18th century 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. 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. In 1787, the French inspector of manufactures
Jean-Marie Roland de la Platière reportedly proposed a scheme to the Academy of Lyons for utilizing the bodies of the dead by converting the fat into lamp-oil and the bones into phosphoric acid.
World War I The claim that Germans used the fat from human corpses to make products, including soap, was made during
World War I. This allegation appears to have originated as a rumor which was spread by the British and Belgian media. The first recorded reference was made 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." 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. 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. The belief that the British had deliberately invented the story was later used by the Nazis.
World War II Rumors which alleged that the Nazis produced soap from the bodies of concentration camp inmates were widely circulated during the war. Germany suffered from 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 because bars of soap were marked with the initials (RIF), which some believed stood for "'
" ("pure Jewish fat"). However, in fact, stood for ' ("National Center for Industrial Fat Provisioning", the German government agency which was responsible for the wartime production and distribution of soap and washing products). soap was a poor quality
substitute for soap and did not contain any fat, human or otherwise. Rumors about the origin of soap and the meaning of the labeling were also spread in the concentration camps. In his book
Solitary in the Overwhelming Turbulence: Five Years as a Prisoner-of-War in East Prussia, Naphtali Karchmer describes his years in captivity as a Jewish-Polish POW. He writes about gray, rectangular, low-quality pieces of soap which he and other POWs received with the letters "" inscribed on a center depression. These were only claimed to be made of "''
" ("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 which is titled "The Extermination of the Jews of
Lvov" attributed to I. Herts and Naftali Nakht:
Raul Hilberg reports that such stories were circulated in
Lublin as early as October 1942. The Germans were aware that the stories were being circulated, because
SS-chief
Heinrich Himmler received a letter which described the Poles' belief that Jews were being "boiled into soap", an indication that the Poles feared that they would suffer a similar fate. Because the rumors were circulated so widely, some segments of the Polish population boycotted the purchase of soap. One of the first instances of the claim concerned
Oskar Dirlewanger, who was rumoured to have "cut up Jewish women and boiled them with horse fat to make soap". Historian Joachim Neander, in a German paper which he presented at the 28th conference of the
German Studies Association in Washington D.C., cites the following comment, which is contained in a letter Himmler wrote to the head of the Gestapo,
Heinrich Müller; the letter is dated 20 November 1942. Himmler wrote the letter to Müller in response to an exposé by
Stephen Wise printed in
The New York Times that mentioned the soap rumor: Müller was instructed to make inquiries if "abuse" had happened somewhere, and he was also instructed to report the results of his inquiries to Himmler "on an SS oath". Neander goes on to state that the letter represents circumstantial evidence which indicates that it was Nazi policy to abstain from processing corpses due to their known desire to keep their mass murder as secret as possible. 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. or "Don't eat much: the Germans will have less soap!"
Danzig Anatomical Institute , 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 he also claimed that 70 to 80 kg (155–175 lb) of fat which was collected from 40 bodies could produce more than of soap, and the finished soap was retained by Professor
Rudolf Spanner. Two British POWs who had to perform auxiliary tasks at the Institute provided witness-accounts. In his book
Russia at War, 1941–1945,
Alexander Werth claims that while visiting /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 it "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". Historian Joachim Neander states that the rumors which allege that the Nazis produced soap from the bodies of Jews whom they murdered in their concentration camps, long-since thoroughly debunked, are still widely believed, and they are exploited by
Holocaust deniers. However, he goes on to say that even scholars who reject the aforementioned claim 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 this claim is still repeated as if it is a firm fact in several remembrance contexts. He, and the Polish historian 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 Spanner's claims which surround the Danzig Anatomical Institute and all of them have concluded that the Holocaust-related soap-making claims which surround it are myths, particularly cemented into Polish consciousness by
Zofia Nałkowska's 1946 book
Medaliony, which was mandatory reading in
Poland until 1990, was widely distributed in the
Eastern Bloc, and it is still popular today. They all alleged that such secondary sources have played a far greater role in spreading information about the claim than scholarly research has. According to both Neander, and Tomkiewicz and Semków, "soap", made from human cadavers, came into existence at the Danzig institute, it was not related to the alleged Holocaust-related crimes of "harvesting" Jews or Poles for soap-making purposes, because the connection between "the Holocaust" on one side and the "Danzig soap" on the other side only exists by way of the confirmed false rumors of "concentration camp soap" which were circulated during the war. The idea that the Danzig Anatomical Institute, and Dr. Spanner's work therein, was related to the Holocaust originally stemmed 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 which was created for the purpose of injecting it into the models' flexible joints, and 2006 respectively, but his and Tomkiewicz research concluded that this 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. An investigation also maintained that at least 10 kg of soap from human fat was produced, sourced from the
Stutthof concentration camp, based on the aforementioned testimonies which were delivered in 1945 and the presence of
kaolin in the samples indicated that it was probably used as a cleaning soap due to its abrasive qualities, 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. Neander states:
Postwar 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) also referred disdainfully to Jewish victims of Nazism who arrived in Israel with the Hebrew word ('''', "soap"). In fact, this offensive word was not linked to the rumours about Nazi crimes and human soap, but it had the sense of "soft", "weaklings". Though some still claim that evidence of "human soap" from the Danzig institute as proof, 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. Historian
Israel Gutman has stated that "it was never done on a mass scale". ==Legacy==