Soap of Denial

In my last year in high school I was living in a small city in southwestern Ontario. The city was pre-dominantly populated by either German immigrants or the descendants of German immigrants. Oktoberfest was a big event. I couldn’t vouch for whether it is still is. Once I left, I never looked back, if you get my drift.

I had the strangest experience on the first day of my World Politics course in my final year at High School. My instructor, a former Czech and ethnic German, announced to the class that he fought with the Luftwaffe and was shot down by the British. He spent the last year of the war in a British prisoner of war camp. He was all of 19 years of age when he was shot down, rescued and captured. He wasn’t the first “Nazi” I met in that city, but he was the first who did not hesitate to announce that he was a former “Nazi”.

After this intro Mr. V. got around to taking attendance, and by the time he came to my last name he called out “Fraulein Werner” rather than the plainer not- so-German sounding “Warner.” It was easy to understand why he would make the blanket assumption that I was of German origins with my blond hair and blue eyes rather than Eastern European. Germans made up a substantial portion of the population and people see what they want to see.

In my father’s family, the holocaust and war years left such an indelible mark that it was often referred to or discussed as if it had just happened. I think I was about 8 when I finally understood that the Nazi’s were defeated 17 years before I was born. So when Mr. V called me Fraulein Werner and asked if I was German; I instinctively went into survivor mode and announced in best fake Hogan Heroes German accent “Jah.”.

The first writing assignment was to discuss which system of government (dictatorship or participatory democracy) provided the most “value” for its citizens. I not only got the only “A” in that class, but I also argued that that Hitler’s Third Reich wasn’t so bad in terms of delivering value and security to its citizens. I learned two valuable lessons from that class. One concerned human nature and the other in revisionistic history.

In recent years a number of websites and books have popped up allegedly “debunking” Nazi Holocaust myths. One of the alleged myths which have allegedly been “busted” concerned claims that the Nazi’s made soap out of the bodies of concentration camp prisoners. Now, I was never taught at school that the Nazi’s did that but others have claimed to have been. What I was taught was that they conducted some absolutely horrendous medical experiments on living people. Furthermore, I do remember reading witness testimony from the Nuremberg Trials which did allude to the possibility that the Nazi’s had made soap out of their victims bodies.

Holocaust denial has become much more sophisticated in recent years. There is a kind of savvy pseudo-intellectual quality to it now. I suppose it’s an attempt to shuck off its bully-pulpit prodie roots. And now, when so many of history's witnesses are dying we are more vulnerable than ever to fall victim to the denier's claims. It usually starts out with a suggestion that the writer/author had no opinion per say, but is only honest searcher looking for the truth, and; lookie what he finds.

The first questions our pseudo-truth seekers seek to answer almost inevitably focus on numbers and logistics but miss two primary points. It is not whether the final death toll of the Nazis’ intended victims numbered 6 million or 5.2 million or even 3.million because the deaths represents an exercise of the utmost barbarism and rationalized entirely on the principle of eugenics, in the search to purify the alleged “master race” so that the Nazi-Nietzschian concept of Herrenmensch could be born into the Aryan nation.

The logistics employed by the Third Reich were excruciating and almost lovingly detailed by the executers at every stage of their master plan, but exclusively in German, and the Nazi records became the exclusive property of competing governments and their interests. Most questions of logistics can be answered simply enough; if one retrieves the appropriate governmental permission/access and one has working knowledge of German. But the new truth seekers rarely do and instead rely on entirely third party sources and innuendo.

There is another tactic that has been employed in the last 10-5 years. It is to use the works and words of reputable holocaust historians to misconstrue the context of their work to process utterly false conclusions. I suppose, it’s a case of so much the better - if the alleged authority is a Jew. For can there be any more moral weight brought to bear than the alleged doubts from one from the ranks of the potential victim pool?

Take the case of Professor Yehuda Bauer, a holocaust historian and academic adviser to Yad Vashem memorial in Israel. His name keeps popping up (among others) and is used indiscriminately by the “truth seekers” and other sundry holocaust deniers to “explode the myth’ of the Nazis’ making soap out of the bodies of their victims.

