Concept
atrocity propaganda
A method of arousing hostility and anger through stories of the enemy’s atrocities, some true, some invented or unverifiable.
Atrocity propaganda tries to arouse hatred and anger through stories that show the enemy’s cruelty. In 1927 Harold Lasswell summed it up as a “handy rule”: if something does not enrage enough, use an atrocity story. The same book adds that most of the stories are old, recycled patterns, and that tales of cruelty against women, children and clergy always work.
But not all of these stories were invented. In Belgium in 1914 the German army’s killings of civilians led, according to the historians John Horne and Alan Kramer, to the deaths of about 6,500 Belgian and French civilians; the Bryce Committee’s report of 1915 also documented some of these events. Stories such as the “corpse factory”, by contrast, were invented and were officially withdrawn in 1925. Because the two kinds could stand side by side, the ones found to be invented discredited the whole account after the war.
That is why, when you study atrocity propaganda, each claim has to be asked about separately: who is telling it, where did it first appear, is there an independent source?
Example
The 1917 rumour that fat was being made from German corpses (the “corpse factory”): in 1925 the British government accepted the German government’s denial.