Soap made from human corpses

Stutthof concentration camp where small quantities of soap are believed to have been made from the bodies of human victims.

During the 20th century, there were various alleged instances of soap being made from human body fat. During World War I it was claimed in the British press that the Germans had a corpse factory in which they used the bodies of their own soldiers to make glycerine and soap. After the war the British government accepted that the stories were untrue. During World War II it was believed that soap was being mass-produced from the bodies of the victims of Nazi concentration camps located in German-occupied Poland. During Nuremberg trials evidence was presented that German researchers had developed a process for the production of soap from human bodies. The Yad Vashem Memorial has stated that the Nazis did not produce soap from Jewish corpses on an industrial scale, saying that rumors that soap from human corpses was mass-produced and distributed were deliberately used by the Nazis to frighten camp inmates.

Further, claims that soap was produced from corpses on a pre-industrial basis by the Germans during World War II seems also to be a myth.

History

1786

In 1780, the former Holy Innocents' Cemetery in Paris was closed because of overuse. In 1786, the bodies were exhumed and the bones were moved to the Catacombs. Many bodies had incompletely decomposed and had reduced into deposits of fat. During the exhumation, this fat was collected and subsequently turned into candles and soap.

World War I

Main article: German Corpse Factory

The claim that Germans used the fat from human corpses to make products, including soap, was made during World War I. This appears to have originated as rumor among British soldiers and Belgians. The first recorded reference is in 1915 when Cynthia Asquith noted in her diary (16 June 1915): "We discussed the rumour that the Germans utilise even their corpses by converting them into glycerine with the by-product of soap." It became a major international story when The Times of London reported in April 1917 that the Germans had admitted rendering the bodies of their dead soldiers for fat to make soap and other products.

After the war John Charteris, the former head of army intelligence, was reported to have claimed in a 1925 speech that he had invented the story. He subsequently insisted that his remarks had been misreported. The controversy led the British Foreign Secretary Sir Austen Chamberlain to officially state that the government accepted that the "corpse factory" story was untrue. The belief that the British had deliberately invented the story was later used by the Nazis.

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 RIF, which was interpreted by some as Reichs-Juden-Fett ("State Jewish Fat"); in German Blackletter font the difference between I and J is only in length. RIF in fact stood for Reichsstelle für industrielle Fettversorgung ("National Center for Industrial Fat Provisioning", the German government agency responsible for wartime production and distribution of soap and washing products). RIF soap was a poor quality substitute product that contained no fat at all, human or otherwise. Rumors about the origins and meaning of "RIF" soap extended into the concentration camps themselves. Naphtali Karchmer, in his book Solitary in the Overwhelming Turbulence: Five Years as Prisoner-of-War in East Prussia, describes his years in captivity as a Jewish-Polish POW. The author writes about gray, rectangular, low-quality pieces of soap he and other POWs received with the letters "RIF" inscribed on a center depression. When one of the POWs complained about the low-foam, smooth soap, the lady of the household answered it was made of "Rein Juden Fett" (pure Jewish fat), when asked "out of human fat?", she answered "No, just Jews". A version of the story is included in The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry, one of the earliest collections of firsthand accounts of the Holocaust, assembled by Soviet writers Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman. The specific story is part of a report titled "The Extermination of the Jews of Lvov" attributed to I. Herts and Naftali Nakht:

In another section of the Belzec camp was an enormous soap factory. The Germans picked out the fattest Jews, murdered them, and boiled them down for soap. Artur [Izrailevich] Rozenshtraukh—a bank clerk from Lvov, in whose words we relate this testimony—held this "Jewish soap" in his own hands. The Gestapo thugs never denied the existence of a "production process" of this kind. Whenever they wanted to intimidate a Jew, they would say to him, "We'll make soap out of you."

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 Polish belief that Jews 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.

Joachim Neander, in a German paper presented at the 28th conference of the German Studies Association, cites the following comment by Himmler from a letter of November 20, 1942 to the head of the Gestapo, Heinrich Müller. Himmler had written to Müller due to an exposé by Rabbi Dr. Stephen Wise, which mentioned the soap rumor and had been printed in The New York Times:

You have guaranteed me that at every site the corpses of these deceased Jews are either burned or buried, and that at no site anything else can happen with the corpses.

Müller was to make inquiries if "abuse" had happened somewhere and report this to Himmler "on SS oath"; Himmler hence did not from the outset exclude the possibility that such had taken place. Neander goes on to state that the letter represents circumstantial evidence that it was Nazi policy to abstain from processing corpses due to their known desire to keep their mass murder as secret as possible.

Danzig Anatomical Institute

A memorial tablet in Gdańsk, Poland, chronicling Rudolph Spanner's experiments.

