Before the 20th century depicting alleged atrocities committed by rebels during the
Irish Rebellion of 1641 In a 1095 sermon at
Clermont,
Urban II promoted the
Crusades by claiming that Muslims "had ravaged the churches of
God in the Eastern provinces, circumcised Christian men, violated women, and carried out the most unspeakable torture before killing them." Urban II's sermon succeeded in mobilizing popular enthusiasm in support of the
People's Crusade. Lurid tales purporting to unveil Jewish atrocities against Christians were also widespread during the Middle Ages. The claim that Jews kidnapped and murdered Christian children to consume their blood during
Passover became known as
blood libel. During the
Irish Rebellion of 1641, several accounts of atrocities committed by Irish rebels against English settlers in Ireland were published in England. Although these accounts were often exaggerated, "the English perception that the Irish... were routinely committing
war crimeswas very real." Many in England reacted to these accounts "with calls for sharp reprisals". Such accounts were used by
Oliver Cromwell to justify
his conquest of Ireland in 1659, including the massacres that followed the
sieges of Drogheda and
Wexford. from the
Ottoman expansion into the Balkans, woodcut by
Erhard Schön, c. 1530 In 1782,
Benjamin Franklin wrote and published an article purporting to reveal a letter between a British
Indian agent and the
governor of Canada, listing atrocities supposedly perpetrated by British-allied Native Americans against white colonists, including detailed accounts of the scalping of women and children. The account was a fabrication, published in the expectation that it would be reprinted by newspapers in Britain and therefore sway British public opinion in favor of peace with the United States. During the
Indian Rebellion of 1857, stories began to circulate in the British and Anglo-Indian press of alleged atrocities committed by rebels, especially rapes of European women, in places like
Cawnpore; a subsequent official inquiry found no evidence for any of the claims. In the lead up to the
Spanish–American War, the newspapers of
Joseph Pulitzer and
William Randolph Hearst published accounts of Spanish atrocities against Cubans. While occasionally true, the majority of these stories were fabrications meant to boost sales and promote American support for war with Spain.
20th century World War I Atrocity
propaganda was widespread during
World War I, when it was used by all belligerents, playing a major role in creating the wave of patriotism that characterised the early stages of the war.
British propaganda is regarded as having made the most extensive use of fictitious atrocities to promote the war effort. Another atrocity story involved a Canadian soldier, who had supposedly been crucified with bayonets by the Germans (see
The Crucified Soldier). Many Canadians claimed to have witnessed the event, yet they all provided different version of how it had happened. The Canadian high command investigated the matter, concluding that it was untrue. Other reports circulated of Belgian women, often nuns, who had their breasts cut off by the Germans. A story about
German corpse factories, where bodies of German soldiers were supposedly turned into glycerine for weapons, or food for hogs and poultry, was published in a
Times article on April 17, 1917. In the postwar years, investigations in Britain and France revealed that these stories were false. German newspapers published allegations that Armenians were murdering Muslims in Turkey. Several newspapers reported that 150,000 Muslims had been murdered by Armenians in Van province. An article about the
1908 Revolution (sometimes called the "Turkish national awakening") published by a German paper accused the "Ottomans of the Christian tribe" (meaning the Armenians) of taking up arms after the revolution and killing Muslims.
World War II in Ukraine, c. 1943; the
NKVD gunman has
stereotypically Jewish features, in accordance with the Nazi idea of "
Judeo-Bolshevism". During World War II, atrocity propaganda was not used on the same scale as in World War I, as by then it had long been discredited by its use during the previous conflict. There were exceptions in some propaganda films, such as ''
Hitler's Children, Women in Bondage, and Enemy of Women'', which portrayed the Germans (as opposed to just Nazis) as enemies of civilization, abusing women and the innocent. However, the Germans often claimed that largely accurate descriptions of German atrocities were just "atrocity propaganda" and a few Western leaders were thus hesitant to believe early reports of Nazi atrocities, especially the existence of
concentration camps,
death camps and the many
massacres perpetrated by German troops and SS
Einsatzgruppen during the war.
Winston Churchill and
Franklin Roosevelt knew from radio intercepts via
Bletchley Park that such
massacres were widespread in Poland and other east European territories. Moreover, the existence of concentration camps like
Dachau was well known both in Germany and throughout the world as a result of German propaganda itself, as well as many exposures by escapees and others from 1933 onwards. Their discovery towards the end of the war shocked many in the west, especially of
Bergen-Belsen and Dachau by allied soldiers, but the atrocities carried out there were amply supported by the facts on the ground. The
Nuremberg trials in 1945/6 confirmed the extent of
genocide,
Nazi medical experimentation,
massacres and
torture on a very wide scale. Later Nuremberg trials produced abundant evidence of atrocities carried out on prisoners and captives. The Germans themselves made heavy use of atrocity propaganda, both before the war and during it. Violence between
ethnic Germans and the
Poles, such as the 1939
Bloody Sunday massacre, was characterised as barbaric slaughter of the German population by the
subhuman Poles, and used to justify the genocide of the Polish population according to the Nazi . Late in the war, Nazi propaganda used exaggerated depictions of real or planned Allied crimes against Germany, such as the
bombing of Dresden, the
Nemmersdorf massacre, and the
Morgenthau Plan for the
deindustrialisation of Germany to frighten and enrage German civilians into resistance. Hitler's last
directive, given fifteen days before
his suicide, proclaimed the postwar intentions of the "
Jewish Bolsheviks" to be the total
genocide of the German people, with the men sent off to labour camps in
Siberia and the women and girls made into military
sex slaves.
