Soap made from human corpses
Encyclopedia
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
it was believed that soap
Soap
In chemistry, soap is a salt of a fatty acid.IUPAC. "" Compendium of Chemical Terminology, 2nd ed. . Compiled by A. D. McNaught and A. Wilkinson. Blackwell Scientific Publications, Oxford . XML on-line corrected version: created by M. Nic, J. Jirat, B. Kosata; updates compiled by A. Jenkins. ISBN...
was being mass produced from the bodies of Polish and Jewish concentration camp
Nazi concentration camps
Nazi Germany maintained concentration camps throughout the territories it controlled. The first Nazi concentration camps set up in Germany were greatly expanded after the Reichstag fire of 1933, and were intended to hold political prisoners and opponents of the regime...
victims.
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 being mass-produced and distributed were used by the Nazis to frighten camp inmates.
Evidence does exist, however, which indicates the possibility that German researchers had developed a process for the industrial production of soap from human bodies.
World War I
The claim that Germans used the fat from human corpses to make products had already been made by the BritishUnited Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
during World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
(see Kadaververwertungsanstalt
Kadaververwertungsanstalt
The Kadaververwertungsanstalten , also sometimes called the "German Corpse-Rendering Works" or "Tallow Factory" was one of the most notorious British anti-German propaganda efforts of World War I....
), with The Times
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
reporting in April 1917 that the Germans were rendering down the bodies of their dead soldiers for fat to make soap and other products. It was not until 1925 that the British Foreign Secretary Sir Austen Chamberlain
Austen Chamberlain
Sir Joseph Austen Chamberlain, KG was a British statesman, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize and half-brother of Neville Chamberlain.- Early life and career :...
officially admitted that the "corpse factory" story had been an error.
World War II rumours
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 acronyms, "i" and "j" were often used interchangeably (in German Blackletter, a k a Fraktur the difference 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.Raul Hilberg
Raul Hilberg
Raul Hilberg was an Austrian-born American political scientist and historian. He was widely considered to be the world's preeminent scholar of the Holocaust, and his three-volume, 1,273-page magnum opus, The Destruction of the European Jews, is regarded as a seminal study of the Nazi Final...
reports such stories as circulating in Lublin
Lublin
Lublin is the ninth largest city in Poland. It is the capital of Lublin Voivodeship with a population of 350,392 . Lublin is also the largest Polish city east of the Vistula river...
as early as October 1942. The Germans themselves were aware of the stories, as SS
Schutzstaffel
The Schutzstaffel |Sig runes]]) was a major paramilitary organization under Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. Built upon the Nazi ideology, the SS under Heinrich Himmler's command was responsible for many of the crimes against humanity during World War II...
-chief Heinrich Himmler
Heinrich Himmler
Heinrich Luitpold Himmler was Reichsführer of the SS, a military commander, and a leading member of the Nazi Party. As Chief of the German Police and the Minister of the Interior from 1943, Himmler oversaw all internal and external police and security forces, including the Gestapo...
had received a letter describing the Polish people's 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. 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.
Joachim Neander, in a German paper presented at the 28th conference of the German Studies Association
German Studies Association
The German Studies Association is an international organization of scholars in history, literature, economics, culture studies, and political science who study Germany, Austria, and Switzerland...
, cites the following quote by Himmler from a November 20, 1942 letter to the head of the Gestapo, Heinrich Müller. Himmler had written to Müller due to an exposé by Rabbi Dr. Stephen Wise
Stephen Samuel Wise
Stephen Samuel Wise was an Austro-Hungarian-born American Reform rabbi and Zionist leader.-Early life:...
, which mentioned the soap rumor and had been printed in The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
:
Müller was to make inquires 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.
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
Ilya Ehrenburg
Ilya Grigoryevich Ehrenburg was a Soviet writer, journalist, translator, and cultural figure.Ehrenburg is among the most prolific and notable authors of the Soviet Union; he published around one hundred titles. He became known first and foremost as a novelist and a journalist - in particular, as a...
and Vasily Grossman
Vasily Grossman
Vasily Semyonovich Grossman was a Soviet writer and journalist. Grossman trained as an engineer and worked in the Donets Basin, but changed career in the 1930s and published short stories and several novels...
