Soap made from human corpses

During the 20th century, there were various alleged instances of soap being made from human body fat. During World War I the British press claimed that the Germans operated a corpse factory in which they made glycerine and soap from the bodies of their own soldiers. Both during, and after, World War II, widely circulated rumors claimed that soap was being mass-produced from the bodies of the victims of Nazi concentration camps which were located in German-occupied Poland. During the Nuremberg trials items were presented as evidence of such production.[1][2] Today it is known that while Nazi Germany produced small amounts of soap made of human corpses, it wasn't done on industrial scale.[3] The Yad Vashem Memorial has stated that the Nazis did not produce soap with fat which was extracted from Jewish corpses on an industrial scale, saying that the Nazis may have frightened camp inmates by deliberately circulating rumors in which they claimed that they were able to extract fat from human corpses, turn it into soap, mass-produce and distribute it.[4][5][6]

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.[7] 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.[8]

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."[9] 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.[10]

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.[11] The belief that the British had deliberately invented the story was later used by the Nazis.[12]

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 Fraktur initials ℜℑ𝔉 (RIF), which was interpreted by some as Rein-jüdisches-Fett ("Pure Jewish Fat"); in German Blackletter font the difference between I and J is only in length (ℑ vs. 𝔍). 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.[13]

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. He writes about gray, rectangular, low-quality pieces of soap he and other POWs received with the letters "ℜℑ𝔉" inscribed on a center depression. These were claimed to be made out of only "Rein Judisches Fett" (pure Jewish fat) when prisoners complained about the low-foam, smooth soap. 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."[14]

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.[15]

Historian 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". 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.[16]

While the soap-making rumor was widely circulated and published as fact in numerous books and newspaper articles after the war, the myth has been debunked for many decades.[17] Historians such as Deborah Lipstadt, have long ago stated that: "Fact is that the Nazis never used the bodies of Jews, or for that matter anyone else, for the production of soap [...] The soap rumor was thoroughly investigated after the war and proved to be untrue."[17] Despite this, many "believers" of this myth persists, which Joachim Neander consider to be unwittingly playing into the hand of Holocaust deniers by giving them a chance to easily debunk the legend, allowing them to cast doubt upon the veracity of the entire Holocaust.[17]

Danzig Anatomical Institute
A memorial tablet in Gdańsk, Poland, chronicling Rudolph Spanner's alleged experiments.

During the Nuremberg Trials, Sigmund Mazur, a laboratory assistant at the Danzig Anatomical Institute, testified that soap had been made from corpse fat at the institute, 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. Two British POWs who had to assist with auxiliary task at the Institute provided witness-accounts.[18]

In his book Russia at War 1941 to 1945, Alexander Werth claims 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".[19]

Historian Joachim Neander states that the rumors which allege that the Nazis produced soap from the bodies of Jews who they murdered in their concentration camps, long-since thoroughly debunked, are still widely believed, and exploited by holocaust deniers. He however goes on to say that even scholars who reject the aforementioned claims that the Germans made soap from human fat and mass-produced it are sometimes still convinced that the Germans attempted "experimental" soap production on a smaller scale in Danzig and that this claim is still repeated as if a firm fact in several remembrance contexts.[17] He, and the Polish historians such as Monika Tomkiewicz, who works in the investigative department of the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) in Gdańsk, and Piotr Semków, formerly also an employee of the IPN, later a lecturer at the Naval Academy in Gdynia, have thoroughly investigated the claims around the Danzig Anatomical Institute by Spanner and have all concluded the Holocaust-related soap-making claims surrounding it to also be myths, particularly cemented into Polish consciousness by Zofia Nałkowska's 1946 book Medaliony,[20] which was mandatory reading in Poland until 1990, was widely distributed in the Eastern Bloc, and is still popular today.[21] They all alleged that such secondary sources have played a far larger role of spreading information about the claim than scholarly research.

According to both Neander, and Tomkiewicz and Semków, "soap", made from human cadavers, was indeed created at the Danzig institute,[22] but that this was not related to the alleged Holocaust-related crimes of "harvesting" Jews or Poles for soap-making purposes. The notion that the Danzig Anatomical Institute, and Dr. Spanners work therein, is related to the Holocaust originally stems from the findings of bodies and bone maceration processes in the creation of anatomical models in a small brick building on the premise of the anatomical institute. This, and the soapy grease created for injection into the models flexible joints,[21] was used by the Soviets and the newly established Polish Chief Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation as proof of human soap production in Nazi concentration camps. The latter claims had been presented as fact and had become a stock phrase in Soviet propaganda, but of which no evidence could be found in the liberated camps. The "human soap" from the bone maceration found in Danzig was conflated with the separate rumors regarding the Nazi concentration camps and were presented together during the Nuremberg trials.[17][21]