The Danzig Anatomical Institute has become notorious as the site of possibly pre-industrial experiments in making soap from human fat. However, recent research suggests it was all mythical.

During the Nuremberg Trials, Sigmund Mazur, a laboratory assistant at the Danzig Anatomical Institute (modern Gdańsk), testified that soap had been made from corpse fat at the camp, and claimed that 70 to 80 kg (155–175 lb) of fat collected from 40 bodies could produce more than 25 kg (55 lb) of soap, and that the finished soap was retained by Professor Rudolf Spanner. Eyewitnesses included British POWs who were part of the forced labor that constructed the camp, and Dr Stanisław Byczkowski, head of the Department of Toxicology at the Gdańsk School of Medicine. Holocaust survivor Thomas Blatt, who investigated the subject, found little concrete documentation and no evidence of mass production of soap from human fat, but concluded that there was evidence of experimental soap making.

Testimony was given both by Nazis and by British prisoners of war about the development of an industrial process for producing soap from human bodies, the production of such soap on a small-scale basis, and the actual use of this soap by Nazi personnel at the Danzig Anatomic Institute.

The prosecutor: The experiments of the Anatomical Institute in the production the soap from the corpses and tanning of human skin for industrial purposes were conducted on a wide scale. I submit a document ... to the tribunal, which consists of the testimony of Sigmund Mazur, one of the direct participants of the production of soap from the human fat, he was helper-laboratory assistant at the Danzig Anatomical institute. ...

The question: Please tell us how soap was produced from the human fat at the Danzig Anatomical institute?

The answer: In summer of 1943 in the yard of the Anatomical institute a two-storey stone building containing three chambers was built. This building was designed for the purpose of utilizing corpses and cooking the bones, as the professor Spanner officially declared. The laboratory was defined as the institution of taking down skeletons, burning meat and superfluous bones, but in the winter 1943-1944 he the year of the prof Spanner instructed us to collect the human fat which was not to be thrown away any more. This order was given to Reichert and Borkmann.

Prof Spanner gave me the recipe for the production of soap from the human fat in February 1944. According to this recipe 5 kg (11 lb) of the human fat appertained to be mixed with 10 litres (2.2 imp gal; 2.6 US gal) of water and 500 to 1000 grams of the caustic soda. This mixture was cooked for two up to three hours, then it was allowed to cool. Then the soap rose to the surface, while water and settlings were under it. To this mixture a pinch of salt and soda was added and it was cooked again for two up to three hours. After cooling the soap was poured into a mould.

In his book Russia at War 1941 to 1945, Alexander Werth reported that while visiting Gdańsk/Danzig in 1945 shortly after its conquest by the Red Army, he saw an experimental factory outside the city for making soap from human corpses. According to Werth it had been run by "a German professor called Spanner" and "was a nightmarish sight, with its vats full of human heads and torsos pickled in some liquid, and its pails full of a flakey substance—human soap".

However, Jaochim Neander in "The Danzig Soap Case: Facts and Legends around "Professor Spanner" and the Danzig Anatomic Institute 1944-1945" concludes:

What, now, is left of the assertions about "Professor Spanner's Soap Factory" quoted at the beginning of this paper? The answer is: nothing. Rudolf Spanner, the alleged "owner" of the "soap factory" and inventor of "a process to produce soap from human fat," was never a member of the SS. No "soap factory" ever existed at Stutthof or at the Danzig Anatomic Institute, no "researches" were conducted there to that effect, no "soap" was made there from Jewish corpses. Nobody was "executed for the 'production' of soap," and none of the corpses found at the liberation of Stutthof had been "used" for that purpose. The majority of corpses delivered to the institute came from (ethnic or Reich) Germans, the rest, apart from a very few Russians, from Poles. With the exception of those Russians, no corpses of Stutthof prisoners were delivered to the institute. With regard to the accusations raised at Nuremberg and by the Main Com mission, we can, moreover, ascertain that no "semi-industrial experiments in the production of soap from human bodies" were carried out at the institute, that Zygmunt Mazur, the main witness, never made soap according to the "recipe" USSR-196, and that the number of corpses taken in and stored in the morgue of the institute did not exceed the needs of teaching and medical research. The equipment in the "suspicious" one-story brick building on the premises of the institute was planned and used not for the manufacture of soap, but for the chemi cal maceration of body parts. In this process, a soapy grease (Soviet prosecutor Rudenko's "unfinished soap") originates as an inevitable by-product. This is the core of truth inherent in the Soap Factory legend.