. The specific story is part of a report titled "The Extermination of the Jews of Lvov" attributed to I. Herts and Naftali Nakht:
Human soap production at the Danzig Anatomical Institute during World War II
During the Nuremberg TrialsNuremberg Trials
The Nuremberg Trials were a series of military tribunals, held by the victorious Allied forces of World War II, most notable for the prosecution of prominent members of the political, military, and economic leadership of the defeated Nazi Germany....
, Sigmund Mazur, a laboratory assistant at the Danzig Anatomical Institute, testified that soap had been made from corpse fat at the camp, and claimed that 70 to 80 kg of fat collected from 40 bodies could produce more than 25 kg of soap, and that the finished soap was retained by Professor Rudolf Spanner
Rudolf Spanner
Rudolf Spanner was Director of the Danzig Anatomical Institute during World War II. On his own initiative, he set up a process to produce soap from human fat in 1943-44 and a limited quantity of the soap was produced on his order to clean autopsy rooms.In his book "Russia at War 1941 to 1945",...
. 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
Thomas Blatt
Thomas "Toivi" Blatt was one of the few survivors who successfully escaped Sobibor extermination camp. While fleeing the SS he was betrayed by a farmer who was hiding him resulting in a gunshot injury to the jaw. The bullet remains there to this day...
, 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. Danzig was the German name of the now-Polish city of Gdańsk
Gdansk
Gdańsk is a Polish city on the Baltic coast, at the centre of the country's fourth-largest metropolitan area.The city lies on the southern edge of Gdańsk Bay , in a conurbation with the city of Gdynia, spa town of Sopot, and suburban communities, which together form a metropolitan area called the...
.
The recipe given by Mazur read, "5 kilos of human fat are mixed with 10 liters of water and 500 or 1,000 grams of caustic soda. All this is boiled 2 or 3 hours and then cooled. The soap floats to the surface while the water and other sediment remain at the bottom. A bit of salt and soda is added to this mixture. Then fresh water is added and the mixture again boiled 2 or 3 hours. After having cooled, the soap is poured into molds."
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.
In his book Russia at War 1941 to 1945, Alexander Werth
Alexander Werth
Alexander Werth was a Russian-born, naturalized British writer, journalist, and war correspondent.-Biography:Werth's family fled to the United Kingdom in the wake of the Russian Revolution....
reported that while visiting Gdansk/Danzig in 1945 shortly after its liberation 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 torsoes pickled in some liquid, and its pails full of a flakey substance - human soap".
Postwar
The idea that "human soap" was manufactured on an industrial scale by the Nazis was published after the war by Alain ResnaisAlain Resnais
Alain Resnais is a French film director whose career has extended over more than six decades. After training as a film editor in the mid-1940s, he went on to direct a number of short films which included Nuit et Brouillard , an influential documentary about the Nazi concentration camps.He began...
, who treated the testimony of Holocaust survivors as fact in his noted 1955 holocaust documentary movie Nuit et brouillard. Some postwar Israelis also referred disdainfully to Jewish victims of Nazism with the Hebrew word סבון (sabon, "soap").
Though evidence does exist of small-scale soap production, possibly experimental, in the camp at Stutthof concentration camp
Stutthof concentration camp
Stutthof was the first Nazi concentration camp built outside of 1937 German borders.Completed on September 2, 1939, it was located in a secluded, wet, and wooded area west of the small town of Sztutowo . The town is located in the former territory of the Free City of Danzig, 34 km east of...
near Danzig/Gdansk, mainstream scholars of the Holocaust
The Holocaust
The Holocaust , also known as the Shoah , was the genocide of approximately six million European Jews and millions of others during World War II, a programme of systematic state-sponsored murder by Nazi...
consider the idea that the Nazis manufactured soap on an industrial scale to be part of World War II folklore
Folklore
Folklore consists of legends, music, oral history, proverbs, jokes, popular beliefs, fairy tales and customs that are the traditions of a culture, subculture, or group. It is also the set of practices through which those expressive genres are shared. The study of folklore is sometimes called...
