Experimental production of human soap in Nazi Germany

[yankeedoodle]

Ion Coja, dedicated Romanian "anti-semite" of high intellect, has extracted this bit of nonsense from wikipedia for our amusement.

Experimental production of human soap in Nazi Germany
https://ioncoja.ro/production-experimentale-de-savon-humain-dans-lallemagne-nazie/

MECHANICALLY TRANSLATED FROM ROMANIAN

Nazi atrocity
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During World War II, several German scientists in the Third Reich allegedly attempted experimental production of human soap. This production, which would have been very limited, was only attested in the case of Rudolf Spanner, before a Polish commission of inquiry. The conclusions of this commission, which charged Spanner, were later contradicted by the German courts. At the beginning of the 21st century, this theme remains a delicate subject: Holocaust deniers claim that historians have reconsidered an opinion that would have been theirs, namely that soap was made industrially from the corpses of murdered Jews. It turns out, however, that historians, unlike Simon Wiesenthal,

History
Rumors during the First World War
The claim that the Germans used the fat of human corpses to make products had already been advanced by the English during the First World War. The Times would write in April 1917 that the Germans boiled the bodies of their dead soldiers to make soap and other products. In 1925, the British Foreign Secretary, Austen Chamberlain, admitted, however, that the story of the "corpse factory" was entirely imaginary.

Jewish grease soap
The same assertion resurfaced very quickly during the Second World War [ref. desired], too early for the allegations to be substantiated. However, jokes, threats, rumors and insults from the time show that many people believed them to be true. The main source of these rumors was the belief that the letters RIF, printed on every bar of soap in Germany, were an acronym meaning Reines Jüdisches Fett ("Pure Jewish fat"); these initials actually corresponded to Reichsstelle für industrielle Fettversorgung ("National Center for Industrial Grease Supply").

In September 1942, the influential Rabbi Wise published a report which endorsed the allegation of soap being made using the corpses of Jews. Having learned of this report, Heinrich Himmler wrote on November 20, 1942 to the head of the Gestapo Heinrich Müller: "You must guarantee me that everywhere the bodies of these deceased Jews are burned or buried, and that nowhere can he be done differently with corpses. »

On November 26, 1942, in a public interview, Rabbi Wise reiterated the allegation of soap being made using the corpses of Jews. To someone who reminded him that a similar charge had already been made against the Germans in World War I, he replied that he had received documents from the State Department that the allegation had been duly checked and confirmed. .

According to Gilles Karmasyn, during the Nuremberg trial, the International Military Tribunal received only one testimony from a former British prisoner of war and based essentially on rumors about soap being made from human fat. In its judgment, the court confines itself to mentioning the attempts made in Danzig.

Since the 1980s, Holocaust historians have viewed the "Jewish soap myth" as one of the dark legends of World War II, not as a reflection of the reality of mass production of such soap in Germany. at the time. This view is supported by several Jewish historians, such as Walter Laqueur, Gitta Sereny, and Deborah Lipstadt, as well as Professor Yehuda Bauer of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Samuel Krakowski, director of the Yad Vashem archives. However, there remain, mainly in Israel, several memorials and cemeteries with soap presented as being made from human fat.

Case of Professor Spanner, of the Institute of Anatomy at Danzig
Later in the war, when human corpses were actually exploited for raw materials (hair as felt or insulation material, for example), some German scientists reportedly experimented with soap production from from human fat. In 1943-1944, Rudolf Spanner, professor at the Institute of Anatomy in Dantzig, would have produced between ten and one hundred kilograms of soap made with corpses from the Konradstein psychiatric hospital, a prison in Königsberg, and the Stutthof concentration camp. Shortly after the war, on May 11, 1945, a witness interviewed by a Polish commission said that during the summer of 1943 a special building was built for the treatment of corpses in order to cook the bones. According to him, there was a laboratory for making human skeletons and incinerating unnecessary flesh and bones. He also stated that during the winter of 1943-1944, Spanner gave the order to save human fat and, in February 1944, gave him the recipe for making soap from human fat. Industrial cooking would have required 3 to 7 days. The witness would have participated in two cooking sessions which would have produced more than 25 kg of soap from 70 to 80 kg of human fat from approximately 40 corpses. Spanner would have supervised the whole thing and would have held in liaison with the direction of the prisons and the concentration camps for the deliveries of the corpses to the institute. He would also have ordered to preserve the human skin, which he treated with chemical substances to degrease it.

In 1947 and 1948, Spanner, questioned by the German justice, declared that this soap had been used only to make injections with the ligaments of the articulations in the anatomical preparations. German justice concludes that no punishable fact could be charged to Spanner and that there was no cause for prosecution.

Even if we believe the witnesses who accused Spanner, it is only an experimental and limited production. There is no evidence to support the theory of an industrial production of soap made from human fat, Jewish or not, by the Third Reich.

According to a study by Joachim Neander, there was not even an experimental production of soap from human fat at the Institute of Anatomy in Danzig. Human fat is no different from the animal fat with which German chemists made soap, and they did not need a layman like a professor of anatomy to experiment with it. What is certain is that a saponaceous fat always appears as a by-product in the manufacture of anatomical preparations; what is possible is that this saponaceous fat was used not only for the use recognized by Spanner (injections into the ligaments of the joints), but also for cleaning the tables and the floor, which Spanner would not have admitted because constituted the (minor) offense of disrespecting the dead.

In Croatia, in a part of the former Yugoslavia occupied by the Axis, in the large concentration camp of Jasenovac, notorious for its cruelty, a small factory for the conversion of human remains (Serbs, Jews, Gypsies) in soap was created by members of the Ustashi group. Parts of the "human soap factory" are discovered during excavations carried out in 1961 and anthropological research on the mass graves of Donja Gradina. Besides the furnaces, a decanter, a high pressure tank and a separator still exist and can be seen in the memorial area of ​​Donja Gradina, today in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

In 1942, SS Judge Konrad Morgen, who was investigating the Dirlewanger unit in Lublin for accusations of atrocities and corruption, noted rumors accusing Oskar Dirlewanger of having, together with members of units of support of the Wehrmacht, injected strychnine into illegally detained and stripped Jewish women, watched their agony and, when they died, cut their corpses into pieces, mixed with pieces of horse before boiling them and making them into soap. Morgen wrote that he only had suspicions about this affair.