The First World War

Abstract

Atrocity stories were, of course, a time-honoured technique of war propagandists. The First World War was no exception. Atrocity stories, as ever, helped to sustain the moral condemnation of the enemy. Perhaps the most infamous atrocity story of the Great War concerned the alleged German 'Corpse-Conversion Factory'. If the First World War was really to be the 'War to end all Wars', then wartime recriminations would need to be forgotten essential if Germany was to pay her reparations and Britain her war-debts. The popularity and virulence of wartime atrocity propaganda in particular led to a different meaning being assigned to the term and to the British abandoning their initiatives in this field. The British had demonstrated to the world the enormous power of propaganda in war but had abandoned it in peacetime; Soviet Russia and, later, Nazi Germany now took up where the British had left off.