidence in favor of this interpretation is the fact that between the wars hardly any publication appeared in the Allied nations addressing this topic. A rare example is the frequently quoted book Falsehood in Wartime by A. Ponsonby[19] which, however, appeared only in small print runs published by a small publisher, and according to my knowledge it was never a matter of discussion of the mass media.

The masses have a very short memory, and the lone voices that did reject these atrocity stories of the Second World War because they were so similar to the false atrocities stories of the First World War were in the minority, and they had little influence.

In the years following WWII, dignitaries, journalists, writers, and influential groups promoted the canard that the Germans manufactured soap from the bodies of their victims.[20] This propaganda did not generate mockery, as van Pelt would have us believe. Quite the contrary – as historian Weber points out:[21]

It was only around the 1980s that the Holocaust lobby finally admitted that the Second World War “Jews-into-soap” story is a myth.[22]

The “mass electrocution” myth further illustrates the fact that Allied and Zionist sources did use wartime propaganda lies in the Second World War to attain their ends.

Belzec was a 'Nazi' concentration camp located in Eastern Poland. Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg claimed that the first killing agent used there was either bottled carbon monoxide or hydrogen cyanide. Later, the camp was equipped with diesel motors, and the Jews were murdered in “gas chambers” that utilized the diesel exhaust.[23] Although The Case for Auschwitz deals mainly with Auschwitz concentration camp, van Pelt has some very important things to say about Belzec. He wrote:[3]

This is false. The Allies did in fact use false, unsubstantiated atrocity stories to attain their ends. At the beginning of 1944, the Allied governments even felt obligated to no longer conceal their secret activities They requested the churches and media of their countries to publicly assist their campaign to spread anti-German atrocity propaganda in order to distract international attention from the atrocities which they expected to be committed by the Red Army as soon as it invaded eastern and central Europe. By so doing, they even referred to the lies of WWI! The British Ministry of Information, for example, sent a circular to the British Clergy and the BBC on Feb. 29, 1944, stating:[24]

Can it be expressed more clearly? By referring to the propaganda of WWI, which finally was refuted, one can of course claim that the British Ministry for Propaganda intended to say between the lines that this time, only 'true' propaganda is to be spread.[25] But if the Ministry wanted to say this, why didn't they write it? After all, this letter went to the Clergy, who certainly didn't want to hear anything more eagerly than their government being truthful. But this letter does not contain the word truth. To the contrary: The Ministry regrets(!) that nowadays people cannot be deceived so easily anymore: “Unfortunately[!!!] the public is no longer so susceptible […]”. Hence, one obviously has to read between the lines: 'Today one must lie better, more brazen, louder.'

However, if one considers how successful the propaganda of World War II was in making most people believe in atrocity stories like the 'corpse factory' in Majdanek or 'soap made of Jewish fat,' and to sell these stories as the truth right into the late 1980s, then it can easily be recognized that the claim made by the British Ministry of Propaganda is simply false that in 1944 the masses were less susceptible for such nonsense than during WWI.

The letter even admits that the accusations “have been and will be put into circulation by the Ministry,” (emphasis added) which means: they have their origin there, not in accounts of witnesses or organizations in the theatre of war. Furthermore, it admits that these propaganda accusations against Germany “have been” put into circulation already for quite a while, i.e., atrocity propaganda didn't start in early 1944. Finally, a huge amount of naïveté is required to believe that allied propaganda did not resort to lies to further their own goals during this most horrifying and threatening war ever experienced by the Allied powers.

But now back to Belzec. In December of 1942, the Inter-Allied Information Committee (an agency of the governments of Australia, Belgium, Canada, China, Czechoslovakia, Great Britain, Greece, India, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, the Philippines, Poland, South Africa, Yugoslavia, the Danish Legation in America, the French National Committee, and the United States) issued a statement in London in regard to the alleged fate of Jews in German-held Europe. It was then distributed in New York through the local office of the United Nations Information Committee. The document concluded:[26]

Here, these Allied sources claimed they had irrefutable evidence that Jews were murdered en masse by electrocution at Belzec. We now know that this is false, as the “mass-electrocution-of-Jews-story” is admitted by van Pelt and the Holocaust lobby to be a myth.[27]

The Belzec electrocution myth further illustrates another flaw in van Pelt's methodology and beliefs. As he points out, the Polish Fortnightly Review, an English-language newspaper published by the Polish government in exile during WWII, published a July 10, 1942 description of the alleged 'electrocution devices' whereby Jews “were murdered en masse at Belzec.” It stated:[28]

In an attempt to get the reader to believe that these were just “honest errors” and not deliberate propaganda lies, van Pelt resorts to this rationalization:[28]

In other words, since no one escaped these alleged mass killings alive to precisely describe the technology of mass murder, false rumors developed as to the exact method of killing. Nevertheless, the central event – the mass killings of Jews – definitely took place.

According to a report that was printed in the February 12, 1944 issue of The New York Times, “eyewitnesses did in fact” escape these mass executions, and they lived to “precisely describe” the “actual method of mass murder”:[29]

Dr. van Pelt can't rationalize this one away. Contrary to what he claims, here we have “eyewitnesses” who “actually escaped a mass electrocution” and lived to tell the story to another escapee of an alleged atrocity, who then in turn gave a “precise description” of the electrocution machinery at Belzec to the world. This shows that pro-Allied media sources in the US were in fact promoting invented atrocity lies.

And there is more. Consider this “eyewitness” account about the “electrocution chambers” at Belzec, which was published in the “authoritative” The Black Book: The Nazi Crimes Against the Jewish People:[30]

Keep in mind this is based upon an “eyewitness” (or “eyewitnesses”) who “saw these mass electrocutions with his (their) own two eyes.”

In order to 'prove' the existence of 'gas chambers,' throughout the entire book van Pelt relies upon a convergence of evidence – an ensemble of evidence that supposedly points to only one conclusion. Namely, the gas chambers existed. Here, I have shown a convergence of evidence – one United Nations report and some eyewitness accounts – that points to the false conclusion that murders by electrocution occurred at Belzec.

Dr. van Pelt admits that the evidence to “prove” that Jews were murdered en masse with diesel exhaust at Belzec is sparse at best:[31]

Since the “evidence” used to prove that Jews were murdered en masse by electrocution devices at Belzec is not really qualitatively different from the “evidence” used to “prove” that Jews were murdered in gas chambers at Belzec; and since the “evidence” for mass murder by electrocution leads to a false conclusion, isn't it also possible that the “evidence” for mass killings of Jews in gas chambers at Belzec also leads to a false conclusion?

Holocaust historian van Pelt claims the “evidence” leads one to the “moral certainty” that Jews were murdered en masse in gas chambers at Belzec.[31] In light of what was pointed out in this essay, this is a false conclusion.

Finally, in his book I can find no reference to the fact that 'Nazi' atrocity stories (real and mythical) were used by Zionists during WWII to gain sympathy for the cause of creating a Jewish state in Palestine. At a mass rally in Madison Square Garden in March 1943, the Zionist activist and first president of Israel, Chaim Weizmann, was quoted as saying:[32]

As van Pelt probably realizes but would not dare publicly admit, the seeds of the current Middle East crisis were nourished by the endless repetition of these 'Nazi' atrocity stories by pro-Zionist groups and governments. There is a lesson in all of this that we should consider. With war once again looming upon the horizon in the Middle East, we are justified in looking with skepticism upon the “official reasons” given by the US government and mass media that are used to “justify” the current proposed war plans.