Semków stated in 2011 that recent surface analysis of the soap presented during the trial by the IPN Gdánsk branch confirmed presence of human tissue,[23] that a 2006 Polish delegation by Andrzej Stołyhwo from the Gdańsk University of Technology to the Hague also showed that it likely contained human fat.,[24][25] and that the IPN maintained that human fat was used, based on testimonies which were delivered in 1945 and the presence of kaolin in the samples, the abrasive qualities of which indicated its possible use as a cleaning soap.[21][26] The IPN concluded the latter investigation stating that Spanner produced between 10 and 100 kg of soap from human corpses sourced, contrary to the testimony of Spanner, from the Stutthof concentration camp, although adding this couldn't be attributed to Nazi crimes. IPN-prosecutor Piotr Niesyn discontinued the investigation due to lack of evidence and did not find grounds to claim that Spanner had incited killings in order to obtain corpses for the Institute. However, it found that in 1944 and 1945 there was a "chemical substance which was essentially soap" obtained from human fat.[21] Tomkiewicz and Semków's research concluded that the soapy grease presented at the trials (claimed to be "unfinished soap"[17]) was a by-product stemming from Spanner's work in bone maceration. Spanner, a well-respected physician who was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1939, would also not have been "experimenting" with soap production (which was widely understood and not something which needed experimentation) instead of teaching his students. Regarding the aforementioned presence of kaolin, the abrasiveness of which has also been criticized as being unsuitable for flexible model-joints,[27] it was noted by Tomkiewicz and Semków that Spanner had previously done research on kaolin injections into cadavers, meaning that the kaolin found in the soap could have come from the cadaver itself, rather than as later additive.[21] They write that when Zofia Nałkowska, Vice-Chairperson of the Chief Commission, was already writing her short-story "Professor Spanner" (which would be published in Medaliony), Spanner was again working as a medical doctor, under his own name, in Schleswig-Holstein in September 1945, unaware that he was being linked to any possible crimes. He was arrested in May 1947, but was released after three days, later being arrested again, but he was once again released after explaining how he had conducted the maceration and injection process. Spanner would "repeat my statement given at the police and add: At the Danzig Anatomic Institute soap was manufactured to a limited extent from human fat. This soap was only used for the manufacturing of joint preparations".[17] After being dismissed by intervention from the British occupation authorities he was declared "clean" by the denazification program in 1948, officially exonerated, and resumed his academic career, becoming director of the Institute of Anatomy in Cologne in 1957 and editor of the esteemed Werner Spalteholz anatomical atlas, before dying in 1960.[21][26]

Neander also points out that the soap-making recipe which was given by Mazur at the Nuremberg trials was contradictory and unrealistic, with a testimony from 12 May 1945 which claimed that 75 kg of fat were produced 8 kg of soap were produced from the first boiling, a testimony from 28 May 1945 which claimed that 70–80 kg of fat were produced from 40 bodies and 25 kg of soap were produced from both boilings, and a testimony from 7 June 1945 which claimed that 40 bodies produced 40 kg of soap from both boilings. These inconsistencies were even pointed out before the Chief Commission.[17] The witness testimonies of the two British POW's were also noted and described as being "contradictory and inconclusive" in a 1990's report which was compiled by the newly established Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C., which holds a cautious stance with regard to the Danzig Soap issue.[17]

Neander concludes that no research or experiments on soap-making were conducted in Danzig, that Mazur never made soap according to his "recipe", that corpses which were delivered to be boiled and turned into anatomical models were all the corpses of Germans who had not been killed in order to "harvest" their bodies, and that the only soap created was a by-product of this. Neander concludes that towards the end of the war, "human fatty soap" from the maceration had been used for laboratory cleaning purposes and that Spanner, as head of the institute, bore responsibility for this, but such handling of dead bodies amounted to a misdemeanor as opposed to any criminal behavior, let alone a crime against humanity or involvement in any genocidal activities, something which is today officially acknowledged in Poland.[17] As Holocaust deniers employ this controversy in order to criticize the veracity of the Nazi genocide,[28] Neander states:

The time therefore has come to reduce the "Danzig Soap Case," inflated by postwar propaganda to a prime example of Nazi German crimes, to its real dimensions. "Revisionists" would lose one of their favorite "arguments" in their efforts to discredit serious Holocaust scholarship. Moreover, de-demonizing "Profesor Spanner" would dismantle a popular Polish anti-German stereotype and would contribute to a better mutual understanding. The list of the Nazi crimes perpetrated in Poland and during the Holocaust is long enough. It will not become significantly shorter, if an alleged crime is deleted from it, but it will become more trustworthy.[17]

Postwar

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 who arrived in Israel with the Hebrew word סבון (sabon, "soap").[29] In fact, this offensive word was not linked to the rumors about Nazi crimes and human soap, but it had the sense of "soft", "weaklings".[30]

