Harry Banks

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Harry Banks, born 16 March 1896 in Yorkshire, England (although other sources suggest that his name was "Harry Band" and that he was born in Montrose, Scotland in August, 1885), was an Allied soldier serving in the Canadian Army who may have been crucified with bayonets or combat knives on a barn door or a tree, while fighting on the Western Front during World War I.

Three witnesses said they saw an unidentified crucified Canadian soldier near the battlefield of Ypres, Belgium on or around April 24, 1915 but there was no conclusive proof such a crucifixion actually occurred. The eyewitness accounts were somewhat contradictory, no crucified body was found, and no knowledge was uncovered at the time about the identity of the supposedly-crucified soldier.

Nevertheless, the story made headline news around the world and the Allies repeatedly used the supposed incident in their war propaganda, including an early propaganda film titled The Prussian Cur which included scenes of an Allied soldier's crucifixion. A three-foot bronze sculpture by British artist Francis Derwent Wood of a crucified soldier titled Canada's Golgotha was included in an 1919 exhibition of wartime art in London, but the sculpture was withdrawn from the exhibit after protest. (The sculpture was also displayed at the Canadian Museum of Civilization in 2000, again provoking some controversy.)

Even during WWI the German government protested the falseness of this atrocity story and after the end of the war they formally requested the Canadian government provide proof. With no knowledge of the identity of the soldier and having only a few eyewitness accounts, the crucifixion story was labelled a propaganda falsehood by an independent British inquiry.

In a 2002 programme for Channel 4's Secret History, British documentary filmmaker Iain Overton claimed to have uncovered new historical evidence which identified Harry Banks as the soldier who had been crucified. Banks, a soldier in the 48th Highlanders, 15th Canadian Infantry Battalion, First Division of the Canadian Corps, was reported missing in action on April 24, 1915 near Ypres. Other soldiers in his unit wrote to Bank's sister Elizabeth to express their condolences; a year later, one of them finally confirmed in a letter to Elizabeth that her suspicions her brother had been "the crucified soldier" were true.

The circumstantial nature of all the known historical evidence has left the truth of this highly controversial story unresolved. It is known that a Harry Banks enlisted into the Canadian Over-seas Expeditionary Force on September 1, 1915 in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. The only other publicly available knowledge on Harry Banks is located at the National Archives of Canada and consists of national service enlistment forms, with no information about the notorious alleged incident.

Adding to the controversy surrounding the Crucified Soldier is the fact that the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, the agency responsible for recording the deaths and grave or memorial sites for Commonwealth soldiers killed in WWI & WWII has no record of the death, resting or memorial place of a Harry Banks fitting the details of the 'crucified soldier'. However, it does list a Sergeant Harry Band of the Central Ontario Regiment of the Canadian Infantry, killed in action on the 24th of April 1915. [1]