by
Mark Weber
Feb 11, 2005
Haaretz -
Nazi soap stories were `invention'
Another Talmudic tale
dumped in the trashcan of history. A Yad Vashem spokeswoman said
there is no proof the Nazis made soap from human bodies during the
Holocaust. The sources said similar claims have been made in the past
regarding soap made from Jewish bodies, including soap found last year
in the Nahariya cemetery. In that case the soap was determined not to
have been made from human remains. In 1990 samples from several soaps
claimed to have been made from Jews were sent for DNA testing at Tel
Aviv University. Likewise, those tests determined the soaps did not
contain human fats.
One of the most lurid
and slanderous Holocaust claims is the story that the Germans manufactured
soap from the bodies of their victims. Although a similar charge during
the First World War was exposed as a hoax almost immediately afterwards,
it was nevertheless revived and widely believed during the Second. More
important, this accusation was "proved" at the main Nuremberg trial of
1945-1946, and has been authoritatively endorsed by numerous historians in
the decades since. In recent years, though, as part of a broad retreat
from the most obviously untenable aspects of the "orthodox" extermination
story, Holocaust historians have grudgingly conceded that the human soap
tale is a wartime propaganda lie. In their retreat, though, these
historians have tried to dismiss the soap story as a mere wartime "rumor,"
neglecting to mention that international Jewish organizations and then
Allied governments endorsed and sanctioned this libelous canard.
Wartime rumors that the Germans were manufacturing soap from the corpses
of slaughtered Jews were based in part on the fact that soap bars
distributed by German authorities in Jewish ghettos and camps bore the
impressed initials "RIF," which many took to stand for "Rein juedisches
Fett" or "Pure Jewish Fat." (It did not seem to matter that the letters
were "RIF" and not "RJF.") These rumors spread so widely in 1941 and 1942
that by late 1942 German authorities in Poland and Slovakia were
expressing official concern about their impact.
According to a Polish source quoted in a secret wartime U.S. Army
military intelligence report, for example, the Germans were operating a
"human soap factory" in 1941 at Turek, Poland. "The Germans had brought
thousands of Polish teachers, priests and Jews there and after extracting
the blood serum from their bodies, had thrown them in large pots and
melted off grease to make soap," the intelligence report added.
Macabre "Jewish soap" jokes became popular in the ghettos and camps, and
many non-Jews on the outside came to believe the story. When trains loaded
with Jewish deportees stopped temporarily at rail stations, Poles
reportedly would gleefully shout at them: "Jews to soap!" Even British
prisoners of war interned at Auschwitz in 1944 testified later about the
wartime rumors that corpses of gassing victims were being turned into soap
there.
In spite of its inherently incredible character, the soap story became
an important feature of Jewish and Allied war propaganda. Rabbi Stephen S.
Wise, wartime head of both the World Jewish Congress and the American
Jewish Congress, publicly charged in November 1942 that Jewish corpses
were being "processed into such war-vital commodities as soap, fats and
fertilizer" by the Germans. He further announced that the Germans were
"even exhuming the dead for the value of the corpses," and were paying
fifty marks for each body.
In late 1942, the Congress Weekly, published by the American Jewish
Congress, editorialized that the Germans were turning Jews "by scientific
methods of dissolution into fertilizer, soap and glue." An article in the
same issue reported that Jewish deportees from France and Holland were
being processed into "soap, glue and train oil" in at least two special
factories in Germany. Typical of many other American periodicals, the
influential New Republic reported in early 1943 that the Germans were
"using the bodies of their Jewish victims to make soap and fertilizer in a
factory at Siedlce."
During June and July 1943, two prominent representatives of the
Moscow-based "Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee" toured the United States and
raised more than two million dollars for the Soviet war effort at a series
of mass meetings. At each of these rallies, Soviet Jewish leader Solomon
Mikhoels showed the crowd a bar of soap that he said was made from Jewish
corpses.
After the war the soap story was given important legitimacy at the main
Nuremberg trial. L. N. Smirnov, Chief Counsellor of Justice for the USSR,
declared to the Tribunal:
... 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 jdisches 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
fr 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.
Mark Weber is editor of
The Journal of Historical Review, published six times yearly by the
Institute for Historical Review. He studied history at the University of
Illinois (Chicago), the University of Munich, Portland State University,
and Indiana University (M.A., 1977). For five days in March 1988, he
testified as a recognized expert witness on the "final solution" and the
Holocaust issue in a Toronto District Court case. He is the author of many
published articles, reviews and essays on various aspects of modern
European history. Weber has appeared as a guest on numerous radio talk
shows, and on the nationally-syndicated "Montel Williams" television show.
For a current catalog,
with a complete listing of books and audio and video tapes, send one
dollar to:
Institute For Historical Review
Post Office Box 2739
Newport Beach, California 92659
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