23. The Bryce Report followed the Lusitania disaster by a few days
The Committee on Alleged German Outrages issued its report, generally known as the Bryce Report, on May 12, 1915, less than a week after the Lusitania sinking. It displaced the latter from the front pages of newspapers in the United States. The Bryce report was allegedly based on depositions which were first-hand accounts from witnesses to German atrocities in Belgium and France. One finding was, “That there were in many parts of Belgium deliberate and systematically organized massacres of the civil population, accompanied by many isolated murders and other outrages.” It accused the Germans of using civilians as human shields, systematic looting and pillaging, and the officers of the German Army of being complicit.
By the end of May, every newspaper in New York had reprinted the report. The British Propaganda Bureau shipped over 40,000 copies to the United States for distribution. Following the war, the depositions upon which the report had been based could not be found. The authors of the report, the committee, had based it (allegedly) entirely on the depositions, it had not actually questioned any of the supposed witnesses. In 1942 the depositions were located, but before they could be examined independently, they were destroyed, allegedly by a German rocket. The Bryce Report is now broadly dismissed as a piece of wartime propaganda, without basis of fact.