Soap made from human corpses
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During World War II it was widely believed that soap was being produced on an industrial scale from the bodies of Jewish concentration camp victims. In reality, while some Nazi scientists experimented with soap made from human corpses, and even engaged in small-scale production, soap from human fat was never produced industrially. The Yad Vashem Memorial has also officially stated that the Nazis did not make soap from Jewish corpses, saying that such rumors were used by the Nazis to frighten camp inmates.[1][2][3]
History
World War I
The claim that Germans used the fat from human corpses to make products had already been made by the British during World War I (see Kadaververwertungsanstalt), with The Times reporting in April 1917 that the Germans were rendering down the bodies of their dead soldiers for fat to make soap and other products.[4] It was not until 1925 that the British Foreign Secretary Sir Austen Chamberlain officially admitted that the "corpse factory" story had been a lie.[5]
World War II
Rumours that the Nazis produced soap from the bodies of concentration camp inmates circulated widely during the war. Germany suffered a shortage of fats during World War II, and the production of soap was put under government control. The "human soap" rumours may have originated from the bars of soap being marked with the initials RJF, which was interpreted by some as Reichs-Juden-Fett ("State Jewish Soap"). RJF in fact stood for Reichs-Industrie-Fett ("State Industrial Soap"), a common soap designed for workers to remove machine oil, which was issued to and distributed widely by the Wehrmacht; in German acronyms, "i" and "j" were often used interchangeably.
Raul Hilberg reports such stories as circulating in Lublin as early as October 1942. The Germans themselves were aware of the stories, as SS-chief Heinrich Himmler had received a letter describing the Poles' belief that Jewish people were being "boiled into soap" and which indicated that the Poles feared they would suffer a similar fate. Indeed, the rumours circulated so widely that some segments of the Polish population actually boycotted the purchase of soap.[6] Himmler was disturbed enough by the rumors, and the implication of poor security at the camps, that he emphasized that all corpses should be cremated or buried as quickly as possible.[7]
Ilya Ehrenburg reports a common version of the story as truth in his The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry:
In another section of the Belzec camp was an enormous soap factory. The Germans picked out the fattest people, murdered them, and boiled them down for soap.
— Ehrenburg[8]
In the later stages of World War II, when human bodies were indeed being plundered for products (hair for felt, for example), there are indications that some German scientists did actually experiment with making soap from human fat. Professor Rudolf Spanner produced somewhere between 10 and 100 kg of soap using fat extracted from corpses from an unidentified source, speculated to be the mental hospital in Konradstein (now Kocborowo), a prison in Königsberg, or the Stutthof concentration camp. According to Spanner's postwar testimonies, the soap was used only for injections into joint ligaments.[9]
Despite the aforementioned case, there is no evidence for wide-spread use of soap made of human fat, Jewish or otherwise, in Nazi Germany.
Postwar
The legend of "human soap" was perpetuated after the war by Alain Resnais, in his noted 1955 holocaust documentary movie Nuit et brouillard also treated the stories as fact. Some postwar Israelis also referred disdainfully to Jewish victims of Nazism with the Hebrew word sabon ("soap").[10]
Mainstream scholars of the Holocaust consider the "soap myth" to be part of WWII folklore.[11] Among others this view was held by the reputable Jewish historians Walter Laqueur,[12] Gitta Sereny,[13] and Deborah Lipstadt.[14] The same view was held by Professor Yehuda Bauer of Israel's Hebrew University and by Shmuel Krakowski, archives director of Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust center.[1][2][3]
Today Holocaust deniers employ this controversy to cast aspersions on the veracity of the Nazi genocide[15].
References
- ^ a b Bill Hutman, "Nazis never made human-fat soap," The Jerusalem Post - International Edition, week ending May 5, 1990.
- ^ a b "Holocaust Expert Rejects Charge That Nazis Made Soap from Jews," Northern California Jewish Bulletin, April 27, 1990. (JTA dispatch from Tel Aviv.) Facsimile in: Christian News, May 21, 1990, p. 19.
- ^ a b "A Holocaust Belief Cleared Up," Chicago Tribune, April 25, 1990. Facsimile in: Ganpac Brief, June 1990, p. 8.
- ^ Knightley, Phillip (2000). The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Kosovo. Prion. pp. pp. 105-106. ISBN 1853753769.
{{cite book}}:|pages=has extra text (help); Cite has empty unknown parameter:|coauthors=(help) - ^ Ponsonby, Arthur (1928). Falsehood in Wartime. New York: Dutton. pp. pp. 102, 111–112.
{{cite book}}:|pages=has extra text (help); Cite has empty unknown parameter:|coauthors=(help) - ^ Hilberg, Raul (1985). The Destruction of the European Jews: The Revised and Definitive Edition. Holmes & Meier. pp. p. 967. ISBN 084190832X.
{{cite book}}:|pages=has extra text (help); Cite has empty unknown parameter:|coauthors=(help) - ^ UCSB History Page: Did Nazis use human body fat to make soap? Accessed December 29, 2006.
- ^ Ehrenburg, Ilya (2003). The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry. Transaction Publishers. ISBN 076580543X.
{{cite book}}: Unknown parameter|coauthors=ignored (|author=suggested) (help) - ^ Human Fat Was Used to Produce Soap in Gdansk during the War Accessed January 31, 2007.
- ^ Goldberg, Michael (1996). Why Should Jews Survive?: Looking Past the Holocaust Toward a Jewish Future. Oxford University Press US. pp. p. 122. ISBN 0195111265.
{{cite book}}:|pages=has extra text (help); Cite has empty unknown parameter:|coauthors=(help) - ^ The soap myth (Jewish Virtual Library) Accessed December 29, 2006.
- ^ Walter Laqueur, The Terrible Secret (Boston: 1980), pp. 82, 219.
- ^ Gitta Sereny, Into That Darkness (London: A. Deutsch, 1974), p. 141 (note).
- ^ "Nazi Soap Rumor During World War II," Los Angeles Times, May 16, 1981, p. II/2.
- ^ Deceit & Misrepresentation. The Techniques of Holocaust Denial: The Soap Allegations. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6 (Nizkor Project)