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 Fraktur initials ℜℑ𝔉 (RIF), which was interpreted by some as Rein-jüdisches-Fett ("Pure Jewish Fat"); in German Blackletter font the difference between I and J is only in length (ℑ vs. 𝔍). 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. He 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]

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.[17] 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."[17] 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.[17]

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.[18]

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".[19]

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 sometimes still convinced that the Germans attempted "experimental" soap production on a smaller scale in Danzig and that this claim is still repeated as if a firm fact in several remembrance contexts.[17] He, and the Polish historians such as Monika Tomkiewicz, who works in the investigative department of the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) in Gdańsk, and Piotr Semków, formerly also an employee of the IPN, later a lecturer at the Naval Academy in Gdynia, have thoroughly investigated the claims around the Danzig Anatomical Institute by Spanner and have all concluded the Holocaust-related soap-making claims surrounding it to also be myths, particularly cemented into Polish consciousness by Zofia Nałkowska's 1946 book Medaliony,[20] which was mandatory reading in Poland until 1990, was widely distributed in the Eastern Bloc, and is still popular today.[21] They all alleged that such secondary sources have played a far larger role of spreading information about the claim than scholarly research.

According to both Neander, and Tomkiewicz and Semków, "soap", made from human cadavers, was indeed created at the Danzig institute,[22] but that this was not related to the alleged Holocaust-related crimes of "harvesting" Jews or Poles for soap-making purposes. The notion that the Danzig Anatomical Institute, and Dr. Spanners work therein, is related to the Holocaust originally stems from the findings of bodies and bone maceration processes in the creation of anatomical models in a small brick building on the premise of the anatomical institute. This, and the soapy grease created for injection into the models flexible joints,[21] 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 Nazi concentration camps. The latter claims had been presented as fact and had become a stock phrase in Soviet propaganda, but of which no evidence could be found in the liberated camps. The "human soap" from the bone maceration found in Danzig was conflated with the separate rumors regarding the Nazi concentration camps and were presented together during the Nuremberg trials.[17][21]

Semków stated in 2011 that recent surface analysis of the soap presented during the trial by the IPN Gdánsk branch confirmed presence of human tissue,[23] that a 2006 Polish delegation by Andrzej Stołyhwo from the Gdańsk University of Technology to the Hague also showed that it likely contained human fat.,[24][25] and that 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.[21][26] The IPN concluded the latter investigation stating that Spanner produced between 10 and 100 kg of soap from human corpses sourced, contrary to the testimony of Spanner, from the Stutthof concentration camp, although adding this couldn't be attributed to Nazi crimes. IPN-prosecutor Piotr Niesyn discontinued the investigation due to lack of evidence and did not find grounds to claim that Spanner had incited killings in order to obtain corpses for the Institute. However, it found that in 1944 and 1945 there was a "chemical substance which was essentially soap" obtained from human fat.[21] Tomkiewicz and Semków's research concluded that the soapy grease presented at the trials (claimed to be "unfinished soap"[17]) was a by-product stemming from Spanner's work in bone maceration. Spanner, a well-respected physician who was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1939, would also not have been "experimenting" with soap production (which was widely understood and not something which needed experimentation) instead of teaching his students. Regarding the aforementioned presence of kaolin, the abrasiveness of which has also been criticized as being unsuitable for flexible model-joints,[27] it was noted by Tomkiewicz and Semków that Spanner had previously done research on kaolin injections into cadavers, meaning that the kaolin found in the soap could have come from the cadaver itself, rather than as later additive.[21] They 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 after three days, later being arrested again, but he was once again released after explaining how he had conducted the maceration and injection process. Spanner would "repeat my statement given at the police and add: At the Danzig Anatomic Institute soap was manufactured to a limited extent from human fat. This soap was only used for the manufacturing of joint preparations".[17] After being dismissed by intervention from the British occupation authorities he was declared "clean" by the denazification program in 1948, officially exonerated, and resumed his academic career, becoming director of the Institute of Anatomy in Cologne in 1957 and editor of the esteemed Werner Spalteholz anatomical atlas, before dying in 1960.[21][26]

Neander also points out that the soap-making recipe which was given by Mazur at the Nuremberg trials was contradictory and unrealistic, with a testimony from 12 May 1945 which claimed that 75 kg of fat were produced 8 kg of soap were produced from the first boiling, a testimony from 28 May 1945 which claimed that 70–80 kg of fat were produced from 40 bodies and 25 kg of soap were produced from both boilings, and a testimony from 7 June 1945 which claimed that 40 bodies produced 40 kg of soap from both boilings. These inconsistencies were even pointed out before the Chief Commission.[17] 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.[17]

Neander concludes that no research or experiments on soap-making were conducted in Danzig, that Mazur never made soap according to his "recipe", that 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, and that the only soap created was a by-product of this. Neander concludes that towards the end of the war, "human fatty soap" from the maceration had been used for laboratory cleaning purposes and that Spanner, as head of the institute, bore responsibility for this, but such 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.[17] As Holocaust deniers employ this controversy in order to criticize the veracity of the Nazi genocide,[28] 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.[17]

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").[29] 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".[30]

Though some still claim that evidence of "human soap" from the Danzig institute as proof,[31] mainstream scholars of the Holocaust consider the idea that the Nazis manufactured soap as part of the Holocaust to be part of World War II folklore.[4][5][6][32][33][34][35] Historian Israel Gutman has stated that "it was never done on a mass scale".[31]