. Historian Israel Gutman
Israel Gutman
Israel Gutman is a Polish-born Israeli historian of the Holocaust.Israel Gutman was born in Warsaw, Poland. After playing an important role in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, he was deported to the Majdanek, Auschwitz and Mauthausen concentration camps. His older sister died in the ghetto. After...
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
Robert Melvin Spector
-Biography:Spector grew up in Boston, Massachusetts and earned his BA and MA at Boston University. After serving in Korea, he earned his J.D. from Boston College and the PhD in history from Boston University. He was a professor at Northeastern University School of Law]] and at the...
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
International Court of Justice
The International Court of Justice is the primary judicial organ of the United Nations. It is based in the Peace Palace in The Hague, Netherlands...
in The Hague was given for analysis to Andrzej Stołyhwo, an expert in the chemistry of fats from the Gdansk University of Technology
Gdansk University of Technology
The Gdańsk University of Technology is a technical university in Gdańsk-Wrzeszcz, and one of the oldest universities in Poland. It has nine faculties and more than 24 thousand undergraduate, as well as about 400 doctoral students...
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-WWII 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 Kaliningrad, Bydgoszcz and Stutthof concentration camp.
Today Holocaust deniers
Holocaust denial
Holocaust denial is the act of denying the genocide of Jews in World War II, usually referred to as the Holocaust. The key claims of Holocaust denial are: the German Nazi government had no official policy or intention of exterminating Jews, Nazi authorities did not use extermination camps and gas...
employ this controversy to cast aspersions on the veracity of the Nazi genocide
Genocide
Genocide is defined as "the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group", though what constitutes enough of a "part" to qualify as genocide has been subject to much debate by legal scholars...
.
Novels and plays
This process figures in the 1962 novel Dog YearsDog Years (novel)
Dog Years, published in Germany in 1963 as Hundejahre, is a novel by Günter Grass. It is the third and last volume of his Danzig Trilogy, the other two being The Tin Drum and Cat and Mouse....
, the third book of Gunter Grass
Günter Grass
Günter Wilhelm Grass is a Nobel Prize-winning German author, poet, playwright, sculptor and artist.He was born in the Free City of Danzig...
's "Danzig Trilogy". The passage is several pages long but runs in part (in Ralph Manheim
Ralph Manheim
Ralph Frederick Manheim was an American translator of German and French literature, as well as occasional works from Dutch, Polish and Hungarian...
's translation) "And piles of bones, heaped up for the sake of purity, will melt cook boil in order that soap, pure and cheap: but even soap cannot wash pure."
The Soap Myth
The Soap Myth
The Soap Myth is a 2009 play by American playwright Jeff Cohen. The play had a workshop run in July 2009 at the Dog Run Repertory Company, and had an Off-Broadway run in the fall of 2009.-Description:...
is a 2009 play about the Nazi production of soap from the bodies of the people they murdered.
See also
- KadaververwertungsanstaltKadaververwertungsanstaltThe Kadaververwertungsanstalten , also sometimes called the "German Corpse-Rendering Works" or "Tallow Factory" was one of the most notorious British anti-German propaganda efforts of World War I....
("corpse utilization factories") - Anthropodermic bibliopegyAnthropodermic bibliopegyAnthropodermic bibliopegy is the practice of binding books in human skin. Though extremely uncommon in modern times, the technique dates back to at least the 17th century...
(In some cases skin with tattoos was preserved in Nazi concentration camps) - Jewish skeleton collectionJewish skeleton collectionThe Jewish skeleton collection was an attempt by the Nazis to create an anthropological display to showcase the alleged racial inferiority of the "Jewish race" and to emphasize the Jews status as untermenschen as opposed to the German race which the Nazis considered to be Aryan ubermenschen...
{Jews killed for their skeletons}