... The same base, rationalized SS technical minds which created gas chambers and murder vans, began devising such methods of complete annihilation of human bodies, which would not only conceal the traces of their crimes, but also to serve in the manufacturing of certain products. In the Danzig Anatomical Institute, semi-industrial experiments in the production of soap from human bodies and the tanning of human skin for industrial purposes were carried out.
Smirnov quoted at length from an affidavit by Sigmund Mazur, an Institute
employee, which was accepted as Nuremberg exhibit USSR-197. It alleged
that Dr. Rudolf Spanner, the head of the Danzig Institute, had ordered
the production of soap from corpses in 1943. According to Mazur's affidavit,
Dr. Spanner's operation was of interest to high-ranking German officials.
Education Minister Bernhard Rust and Health Leader Dr. Leonardo Conti,
as well as professors from other medical institutes, came to witness Spanner's
efforts. Mazur also claimed to have used the "human soap" to
wash himself and his laundry.
A human soap "recipe," allegedly prepared by Dr. Spanner (Nuremberg
document USSR-196), was also presented. Finally, a sample of what was supposed
to be a piece of "human soap" was submitted to the Nuremberg
Tribunal as exhibit USSR-393.
In his closing address to the Tribunal, chief British prosecutor Sir Hartley
Shawcross echoed his Soviet colleague: "On occasion, even the bodies
of their victims were used to make good the wartime shortage of soap."
And in their final judgment, the Nuremberg Tribunal judges found that "attempts
were made to utilize the fat from the bodies of the victims in the commercial
manufacture of soap."
It is worth emphasizing here that the "evidence" presented at
the Nuremberg Tribunal for the bogus soap story was no less substantial
than the "evidence" presented for the claims of mass extermination
in "gas chambers." At least in the former case, an actual sample
of soap supposedly made from corpses was submitted in evidence.
After the war, supposed Holocaust victims were solemnly buried, in the
form of soap bars, in Jewish cemeteries. In 1948, for example, four such
bars wrapped in a funeral shroud were ceremoniously buried according to
Jewish religious ritual at the Haifa cemetery in Israel. Other bars of
"Jewish soap" have been displayed as grim Holocaust relics at
the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, the Stutthof Museum near Gdansk
(Danzig), the Yivo Institute in New York, the Holocaust Museum in Philadelphia,
the Jewish Holocaust Centre in Melbourne (Australia), and at various locations
in Israel.
Numerous Jews who lived in German ghettos and camps during the war helped
keep the soap story alive many years later. Ben Edelbaum, for example,
wrote in his 1980 memoir Growing Up in the Holocaust:
Often with our rations in the ghettos, the Germans had included a bar of soap branded with initials R.J.F. which came to be known as "RIF" soap. It wasn't until the war had ended that we learned the horrible truth about the bar of soap. Had we known in the ghetto, every bar of "RIF" soap would have been accorded a sacred Jewish funeral in the cemetery at Marysin. As it was, we were completely oblivious to its origin and used the bones and flesh of our murdered loved ones to wash our bodies.
Nesse Godin was transferred from a ghetto in Lithuania to the Stutthof concentration camp in the spring of 1944. In a 1983 interview, she recalled her arrival there:
That day they gave us a shower and a piece of soap. After the war we found out the soap was made out of pure Jew fat, Rein Juden Fett, marked in the initials on the soap that I washed with. For all I know sometimes maybe there was a little bit of my father's fat in that soap that I washed with. How do you think I feel when I think about that?
Mel Mermelstein, the former Auschwitz inmate who was featured in the
sensationalized April 1991 cable television movie "Never Forget"
(and who sued the Institute for Historical Review and three other defendants
for $11 million), declared in a 1981 sworn deposition that he and other
camp inmates used soap bars made from human fat. It was an "established
fact," he insisted, that the soap he washed with was made from Jewish
bodies.
Renowned "Nazi hunter" Simon Wiesenthal repeated the soap tale
in a series of articles published in 1946 in the Austrian Jewish community
paper Der Neue Weg. In the first of these he wrote:
During the last weeks of March the Romanian press reported an unusual piece of news: In the small Romanian city of Folticeni twenty boxes of soap were buried in the Jewish cemetery with full ceremony and complete funeral rites. This soap had been found recently in a former German army depot. On the boxes were the initials RIF, "Pure Jewish Fat." These boxes were destined for the Waffen-SS. The wrapping paper revealed with completely cynical objectivity that this soap was manufactured from Jewish bodies. Surprisingly, the thorough Germans forgot to describe whether the soap was produced from children, girls, men or elderly persons.
Wiesenthal went on:
After 1942 people in the General Government [Poland] knew quite well what the RIF soap meant. The civilized world may not believe the joy with which the Nazis and their women in the General Government thought of this soap. In each piece of soap they saw a Jew who had been magically put there, and had thus been prevented from growing into a second Freud, Ehrlich or Einstein.
In another article he observed: "The production of soap from human
fat is so unbelievable that even some who were in concentration camps find
it difficult to comprehend."
Over the years, numerous supposedly reputable historians have promoted
the durable soap story. Journalist-historian William L. Shirer, for example,
repeated it in his best-selling work, The Rise and Fall of the Third
Reich.
