Soap made from human corpses

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]

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]

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 Rein-Judisches-Fett ("Pure Jewish Fat"); in German Blackletter font the difference between I and J 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.[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. The author 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]

Polish 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.[3] 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."[3] 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.[3]

Wikisource has original text related to this article: Testimony of Sigmund Mazur

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.[17]

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".[18]

Polish 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 still convinced that the Germans attempted small-scale, "experimental" soap production in Danzig, and this claim is still repeated as if it is a firm fact in several remembrance contexts.[3] He, and the other Polish historians such as Monika Tomkiewicz and Piotr Semków, have thoroughly investigated the claims of human soap production in the Danzig Anatomical Institute by Spanner and all of them have concluded that these soap-making claims are also myths, that were particularly cemented into Polish consciousness by Zofia Nałkowska's 1946 book Medaliony[19], which was mandatory reading in Poland until 1990, was widely distributed in the Eastern Bloc, and is still popular today.[20] They all alleged that such secondary sources have played a far larger role of spreading information about the claim than scholarly research.

It is pointed out that the soap-making recipe which was given by Manzur at the Nuremberg trials was contradictory and unrealistic, with a testimony from 12 May 1945 which claimed that 75kg of fat were produced 8kg of soap were produced from the first boiling, a testimony from 28 May 1945 which claimed that 70-80kg of fat were produced from 40 bodies and 25kg of soap were produced from both boilings, and a testimony from 7 June 1945 which claimed that 40 bodies produced 40kg of soap from both boilings. These inconsistencies were even pointed out before the Chief Commission.[3] 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.[3]

Tomkiewicz and Semków state that recent surface analysis of soap by the Department of Forensic Medicine at the Medical University of Gdańsk tested negative for evidence of human DNA. They also document how a 2006 Polish delegation by Andrzej Stołyhwo from the Gdańsk University of Technology to the Hague which sampled the soap-material which was presented at the Nuremberg trials showed that it likely contained human fat[21][22], but the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) Gdánsk branch closed the investigation citing lack of evidence of crimes committed. However, 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.[20] Tomkiewicz and Semków's research, however, concluded that Spanner, a well-respected physician who was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1939, would not have been "experimenting" with soap production (which was widely understood and not something which needed experimentation) instead of teaching his students, and that the soapy grease (claimed to be "unfinished soap"[3]), a by-product stemming from bone maceration in the creation of anatomical models for the institute, was injected into the models flexible joints.[20] They further noted that Spanner had previously done research on kaolin injections into cadavers, and stated that the kaolin could have come from the cadaver itself, rather than from a later additive.[20]

Both Neander, and Tomkiewicz and Semków, state that the origin of this myth comes from the findings of bodies and maceration processes in a small brick building on the premise the anatomical institute which 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 concentration camps, which had been presented as fact and had also become a stock phrase in Soviet propaganda, but of which no evidence could be found in the liberated camps. The "human soap" which was found in Danzig was conflated with the separate rumors regarding the concentration camps and they were presented together during the Nuremberg trials.[3][20] Neander concludes that no research, experiments or production on soap-making were conducted in Danzig, that Manzur never made soap according to his "recipe", that the 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. However, his research did prove that towards the end of the war, the grease was used for simple cleaning purposes and that Spanner bore responsibility for this, whether he was aware of it or not, as head of the institute, but that the 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.[3]

Tomkiewicz and Semków 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 three days later. Later he was arrested again, but he was once again released after explaining how he had conducted the maceration and injection process. He was officially exonerated in 1948 and resumed his academic career.[20]

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.[3]

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").[23] 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".[24]

Though some still claim that evidence of soap production exists in the Danzig institute, and they also claim that human fat was sourced at the Stutthof concentration camp near Danzig/Gdańsk,[25] mainstream scholars of the Holocaust consider the idea that the Nazis manufactured soap on an industrial scale to be part of World War II folklore.[4][5][6][26][27][28][29] Historian Israel Gutman has stated that "it was never done on a mass scale".[25] 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 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.[30]

Today, Holocaust deniers employ this controversy in order to criticize the veracity of the Nazi genocide.[31]