The Holocaust is the most thoroughly documented genocide in history. The documentation includes the Reich’s own administrative records, the captured German correspondence, the surviving camp documents, the photographic and film record made by the perpetrators themselves, the testimony of around half a million survivors recorded across the post-war decades, the perpetrator confessions given at trial and outside court, the forensic work at the killing sites, and the demographic record of the European Jewish population. The historians’ confidence in the central facts of the killing is built from these layers of mutually-corroborating evidence. The pages in this section, however, treat a smaller and more specific question: which post-war stories about the camps are documented, which are partly documented and partly inflated, and which are wartime rumour with little or no documentary basis. The honest separation of these categories is itself a historical task and is the subject of this section.
The structure of the question
Many of the most-told stories about the camps fall into three rough categories. The first is documented atrocity: events that the surviving records, photographs, perpetrator confessions and survivor testimony all corroborate, and that are accepted as historical by the historiographical consensus. The mass shootings of the Einsatzgruppen, the gassing operations at Auschwitz-Birkenau and the Reinhard camps, the systematic starvation in the ghettos, the Sonderkommando work at the crematoria: these are documented atrocities. They are not subjects of this section.
The second category is documented atrocity that has been inflated in post-war popular memory. The Buchenwald pathology block did preserve human skin and human anatomical specimens; the post-war story that the camp commandant’s wife had had multiple lampshades made from prisoner skin for domestic decoration is the inflated version of a smaller documented practice. The Anatomical Institute of Danzig did produce a small experimental quantity of soap from human corpses in 1944; the wartime rumour that the Reich was industrially rendering Jewish bodies into soap on a continental scale was the inflated version of that documented but limited operation. Pages in this section that treat these cases preserve the kernel and identify the inflation.
The third category is wartime rumour that has not been corroborated and that the post-war historiography has rejected. The general soap-rendering story falls largely in this category, with the Danzig exception preserved. Other wartime rumours, including specific stories about industrial uses of human hair, of human bones, and of specific named camps as sites of practices that the camps did not in fact host, have similarly been rejected by the historians while their kernels (the documented use of prisoner hair as industrial fibre at some camps, the documented use of bone meal in particular cases) have been preserved.
Why the distinction matters
The distinction between documented atrocity and inflated post-war rumour is not academic point-scoring. It is the practical condition of being able to defend the historical record against the deniers. Holocaust deniers have used the demonstrable falsity of the wider soap-and-lampshade stories to argue, by extension, that the documented core of the killing programme is similarly mythical. The argument fails on the specifics, because the documented core does not depend on the inflated stories. But the argument gains rhetorical traction whenever a defender of the historical record cannot, when challenged, separate the documented from the rumoured.
The position the historians have therefore settled on is the position the pages below take. Acknowledge the documented atrocities in their full and exact form. Acknowledge the kernel of the inflated stories, identify the inflation, and do not allow the inflation to do the rhetorical work the kernel cannot do alone. Reject the wholly mythical stories and explain why they were believed and how they were corrected.
The pages in this section
The Lampshade Myth treats the most-cited inflated case. The Buchenwald pathology block preserved human skin as research material; the lampshade story attached itself to that documented atrocity and grew larger than the evidence supports.
Ilse Koch and the Buchenwald Evidence treats the figure on whom the lampshade story was personally hung. Koch was a senior figure in the Buchenwald regime, was tried twice and convicted twice, and the documentary basis for the convictions was substantial; the lampshade story is not what those convictions rested on.
Soap Made from Human Fat treats the most-believed wartime rumour. The Anatomical Institute of Danzig produced a small experimental quantity of soap from human corpses in 1944; the wartime story of industrial-scale rendering on a continental basis was not corroborated.
Sources
- Yehuda Bauer, “Whose Holocaust?”, Midstream, November 1980
- Lucy S. Dawidowicz, The Holocaust and the Historians, Harvard University Press, 1981
- Deborah E. Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, Free Press, 1993
- Joachim Neander, “The Danzig Soap Case”, German Studies Review, vol 29 no 1, 2006
- Alexandra Przyrembel, “Transfixed by an Image”: Ilse Koch, the “Kommandeuse of Buchenwald”, German History, vol 19 no 3, 2001
- Robert Jan van Pelt, The Case for Auschwitz, Indiana University Press, 2002
- Yad Vashem, “Combating Holocaust Denial: Origins of Holocaust Denial”, https://www.yadvashem.org
- USHMM, “Combating Holocaust Denial”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org