At Nitzkor, I found perhaps the hook the holocaust deniers have been using to hang their proof around the Professor’s neck. It’s a copy of a letter written by Professor Bauer detailing his knowledge of the “Nazi Soap” and written to the editor of the Jerusalem Post:

From the Jerusalem Post, May 29, 1990, p. 4:
To the Editor of the Jerusalem Post:

Sir, - Neil Kuchinsky (letters, May 20) quotes from the Nuremberg trial transcripts to show that the Germans made soap from human bodies at the Danzig Anatomic Institute, basing himself on the testimony of two British PoWs and a German laboratory assistant. The facts are correct. They were quoted in extenso in a Czech- language book by Ota Kraus and Erich Kulka, and are well-known to historians.

The reason why no historian has ever claimed that Germans made industrial use of human bodies for the production of soap is also contained in those very testimonies. They show that the "Institute" was established in the course of 1944 by a Danzig Nazi scientist (Dr. Spanner) who invented the method by which this could be done, and persuaded an apparently enthusiastic Berlin authority (we do not know who it was) to support his experiments.

According to the somewhat contradictory evidence, 25 kg. or perhaps more of this horrible substance was made, and one source claims that it was used experimentally in Danzig itself. It emerges very clearly that this was a first and unique experiment and that it was in its experimental stages. The bodies used may have been those of prisoners of war and forced labourers from the immediate vicinity. It is also clear that had the war continued, the Nazis were certainly capable of turning this into another mass horror.

There was no industrial production, and the pieces of soap inscribed R.I.F. which Jewish victims were told were made of human fat were found to contain ordinary non-organic fats (R.I.F. means Reichsstelle fuer Industrielle Fettversorgung, or State Centre for Supply of Fats, and not Pure Jewish Fat, as the victims were told by the Nazis).

The reason why one has to be accurate is that one has to exercise tremendous responsibility and deep respect towards the victims and their relatives and towards the memory of the millions of Jewish dead. What the Nazis did is horrendous enough; we do not need to believe the additional horrors they thought about but did not have time to realize. The Holocaust deniers waiting in the wings are eager to pick up any inaccuracies we may inadvertently commit, and we should not ease their "work."

Yehuda Bauer

It is pertinent to note that Professor Bauer never claims that the Nazi’s did not attempt to conduct experiments creating soap made from human fats, nor does he suggest that the Nazi’s did not have intentions towards the mass production of soap using the fat of concentration camp prisoners. Professor Bauer simply claims the Nazi’s were strictly in the experimental stage. Professor Bauer rightly calls for accuracy and context. How utterly shameful that his name and reputation are besmirched for those who seek to negate the weight of the horrendous sins of the past.

I was reminded of the Nazi soap debunking myths this week when I saw this article carried by Ynet News reporting on the test results from the Polish Authorities in possession to the 25 kgs of soap that Professor Bauer alluded to.

Poland's Nazi German occupiers used "substances" from the bodies of concentration camp prisoners to make soap, a study carried out by Poland's National Remembrance Institute (IPN) to counter the arguments of negationists showed Friday.

"We have determined that, without the shadow of a doubt, soap was produced using substances obtained from human bodies at the anatomical institute of the Medical Academy of Danzig, led by Professor Rudolf Spanner," Paulina Szumera of the IPN told AFP. Danzig is the German name for the Polish city of Gdansk. "We launched our investigation to still the voices denying that this ever happened," she said.

For the IPN probe, Polish scientists studied a bar of soap that was presented as evidence during the Nuremberg Nazi war crime trials after World War II, that was in the archives of the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Szumera said. Polish television station TVN24 cited IPN investigators as saying the bodies of prisoners at the Nazi concentration camp of Stutthof, in northern Poland, and at Gdansk municipal jail were used to make the soap.

The bodies of patients at a psychiatric hospital in Gdansk were also used, the investigators told TVN24. Several dozen kilogrammes of soap were produced by the Nazis in Gdansk and used to clean Spanner's laboratory work surfaces, the IPN said. Almond extract was added to the soap to give it a palatable scent.

If I have time next week, I will tackle the assertions first published by I believe Faurisson, and repeated on almost all alleged “truth seeker” site’s suggesting that the diaries of Anne Frank are nothing short of a fraud promoted by her father for financial gain.