Soap made from human corpses

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As part of World War II folklore there are claims that the atrocities of Nazi Germany included soap made from human corpses. In truth, there is no evidence that Nazi Germany organised the large-scale production of soap made of fat extracted from the dead bodies of concentration camp prisoners.

The claim that Germans used the fat from human corpses to make products was already made by the British during World War I. The Times reported in April 1917 that the Germans were boiling down the bodies of their dead soldiers to make soap and other products.^[1] In 1925, the British Foreign Secretary Sir Austen Chamberlain admitted that the "corpse factory" story had been a lie.^[2]

The claim resurfaced very early during World War II, so early that it almost certainly was not true. However, contemporary jokes, threats, rumors and insults show beyond a doubt that many people thought that it was at least believable. The main support for this belief was found in the abbreviation "RIF" which was imprinted on most pieces of soap available in Germany during WWII. It was interpreted as "Reines Judishes Fett" (pure Jewish fat) while, in fact, the abbreviation stood for "Reichsstelle für industrielle Fettversorgung" (National Center for Industrial Fat Provisioning). Later, when human bodies were indeed being plundered for products (hair for felt and insulation, for example), there are indications that some German scientists experimented with making soap from human fat. As of now, only one such case has been identified – that of Professor Rudolf Spanner who produced somewhere between 10 and 100 kg of soap from corpses from the mental hospital in Konradstein, a prison in Königsberg, and the Stutthof concentration camp. The soap was used as injection into joint ligaments and for cleaning the autopsy room at the Anatomy Institute in Danzig where Spanner worked.^[3]

Despite the aforementioned case, there is no evidence for wide-spread use of soap made of human fat, Jewish or otherwise, in Nazi Germany. In fact, the experiments in Danzig must have been stopped immediately once SS-chief Heinrich Himmler heard rumors about them; on November 20, 1942 he ordered an investigation. However, for the very reason that Himmler, who authorized the industrial use of human hair, found the idea of using human fat so repellant, other contemporaries found it believable as a powerful symbol of Nazism's utter disregard for the value of human lives.^[4]

Nowadays, serious scholars of the Holocaust consider the "Jewish Soap Legend" to be part of WWII folklore, rather than reflecting the way how soap was chiefly produced in Germany during WWII. ^[5] Among others this view was held by the reputed Jewish historians Walter Laqueur,^[6] Gitta Sereny,^[7] and Deborah Lipstadt.^[8] 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.^[9][10][11]

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