Leading Soviet war propagandist Ilya Ehrenburg wrote in his postwar memoir:
"I have held in my hand a cake of soap stamped with the legend 'pure
Jewish soap', prepared from the corpses of people who had been destroyed.
But there is no need to speak of these things: thousands of books have
been written about them."
A standard history studies textbook used in Canadian secondary schools,
Canada: The Twentieth Century, told students that the Germans "boiled"
the corpses of their Jewish victims "to make soap." The Anatomy
of Nazism, a booklet published and distributed by the Zionist "Anti-Defamation
League" of B'nai B'rith, stated: "The process of brutalization
did not end with the mass murders themselves. Large quantities of soap
were manufactured from the corpses of those murdered."
A detailed 1981 work, Hitler's Death Camps, repeated the soap story
in lurid detail. While noting that "some historians claim that the
Nazi manufacture of soap from human fat is just a grim rumor," author
Konnilyn Feig nevertheless accepted the story because "most East European
camp scholars ... validate the soap stories, and other kinds of bars made
from humans are displayed in Eastern Europe -- I have seen many over the
years."
New York Rabbi Arthur Schneier repeated the tale at the opening ceremony
of the largest Holocaust meeting in history. In his invocation to the "American
Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors," held in Washington in April
1983, the Rabbi solemnly declared: "We remember the bars of soap with
the initials RJF -- Rein jüdisches Fett, Pure Jewish Fat -- made from
the bodies of our loved ones."
In spite of all the apparently impressive evidence, the charge that the
Germans manufactured soap from human beings is a falsehood, as Holocaust
historians are now belatedly acknowledging. The "RIF" soap bar
initials that supposedly stood for "Pure Jewish Fat" actually
indicated nothing more sinister than "Reich Center for Industrial
Fat Provisioning" ("Reichsstelle für Industrielle Fettversorgung"),
a German agency responsible for wartime production and distribution of
soap and washing products. RIF soap was a poor quality substitute that
contained no fat at all, human or otherwise.
Shortly after the war the public prosecutor's office of Flensburg, Germany,
began legal proceedings against Dr. Rudolf Spanner for his alleged role
in producing human soap at the Danzig Institute. But after an investigation
the charge was quietly dropped. In a January 1968 letter, the office stated
that its inquiry had determined that no soap from human corpses was made
at the Danzig Institute during the war.
More recently, Jewish historian Walter Laqueur "denied established
history" by acknowledging in his 1980 book, The Terrible Secret,
that the human soap story has no basis in reality. Gitta Sereny, another
Jewish historian, noted in her book Into That Darkness: "The
universally accepted story that the corpses were used to make soap and
fertilizer is finally refuted by the generally very reliable Ludwigsburg
Central Authority for Investigation into Nazi Crimes."
Deborah Lipstadt, a professor of modern Jewish history, similarly "rewrote
history" when she confirmed in 1981: "The fact is that the Nazis
never used the bodies of Jews, or for that matter anyone else, for the
production of soap."
In April 1990, professor Yehuda Bauer of Israel's Hebrew University, regarded
as a leading Holocaust historian, as well as Shmuel Krakowski, archives
director of Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust center, confirmed that the human
soap story is not true. Camp inmates "were prepared to believe any
horror stories about their persecutors," Bauer said. At the same time,
though, he had the chutzpah to blame the legend on "the Nazis."
In fact, blame for the soap story lies rather with individuals such as
Simon Wiesenthal and Stephen Wise, organizations like the World Jewish
Congress, and the victorious Allied powers, none of whom has ever apologized
for promoting this vile falsehood.
Why did Bauer and Krakowski decide that this was the appropriate time to
officially abandon the soap story? Krakowski himself hints that a large
part of the motivation for this "tactical retreat" has been to
save what's left of the sinking Holocaust ship by throwing overboard the
most obvious falsehoods. In the face of the growing Revisionist challenge,
easily demonstrable falsehoods like the soap story have become dangerous
embarrassments because they raise doubts about the entire Holocaust legend.
As Krakowski put it: "Historians have concluded that soap was not
made from human fat. When so many people deny the Holocaust ever happened,
why give them something to use against the truth?"
The bad faith of those making this calculated and belated concession to
truth is shown by their failure to note that the soap myth was authoritatively
"confirmed" at Nuremberg, and by their unwillingness to deal
with the implications of that confirmation for the credibility of the Tribunal
and other supposedly trustworthy authorities in establishing other, more
fundamental aspects of the Holocaust story.
The striking contrast between the prompt postwar disavowal by the British
government of the infamous "human soap" lie of the First World
War, and the way in which a similarly baseless propaganda story from the
Second World War was officially endorsed by the victorious Allied powers
and then authoritatively maintained for so many years not only points up
the dispiriting lack of integrity on the part of so many Western historians,
but underscores the general decline in Western ethical standards during
this century.
The "human soap" story demonstrates anew the tremendous impact
that a wartime rumor, no matter how fantastic, can have once it has taken
hold, particularly when it is disseminated as a propaganda lie by influential
individuals and powerful organizations. That so many intelligent and otherwise
thoughtful people could ever have seriously believed that the Germans distributed
bars of soap brazenly labeled with letters indicating that they were manufactured
from Jewish corpses shows how readily even the most absurd Holocaust fables
can be -- and are -- accepted as fact.