Soviet–Afghan War mine was claimed to have been deliberately designed to attract children According to a 1985 UN report backed by Western countries, the KGB had deliberately designed mines to look like toys, and deployed them against Afghan children during the
Soviet–Afghan War. Newspapers such as the
New York Times ran stories denouncing the "ghastly, deliberate crippling of children" and noting that while the stories had been met with skepticism by the public, they had been proven by the "incontrovertible testimony" of a UN official testifying the existence of booby-trap toys in the shape of harmonicas, radios, or birds. The story likely originated from the
PFM-1 mine, which was made from brightly colored plastic and had been indirectly copied from the American
BLU-43 Dragontooth design. The
Mine Action Coordination Center of Afghanistan reported that the allegations "gained a life for obvious journalist reasons", but otherwise had no basis in reality.
Gulf War Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990. On October 10, 1990, a young
Kuwaiti girl known only as "
Nayirah" appeared in front of a congressional committee and testified that she witnessed the mass murdering of infants, when Iraqi soldiers had snatched them out of hospital incubators and threw them on the floor to die. Her testimony became a lead item in newspapers, radio and TV all over the US. The story was eventually exposed as a fabrication in December 1992, in a
CBC-TV program called
To Sell a War. Nayirah was revealed to be the daughter of Kuwait's ambassador to the United States, and had not actually seen the "atrocities" she described take place; the PR firm
Hill & Knowlton, which had been hired by the Kuwaiti government to devise a PR campaign to increase American public support for a war against Iraq, had heavily promoted her testimony.
21st century in Afghanistan, United States, 2020
Iraq War In the runup to the 2003
invasion of Iraq, press stories appeared in the
United Kingdom and
United States of
a plastic shredder or wood chipper into which
Saddam and
Qusay Hussein fed opponents of their
Baathist rule. These stories attracted worldwide attention and boosted support for military action, in stories with titles such as "See men shredded, then say you don't back war". A year later, it was determined there was no evidence to support the existence of such a machine. In 2004, former Marine Staff Sgt. Jimmy Massey claimed that he and other Marines intentionally killed dozens of innocent Iraqi civilians, including a 4-year-old girl. His allegations were published by news organizations worldwide, but none of the five journalists – embedded with the troops and approved by the Pentagon – who covered his battalion said they saw reckless or indiscriminate shooting of civilians. The
St. Louis Post-Dispatch dismissed his claim as "either demonstrably false or exaggerated". In July 2003 an Iraqi woman,
Jumana Hanna, testified that she had been subjected to inhumane treatment by Baathist policemen during two years of imprisonment, including being subjected to electric shocks and raped repeatedly. The story appeared on the front page of
The Washington Post, and was presented to the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee by then-Deputy Defense Secretary
Paul D. Wolfowitz. In January 2005, articles in
Esquire and
The Washington Post concluded that none of her allegations could be verified, and that her accounts contained grave inconsistencies. Her husband, who she claimed had been executed in the same prison where she was tortured, was in fact still alive.
Other cases ", July 2022 During the
Battle of Jenin, Palestinian officials
claimed there was a massacre of civilians in the refugee camp, which was proven false by subsequent international investigations. During the
2010 South Kyrgyzstan ethnic clashes, a rumor spread among ethnic Kyrgyz that Uzbek men had broken into a local women's dormitory and raped several Kyrgyz women. Local police never provided any confirmation that such an assault occurred. During the
Libyan Civil War, Libyan media was reporting atrocities by
Muammar Gaddafi loyalists, who were ordered to perform mass "Viagra-fueled rapes" (see
2011 Libyan rape allegations). A later investigation by
Amnesty International has failed to find evidence for these allegations, and in many cases has discredited them, as the rebels were found to have deliberately lied about the claims. In July 2014, the Russian public broadcaster
Channel One aired a report claiming that Ukrainian soldiers in
Sloviansk had
crucified a three-year-old boy to a board, and later dragged his mother with a tank, causing her death. The account of the only witness interviewed for the report was not corroborated by anyone else, and other media have been unable to confirm the story, despite claims in the testimony that many of the city's inhabitants had been forced to watch the killings. in
Donbas, a state-sponsored event in Kursk in July 2023 In his announcement of the
Russian invasion of Ukraine, Russian President
Vladimir Putin baselessly claimed that Ukraine was carrying out
genocide in the mainly Russian-speaking Donbas region. In April 2022, Canada's
Communications Security Establishment said there was a coordinated effort by the Russian government to
promote false reports about Ukraine harvesting organs from dead soldiers, women and children. On 21 September 2022, Vladimir Putin announced a
partial mobilisation. To justify Russia's invasion of Ukraine and mobilization, Putin claimed in his address to the Russian audience that the "terror and violence" against the Ukrainian people by the pro-Western "Nazi" regime in Kiev had "taken increasingly horrific, barbaric forms," Ukrainians had been turned into "cannon fodder," and therefore Russia had no choice but to defend "our beloved" in Ukraine. In the aftermath of the 2023
October 7 attacks, Israel was accused of spreading atrocity propaganda to justify its
invasion of the Gaza Strip. The alleged propaganda included
claims of systematic rape (such as a
New York Times piece titled
Screams Without Words) and of
babies being beheaded and burned. ==See also==