Soap made from human corpses

During World War I the British press claimed that the Germans operated a corpse factory in which they made glycerine and soap from the bodies of their own soldiers.

Both during and after World War II, widely circulated rumors claimed that soap was being mass-produced from the bodies of the victims of Nazi concentration camps which were located in German-occupied Poland.

The first recorded reference was made in 1915 when Cynthia Asquith noted in her diary (16 June 1915): "We discussed the rumour that the Germans utilise even their corpses by converting them into glycerine with the by-product of soap.

"[8] It became a major international story when The Times of London reported in April 1917 that the Germans had admitted rendering the bodies of their dead soldiers for fat to make soap and other products.

The controversy led the British Foreign Secretary Sir Austen Chamberlain to officially state that the government accepted that the "corpse factory" story was untrue.

A version of the story is included in The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry, one of the earliest collections of firsthand accounts of the Holocaust, assembled by Soviet writers Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman.

The specific story is part of a report which is titled "The Extermination of the Jews of Lvov" attributed to I. Herts and Naftali Nakht: In another section of the Belzec camp was an enormous soap factory.

Neander goes on to state that the letter represents circumstantial evidence which indicates that it was Nazi policy to abstain from processing corpses due to their known desire to keep their mass murder as secret as possible.

[21] In his book Russia at War, 1941–1945, Alexander Werth claims that while visiting Gdańsk/Danzig in 1945 shortly after its conquest by the Red Army, he saw an experimental factory outside the city for making soap from human corpses.

[22] Historian Joachim Neander states that the rumors which allege that the Nazis produced soap from the bodies of Jews who they murdered in their concentration camps, long-since thoroughly debunked, are still widely believed, and they are exploited by Holocaust deniers.

[18] He, and the Polish historian Monika Tomkiewicz, who works in the investigative department of the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) in Gdańsk, and Piotr Semków, formerly also an employee of the IPN, later a lecturer at the Naval Academy in Gdynia, have thoroughly investigated Spanner's claims which surround the Danzig Anatomical Institute and all of them have concluded that the Holocaust-related soap-making claims which surround it are myths, particularly cemented into Polish consciousness by Zofia Nałkowska's 1946 book Medaliony,[23] which was mandatory reading in Poland until 1990, was widely distributed in the Eastern Bloc, and it is still popular today.

The "human soap" which was made from the bone maceration which was found in Danzig was conflated with the separate rumors regarding the Nazi concentration camps and they were presented together during the Nuremberg trials.

[18][24] Semków states that the presence of human fat tissue has been confirmed in the samples of soapy grease from Danzig which were presented at the trials (which was claimed to be "unfinished soap"[18]) through analysis which was performed by the IPN and Gdańsk University of Technology in 2011[26] and 2006[27][28] respectively, but his and Tomkiewicz research concluded that this was a by-product stemming from Spanner's work in bone maceration.

Spanner, a well-respected physician who was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1939, would also not have been "experimenting" with soap production (which was widely understood and not something which needed experimentation) instead of teaching his students.

An investigation also maintained that at least 10 kg of soap from human fat was produced, sourced from the Stutthof concentration camp, based on the aforementioned testimonies which were delivered in 1945 and the presence of kaolin in the samples indicated that it was probably used as a cleaning soap due to its abrasive qualities,[24][23] but the criminal investigation of this claim was discontinued because it lacked grounds which would indicate that Spanner had incited killings in order to obtain corpses for the Institute.

[18] The witness testimonies of the two British POWs were also noted and they were described as being "contradictory and inconclusive" in a 1990s report which was compiled by the newly established Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C., which holds a cautious stance with regard to the Danzig Soap issue.

[18] After being dismissed by intervention from the British occupation authorities he was declared "clean" by the denazification program in 1948, officially exonerated, and resumed his academic career, becoming director of the Institute of Anatomy in Cologne in 1957 and editor of the esteemed Werner Spalteholz anatomical atlas, before dying in 1960.

He also concludes that what the IPN called the "chemical substance which was essentially soap", obtained by human fat,[24] was used for laboratory cleaning purposes towards the end of the war, with Spanner, as head of the institute, bearing responsibility for this, but that such handling of dead bodies amounted to a misdemeanor as opposed to any criminal behavior, let alone a crime against humanity or involvement in any genocidal activities, something which is today officially acknowledged in Poland.

Some postwar Israelis (in the army, schools) also referred disdainfully to Jewish victims of Nazism who arrived in Israel with the Hebrew word סבון (sabon, "soap").