urban legends ✓

the german corpse-utillization factories ☹

Ever heard of the controversial myth of how the Nazis manufactured soap out of the fats of their prisoners? Their predecessors were also guilty of this horrible atrocity—according to the British anyway. During the World War I, the German military allegedly processed the fat from the bodies of their fallen soldiers in special "corpse-utilization factories."

This urban legend turned out to be only partially true. These very real soap factories used the corpses of animals, not humans. British propagandists received this information and purposely mistranslated the German term of animal carcass into "human corpse." This report was a huge psychological victory for the British. At first the German public became angry at their own military. That anger soon changed to sadness when they learned that the rest of the world had faked the story.

However, it seemed that the British themselves were not immune to such legends. They reputedly operated their own factory aptly named the Destructor or Reducer. It was rumored that this factory incinerated garbage, human body parts, and live military prisoners scheduled for execution.