Jasenovac concentration camp

In the Independent State of Croatia, a World War II puppet state of Nazi Germany and Italy established in part of Axis-occupied Yugoslavia, in the Jasenovac concentration camp a small factory for converting human remains into soap was also established by members of the Ustasha movement. Parts of the "soap factory" still exist and can be seen in memorial zone "Donja Gradina".

Postwar

The idea that "human soap" was manufactured on an industrial scale by the Nazis was first published after the war in 1946 by Zofia Nałkowska in her seminal Medallions (see Rudolf Spanner). It was not refuted for dozens of years in Polish official historiography.

Alain Resnais, who treated the testimony of Holocaust survivors as fact, continued the accusation in his noted 1955 Holocaust documentary film Nuit et brouillard. Some postwar Israelis — in the army, schools, etc. — also referred disdainfully to Jewish victims of Nazism arrived to Israel with the Hebrew word סבון (sabon, "soap"). In fact, this offensive word was not linked to the rumors about the Nazi crimes and the human soap, but had the sense of "soft", "weaklings".

Though evidence does exist of small-scale soap production, possibly experimental, in the camp at Stutthof concentration camp near Danzig/Gdansk, mainstream scholars of the Holocaust consider the idea that the Nazis manufactured soap on an industrial scale to be part of World War II folklore. Historian Israel Gutman has stated that "it was never done on a mass scale". In Hitler's Death Camps: The Sanity of Madness Konnilyn Feig concludes that the Nazis "did indeed use human fat for the making of soap at Stutthof", albeit in limited quantity. Holocaust historian Robert Melvin Spector writes that "her analysis seems sound, given the known fact that the S.S. used everything it could obtain from its prisoners", including hair, skin and bones.

In 2006 a sample of the soap archived at the International Court of Justice in The Hague was given for analysis to Andrzej Stołyhwo, an expert in the chemistry of fats from the Gdansk University of Technology in Poland. He concluded that some of the fat in the sample tested was of human origin. The sample of soap had previously been used as evidence in the post-World War II Nuremberg trials, but at the time the technology was unavailable to determine whether the soap had been produced from human fat. The human remains used to make the soap were believed to have been brought from Bydgoszcz and Stutthof concentration camp.

Today Holocaust deniers employ this controversy to criticize the veracity of the Nazi genocide.

Legacy

In the wake of the second world war, Rabbi David Polish wrote a poem, speaking of the Jewish soap:

And on that day it will be,
and one to one they shall gather in the valley of the bones:
Human ashes from the furnaces, human vapor from Auschwitz,
human parchments from the library of Satan himself,
human soap, human unborn fetuses still without the human image...

The master of all winds will command and bring forth a peddler to the world,
who will gather us one to one,
who will wonder around the world, and sell us for money,
like precious ornaments, and not a high price shall he request.
He shall announce his wares and call:
"Who wishes to buy a souvenir—a memory from my memories?
Little boys made of soap,
or a rare parchment from the skin of the head of one of the biggest sages of Ashkenaz?"

— Rabbi David Polish

The BBC documentary about the death camps found during the end of the war shows similar atrocities including shrunken prisoner heads and preserved tattoos, recorded at a display in Buchenwald before the German people from Weimar after the camp's liberation.

Several burial sites in Israel include graves for "soap made of Jewish victims by the Nazis". These are probably bars of RIF soap. Following a heated discussion on the media about these graves in 2003, Yad Vashem publicized Professor Yehuda Bauer's research saying that RIF soap was not made of human fat, and that the RIF myth was probably propagated by the Nazi guards to taunt the Jews. Yad Vashem includes an image of an emotional funeral and burial of "Jewish" soap in Romania.

A small bar of soap was on display at the Nazareth holocaust memorial museum in Israel, and a similar bar of soap was buried in the "holocaust cellar" live-museum in mount Zion in Jerusalem, Israel, during the museum's inception in 1958. A replica was on display there. Following Professor Yehuda Bauer of Yad Vashem publicizing his conclusion that soap was not made in industrial quantities from the bodies of Jews or other Nazi camp inmates, Tom Segev, a "new historian" and anti-establishment Israeli author, wrote in his book "The Seventh Million" about the Holocaust-Cellar soap that it was "idol worshiping in Jerusalem".

See also

• The Soap Myth
• Anthropodermic bibliopegy (in some cases, skin with tattoos was preserved in Nazi concentration camps)
• Jewish skeleton collection (Jews killed for their skeletons)
• German Corpse Factory, one of the most notorious anti-German atrocity propaganda stories circulated in World War I
• Lampshades made from human skin

External links

• U.S. National Archives, Still Picture Branch, College Park, MD, document 238-NT-270. Introduced at IMT on Feb. 19, 1946 as exhibit USSR-393