Though some still claim that evidence of "human soap" from the Danzig institute as proof,[31] mainstream scholars of the Holocaust consider the idea that the Nazis manufactured soap as part of the Holocaust to be part of World War II folklore.[4][5][6][32][33][34][35] Historian Israel Gutman has stated that "it was never done on a mass scale".[31]

Legacy

A BBC documentary about the death camps which was produced at the end of the war shows bars of "RIF" soap, which were alleged to be made of human fat, and evidence of similar atrocities including shrunken prisoner heads and preserved tattoos, which were put on display in Buchenwald and shown to the population of Weimar after the camp's liberation.[36]

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 about these graves in the media in 2003, Yad Vashem publicized Professor Yehuda Bauer's research which says that RIF soap was not made of human fat, and the RIF myth was probably propagated by the Nazi guards in order to taunt the Jews.[37][38] Yad Vashem includes an image of an emotional funeral and a burial of "Jewish" soap in Romania.[39][40]

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 the publication of Yad Vashem Professor Yehuda Bauer's conclusion that soap was not manufactured from the bodies of Jews or other Nazi concentration camp inmates in industrial quantities, Tom Segev, a "new historian" and an anti-establishment Israeli author, wrote in his book "The Seventh Million" that the belief in the existence of the Holocaust-Cellar soap was "idol worshiping in Jerusalem".[41][42]

A bar of soap is displayed at the National Museum of the History of Ukraine in the Second World War inside the Motherland Monument in Kiev, Ukraine.[43]

In September 2016, Dutch artist, Julian Hetzel, created an art installation called Schuldfabrik using soap made from (donated) human fat, highlighting human excess and waste. 'Schuld' is a German term that has two different yet related meanings: 'guilt' as a moral duty, and 'debt' as an economical obligation.[44]

