the conversion of dead bodies first appeared on 10 April 1917, in the , and in the Belgian newspapers and . Sir Austen Chamberlain finally established that the British government accepted that the story was untrue, when in a reply in Parliament on 2 December 1925 he said that the German Chancellor had authorised him to say on the authority of the German government, that there was never any foundation for the story, and that he accepted the denial on behalf of His Majesty's Government. Interwar and World War II The claim that Charteris invented the story to sway the opinion of the Chinese against the Germans was given wide circulation in Arthur Ponsonby's highly influential book, Falsehood in War-Time, which examined, according to its subtitle, an "Assortment of Lies Circulated Throughout the Nations During the Great War". In his 1931 book Spreading Germs of Hate, pro-Nazi writer George Sylvester Viereck also insisted that Charteris had originated the story: The explanation was vouchsafed by General Charteris himself in , at a dinner at the National Arts Club, New York City. It met with diplomatic denial later on, but is generally accepted. Charteris's alleged 1925 comments later gave Adolf Hitler rhetorical ammunition to portray the British as liars who would invent imaginary war crimes. The widespread belief that the had been invented as propaganda had an adverse effect during World War II on rumours emerging about the Holocaust. One of the earliest reports in September 1942, known as the "Sternbuch cable" stated that the Germans were "bestially murdering about one hundred thousand Jews" in Warsaw and that "from the corpses of the murdered, soap and artificial fertilizers are produced". Victor Cavendish-Bentinck, chairman of the British Joint Intelligence Committee, noted that these reports were rather too similar to "stories of employment of human corpses during the last war for the manufacture of fat which was a grotesque lie." Likewise, The Christian Century commented that "The parallel between this story and the ‘corpse factory’ atrocity tale of the First World War is too striking to be overlooked.” German scholar Joachim Neander notes that "There can be no doubt that the reported commercial use of the corpses of the murdered Jews undermined the credibility of the news coming from Poland and delayed action that might have rescued many Jewish lives." Recent scholarship Modern scholarship supports the view that the story arose from rumours circulating