The wartime rumour that the Germans were processing the corpses of murdered Jews into soap was the most widely-believed of the Holocaust myths during the war and the immediate post-war years. The rumour was repeated by Allied governments, by Soviet propaganda, by Jewish refugee organisations, by survivors themselves, and at the Nuremberg trial. Bars of yellowish soap allegedly made from human fat were buried in mass graves in Israel and elsewhere as memorial objects. The rumour has, on the historiographical evidence, almost no documented basis. The exception is one small experimental operation at the Anatomical Institute of Danzig in 1944, which produced a small quantity of soap from corpses; that operation was real but was not industrial in scale and not part of any wider programme. The wartime rumour as it was generally believed has not been corroborated.
The wartime rumour
The story of soap made from Jewish corpses had a long pre-history. A similar rumour had circulated during the First World War, in which the Germans were said to be rendering the bodies of dead Allied soldiers into industrial fats; that earlier rumour was investigated and rejected after the war. The Second World War rumour took shape in 1942 to 1943 in occupied Poland, in the form of stories about a “Jewish soap factory” that was variously located at Stutthof, at Belzec, at Treblinka, or at unspecified sites in the General Government. The most-cited specific claim was that bars of soap stamped with the initials “RIF” stood for Reines Judenfett (Pure Jewish Fat) and were the industrial product of the rendering of Jewish corpses.
The RIF stamping was real. It stood for Reichsstelle für Industrielle Fettversorgung (Reich Centre for Industrial Fat Provision), the wartime German agency that controlled fat distribution. RIF soap was a standard wartime German industrial soap manufactured from various synthetic and animal-fat sources, and was distributed across occupied Europe. The reading of the initials as Reines Judenfett was a wartime mishearing or wilful reinterpretation. The Reichsstelle had no involvement in any human-corpse processing.
The Danzig case
The single documented exception to the otherwise unsupported soap story is the experimental operation at the Anatomical Institute of the Danzig Medical Academy from late 1943 or early 1944. The director of the Institute, Professor Rudolf Spanner, established a small experimental facility to extract fat from the corpses of executed prisoners (mostly Soviet POWs and a smaller number of Polish civilians) and to convert it into soap. The Institute received corpses from the Stutthof concentration camp and from the local Danzig prison.
The operation was small. The most rigorous post-war investigation, conducted by the Polish Main Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in 1945, recovered around 40 kilograms of human-rendered soap and around 80 kilograms of unprocessed fat. The number of corpses involved is estimated at between 80 and 350. Spanner was investigated by the Polish authorities after the war but escaped to West Germany; he was investigated again by West German authorities in the 1960s and the case was closed in 1968 without prosecution on the basis that the experimental operation had not, in the West German prosecutors’ view, met the legal threshold for premeditated murder of named victims (Spanner’s defence had been that the corpses were already dead when he received them). The Danzig soap is preserved at the Stutthof museum and at the Holocaust History Museum at Yad Vashem.
Why the myth persisted
The soap rumour persisted for the same general reason as the lampshade myth: a real but smaller atrocity provided the kernel that an exaggerated wider story could attach to. The Danzig operation was real, the small quantity of human-rendered soap recovered there was real, and the Polish post-war investigation was published. The wartime rumour had drawn on the older First World War story, on the documented disappearance of Jewish populations into the camps, and on the genuine industrial scale of the killing programme. The conjunction made the soap story plausible enough at the time to be repeated by figures including the Nuremberg prosecutors. The Soviet prosecution at the IMT introduced the soap story formally and presented bars of alleged human-rendered soap as exhibit USSR-393.
The historiographical correction has been slow. The principal corrective work was done by Yad Vashem in the 1980s and 1990s. Yehuda Bauer, the chief historian of Yad Vashem, addressed the rumour in his 1991 article on Holocaust myths and concluded, on the available evidence, that the only documented soap-from-corpses operation was Danzig and that the wider wartime rumour had no industrial basis. Yad Vashem has since maintained that position in its public materials.
Why this matters
The soap myth is a case where a real atrocity was inflated into a much larger one. The cost of the inflation has been substantial. Holocaust deniers have used the demonstrable falsity of the wider soap story to argue, by extension, that other widely-believed elements of the historical record are similarly mythical. The denier argument fails on the specifics (the documented basis for the gas chambers, the documented basis for the Einsatzgruppen, the documented basis for the camp populations) but it gains rhetorical traction from the soap case. The honest historiographical position is to acknowledge what the Danzig record shows, to acknowledge what the wartime rumour got wrong, and to keep the documented atrocities and the inflated rumours clearly distinguished.
Sources
- Yehuda Bauer, “Whose Holocaust?”, in Midstream, November 1980, and subsequent essays on the soap rumour
- Joachim Neander, “The Danzig Soap Case: Facts and Legends Around Professor Spanner and the Danzig Anatomic Institute 1944-1945”, German Studies Review, vol 29 no 1, 2006
- Polish Main Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes, Investigation Report on the Anatomical Institute of Danzig, 1945, archive of the Institute of National Remembrance, Warsaw
- Robert Jan van Pelt, The Case for Auschwitz: Evidence from the Irving Trial, Indiana University Press, 2002 (chapter on the soap and lampshade rumours and their use in denier argument)
- International Military Tribunal, Trial of the Major War Criminals, vol VII, Nuremberg, 1947 (the Soviet prosecution presentation of exhibit USSR-393)
- Stutthof Museum, “Soap from the Anatomical Institute of Danzig” exhibition documentation, https://stutthof.org
- Yad Vashem, “The Soap Myth”, https://www.yadvashem.org