See also

Notes
  1. Justice at Nuremberg, Robert E. Conot, Carroll & Graf Publishers, 1984, pp. 298-9
  2. "Nuremberg Trial Proceedings Vol. 7, SIXTY-SECOND DAY, 19 February 1946, Morning Session". yale.edu. Retrieved August 2, 2016.
  3. The Holocaust in the Borderlands Interethnic Relations and the Dynamics of Violence in Occupied Eastern Europe 2019, page 202, Miriam Schulz. "Gornisht oyser verter”?! Khurbn-shprakh as a Mirror of the Dynamics of. Violence in German-Occupied Eastern Europe. there were instances when soap was produced from human fat(mostly extracted from Polish prisoners), but no evidence has ever been produced providing that Germany was indeed producing soap using fat from Jewish corpses in an industralized way nor that there were plans to do so in the future
  4. Bill Hutman, "Nazis never made human-fat soap," The Jerusalem Post - International Edition, week ending May 5, 1990.
  5. "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.
  6. "A Holocaust Belief Cleared Up," Chicago Tribune, April 25, 1990. Facsimile in: Ganpac Brief, June 1990, p. 8.
  7. "Paris' Les Innocents cemetery". Retrieved February 6, 2011.
  8. "You (posthumously) light up my life". Scientific American blog. 15 April 2011.
  9. Neander, Joachim, The German Corpse Factory. The Master Hoax of British Propaganda in the First World War, Saarland University Press, 2013, pp.79-85.
  10. Knightley, Phillip (2000). The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Kosovo. Prion. pp. 105–106. ISBN 1-85375-376-9.
  11. Ponsonby, Arthur (1928). Falsehood in Wartime. New York: Dutton. pp. 102, 111–112.
  12. Marlin, Randal (2002). Propaganda and the Ethics of Persuasion, Broadview, pp. 73–4.
  13. Waxman, Zoë (2006). Writing the Holocaust: Identity, Testimony, Representation. Oxford University Press. p. 168. ISBN 0-19-920638-4.
  14. Ehrenburg, Ilya; Il'ja Grigor'jevic Erenburg; Vasilij Semenovic Grossman; et al. (2003). The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry. Transaction Publishers. p. 82. ISBN 0-7658-0543-X.
  15. Hilberg, Raul (1985). The Destruction of the European Jews: The Revised and Definitive Edition. Holmes & Meier. p. 967. ISBN 0-8419-0832-X.
  16. Joachim Neander: "Seife aus Judenfett", paper presented at the Oct. 2004 German Studies Association conference. http://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/marcuse/dachau/legends/NeanderSoap049.htm
  17. Neander, Joachim (2006). "The Danzig Soap Case: Facts and Legends around "Professor Spanner" and the Danzig Anatomic Institute 1944-1945" (PDF). German Studies Review. 29 (1): 63–86.
  18. http://holocaust.skeptik.net/documents/soap.htm
  19. Werth, Alexander (1964). Russia at War, 1941-1945. Dutton. p. 1019.
  20. "Zakończono śledztwo w głośnej "sprawie profesora Spannera"". Dziennik Bałtycki. Archived from the original on 2007-09-30.
  21. Tomkiewicz, Monika; Semków, Piotr (2013). Soap from human fat: the case of Professor Spanner. Gdynia Wydawnictwo Róża Wiatrów. ISBN 9788362012022.
  22. M. Tomkiewicz, P. Semków: Profesor Rudolf Maria Spanner – naukowiec czy eksperymentator? Medycyna na usługach systemu eksterminacji ludności w Trzeciej Rzeszy i na terenach okupowanej Polski. Edited by G. Łukomski, G. Kucharski. Poznań–Gniezno 2011, page 131 . Należy odnotować, że prowadzone w latach 2002–2006 przez Oddziałową Komisję Ścigania Zbrodni przeciwko Narodowi Polskiemu w Gdańsku śledztwo potwierdziło, że w Instytucie Anatomicznym produkowano w czasie wojny mydło z tłuszczu ludzkiego, wprawdzie nie na skalę przemysłową, jednak do celów użytkowych:,translated:One should note that the investigation carried out in the years 2002–2006 by the District Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation in Gdańsk (Oddziałowa Komisja Ścigania Zbrodni przeciwko Narodowi Polskiemu w Gdańsku) proved that during the war soap from human fat was manufactured at the Anatomical Institute. It was not produced on an industrial scale, but still for utilitarian purposes:
  23. Gdańsk: Ofiary zbrodniczych eksperymentów w zapomnianej mogile Dziennik Baltycki 21.04.2011
  24. Polska Press Sp. z o.o. (2006-10-07). "Zakończono śledztwo w głośnej "sprawie profesora Spannera"". Wiadomosci24.pl. Retrieved 2016-01-14.
  25. "Human Fat Was Used to Produce Soap in Gdansk during the War" Archived 2011-05-21 at the Wayback Machine, Auschwitz–Birkenau Memorial and Museum website, 13 October 2006. Accessed July 12, 2011.
  26. "Zakończono śledztwo w głośnej "sprawie profesora Spannera"". Dziennik Bałtycki. Archived from the original on 2007-09-30.
  27. Soap from Human Fat: The Case of Professor Spanner John A. Drobnicki CUNY York College
  28. Deceit & Misrepresentation. The Techniques of Holocaust Denial: The Soap Allegations. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6 (Nizkor Project)
  29. Goldberg, Michael (1996). Why Should Jews Survive?: Looking Past the Holocaust Toward a Jewish Future. Oxford University Press US. p. 122. ISBN 0-19-511126-5.
  30. Dan Ben Amotz, Netiva Ben Yehuda The World Dictionary of Hebrew Slang - Milon Olami leivrit meduberet, vol.1,Zmora Bitan, Tel Aviv 1982 page 158
  31. Denying history: who says the Holocaust never happened and why do they say it? by Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman, University of California Press, 2002: "The Human Soap Controversy," pp. 114–117.
  32. The soap myth (Jewish Virtual Library) Accessed December 29, 2006.
  33. Walter Laqueur, The Terrible Secret (Boston: 1980), pp. 82, 219.
  34. Gitta Sereny, Into That Darkness (London: A. Deutsch, 1974), p. 141 (note).
  35. "Nazi Soap Rumor During World War II," Los Angeles Times, May 16, 1981, p. II/2.
  36. An Alfred Hitchcock documentary on the Nazi Holocaust [00:40:50] (youtube) Presumably the display is from Ilse Koch's collection of artifacts from humans. The display includes a bar of RIF soap allegedly made from human fat. Image of artifacts on display from BBC documentary
  37. Shocking: Soap from Jews murdered in holocaust, buried in Safed (Hebrew, Ladaat.net)
  38. Yad Vashem: No soap made from Jews (Hebrew) following discussion of soap grave in Magdiel, 2005
  39. Jewish soap funeral (Yad Vashem)
  40. Holocaust era soap find raises new questions Deborah Lipstadt told the newspaper that soap was not mass-produced, although "There were attempts, but it was never practical." Stewart Ain, February 22, 2011, The Jewish Week
  41. The holocaust cellar: Between public memory and the republic memorial (Hebrew) Alex Lavon, Ben Gurion University
  42. The Seventh Million: Israelis and the Holocaust (2000, ISBN 0-8050-6660-8) part 2 page 412 and on.
  43. "Great Patriotic War Museum | Kyiv, Ukraine Attractions". Lonely Planet. Retrieved 2020-09-25.
  44. "Schuldfabrik". Julian Hetzel. Retrieved 2021-01-29.
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