more on the alleged Human Soap

[Hannover]

As a form of damage control, it's now frequently said by the believers that the human soap tale is/was:

1. not true, a rumor spread by the Germans
2. done on a very limited basis in the Danzig area

I posted some references which take issue with those spins. It's really a case of certain people lying. Have a look.

- Hannover

*** 4/30/81 - The editorial page of the Los Angeles Times contains a piece by Rachel Patron, who claims that as a Polish Jew she was shipped off to Siberia by the Soviets during WWII (hmmm...and you thought all Polish Jews were captured and allegedly gassed by Nazis). Ms. Patron goes on to state that on later passing through Ukraine on her return to Poland she found a shed full of soap made from Jews.

Isn't it interesting how these 'Holocaust survivors' can remember seeing things that never existed?

*** May 10, 1997 the New York Times ran an article entitled, "Holocaust Collection Is Educator for Young." The story concerns Milton Kohn, the owner of the world's "largest private collection of Holocaust memorabilia." Kohn wanders the world repeating anti-German hate stories to children. Part of his traveling collection includes an alleged "bar of soap rendered from human fat [which] was bought from a third party in Eastern Europe in 1968."
Surely the New York Times, which prides itself on reporting "all the news that's fit to print," is aware that the soap story has been discredited.

*** Deborah Lipstadt noted in 1981 "The fact is that the Nazis never used the bodies of Jews, or for that matter anyone else, for the production of soap." ("Nazi Soap Rumor During World War II," Los Angeles Times, May 16, 1981, p II/2.)

*** Soap for sale
TEL AVIV, April 3 (Reuter) - An Israeli shop of horrors from the Nazi Holocaust has cancelled plans to auction a bar of soap which its owner said was made from the bodies of Jews killed in a death camp.
"We removed it from the auction because private individuals and Chief Rabbi Yisrael Lau protested," shop owner Menashe Meridack said on Monday.
His Zodiac Stamp shop, which originally dealt in philately, is stocked with
Holocaust memorabilia including yellow Stars of David, which the Nazis forced Jews to wear, and identity discs issued to slave labourers.
The items are listed in a catalogue which Meridack said he distributes to collectors worldwide.
Meridack told Reuters he had purchased the bar of soap from the son of a former inmate of ***Buchenwald*** death camp and had planned to auction it on April 25 at a starting price of $300.
The soap is described on page 39 of the catalogue as "A terrible and tragic item -- soap of victims in an antique box taken from Buchenwald."
The seller, Moshe Yahalom, said in a telephone interview he offered the soap along with horrific photographs from the Nazi era because he had fallen on hard times.
"He (Meridack) said I would get a lot of money," Yahalom said. "It pains me that I had to do this -- but I was not going to go out and steal money instead."
News of the auction drew an anguished outcry from Israeli legislator Dov
Shilansky, a survivor of the World War Two Holocaust in which six million Jews died.
"How can he (Yahalom) live with himself -- selling soap made from his ancestors? His father kept it as a reminder, so he would never forget," Shilansky told Israel Radio.
Shilansky said he would raise in parliament the issue of the sale of Holocaust memorabilia. He said such soap -- labelled "Made from pure Jewish fat" -- was Sold by a German firm during the war.
"If the auction goes ahead, we Holocaust survivors will stand outside the shop ... in silence, which will be our loudest cry to heaven," Shilansky said.
REUTERS - Transmitted: 95-04-03 14:01:09 EDT

*** "Polish people still talk about the way soap was manufactured from the bodies of Jews. "Sent away for soap" was the expression the Poles would use when they spoke of transports to Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor. The discovery of Professor Spanner's soap factory in Langfuhr near Danzig proved that their suspicions had been well founded. Witnesses tell us that when the corpses were burned on pyres, pans would be placed beneath the racks to catch the fat as it ran off, but this has not been confirmed. But, even if the Germans in Treblinka or at any of the death factories failed to do this, and allowed so many tons of precious fat to go to waste, it could only have been an oversight on their part. They were fully capable of doing things like that. It was entirely in keeping with their proclivities. Only the newness of this branch of manufacturing was to blame for this omission". - from:
'Death camp Treblinka; a documentary', edited by Alexander Donat;
from the chapter: 'In the Fields of Treblinka', by Rachel Auerbach, pub. by Holocaust Library, New York, 1979.

*** Simon Wiesenthal said:
"During the last weeks of March (1946), the Romanian press reported an unusual piece of news: in the small Romanian city of Folticini, 20 boxes of soap were buried in the Jewish cemetery with full ceremony and complete funeral rites. This soap had been found recently in a former German army depot. On the boxes were the initials RIF 'pure Jewish fat'. These boxes were destined for the Waffen SS. The wrapping paper revealed with completely cynical objectivity that this soap was manufactured from Jewish bodies. Surprisingly, the thorough Germans forgot to describe whether the soap was produced from children, girls, men or elderly persons... After 1942, people in the General Gouvernement knew quite well what the RIF meant. The civilized world may not believe the joy with which the Nazis and their women in the General Gouvernement thought of this soap. In each piece of soap they say a Jew who had been magically put there, and had they been prevented from growing into a second Freud, Ehrlich, or Einstein... The burial of this soap in a Romanian village may be reminiscent of the supernatural. The bewitched suffering contained in this small object of everyday utility shatters the already-hardened human heart of the 20th century. In the Atomic Age, the return of the darkest witch's cauldron of the Middle Ages may appear ghostly. And yet it is the truth!" - Simon Wiesenthal in Der neue Weg, Vienna, no. 17/18, 1946

*** The Doctor and the Damned by Albert Haas
(Granada 1984, from the paperback version 1985, classified
as non-fiction)
[ Dr Albert Haas is interned in ***Dachau***] "After we dressed, the Stubendiests distributed small bars of soap with the letters 'RJF' pressed into them. I didn't learn until after the war that they stood for Reines
Judisches Fett - 'Pure Jewish Fat.' The recollection that I used to cleanse my body with the by-products of the millions of Jewish people who
perished in the gas chambers sickens me even today. We always tried to steal the RJF soaps because they made better suds than the other artificial soap alternately distributed to us. [ p.122 ]

***A letter from a Veronica Szelepecz Lange to the editor of The Atlantic Monthly published in the May 2000 issue [p. 8] tells of having handled a cake of soap stamped with a "Judenfett".

*** Michael Berenbaum, former director of the United States "Holocaust" Memorial Museum, now supervising Steven Spielberg's taxpayer-funded "Holocaust" remembrance project, admitted in 1994, "there is no evidence, despite widespread reports, that human fat was used for soap. The United States "Holocaust" Memorial Museum tested several bars of soap reported to be composed of human fat but no such fat was found."