← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Rudel
Thread ID: 9761 | Posts: 3 | Started: 2003-09-13
2003-09-13 08:40 | User Profile
[url=http://www.oakridger.com/stories/092600/stt_0926000032.html]Museum, author at odds over whether Nazis made soap from bodies[/url]
by Russ Bynum Associated Press
ATLANTA -- A dispute over a new wartime memoir has cast a spotlight on the enduring belief that the Nazis made soap from the bodies of Jews -- something that Holocaust scholars largely dismiss as myth.
The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum has denied a book-signing for an Atlanta man whose memoir tells the story of an uncle who says Nazis forced him to make soap from humans at Auschwitz.
Museum officials told Ben Hirsch he couldn't sign copies of his memoir, "Hearing a Different Drummer," there after the museum's senior historian read the book and questioned the accuracy of the soap-making passages.
"Singling out a memoir for a book signing implies a level of endorsement of its contents," said Mary Morrison, a spokeswoman for the museum. "The combination of all available evidence doesn't draw one to the conclusion that this happened."
Historians have never been able to prove, or disprove, that Nazis used human fat to make soap. Many say the tales are likely just rumors so gruesome that they're still perpetuated nearly 60 years later.
But Hirsch, whose parents and two siblings died in concentration camps, says his book offers new evidence -- excerpts from unpublished memoirs that his uncle typed in broken English.
"How dare you say that it didn't happen when you say there's not enough proof," Hirsch, 68, said Monday. "I just can't imagine anybody writing a memoir and saying they made soap if they didn't. It's not something to be proud of."
Historians have documented many Nazi atrocities -- of Jews killed in gas chambers and used as subjects in strange experiments. Their hair and gold fillings were removed for industrial use. And in at least one instance the skin of Jews was used to make lampshades.
One Holocaust scholar said the museum has good reason distance itself from Hirsch's soap story, which could give new ammunition to those who insist the Holocaust was a hoax.
"Holocaust deniers have seized upon the soap story as proof of demonstrating the unreliability of Holocaust survivors," said Christopher Browning, a historian at the University of North Carolina. "I don't think they can afford to compromise themselves on this."
Raul Hilberg, considered the dean of Holocaust scholars, said rumors that Nazis made soap from human fat started circulating in Poland in 1942, the same year they first appeared in American newspapers.
Testimonial accounts of soap-making tend to be secondhand at best. Hilberg said he can't recall a single account from a survivor who saw human soap being made. He said he doubts the soap stories, in part, because the Germans would have found it distasteful.
"The idea of washing oneself with soap made of human fat, aside from the fact they didn't like Jews and didn't want any contact with them ... it was considered sick," he said.
Hirsch's memoir, which remains on the shelves at the museum's bookstore, mostly recalls his experience as a U.S. soldier in post-World War II Germany. But he uses one chapter to criticize scholars for rejecting accounts of human soap.
He quotes a typewritten manuscript by his uncle, Philipp Auerbach, a chemist who said Nazis made him manufacture soap using human remains at Auschwitz.
One excerpt reads: "As chief of the soap-production I had to take care of the production of fat and to make controls in the Slaughter-house. Nearly every week I have been three or four times there in order to get the waste of fat and of the bowels for the soap-manufacture."
Hirsch also recalls how he helped a rabbi in 1970 bury four bars of soap at Atlanta's Greenwood Cemetery. He says the soap had been found by a Jewish soldier who helped liberate a concentration camp at the end of World War II. The soldier's wife had them buried after finding them in her basement decades later. For those who ask, the Holocaust museum distributes a fact sheet saying the story that Nazis used corpses for soap is a rumor that has never been substantiated.
"This one soap story keeps rolling around," said Deborah Lipstadt, an Emory University history professor who recently prevailed against a libel suit by a British scholar whom she accused of denying the Nazis slaughtered millions of Jews. "Soap became sort of a metaphor -- they killed them and made soap out of them -- to show how horrible the Nazis were."
2003-09-17 18:43 | User Profile
Human Soap
RICHARD HARWOOD & DITLIEB FELDERER
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It would thus appear that the entire allegation is founded on anonymous reports and speculative hearsay. No one can come up with any locations, dates, or names. Of course, this has not prevented popular "historians" such as William L. Shirer from perpetuating the myth:
There was testimony at the Nuremberg Trials that the ashes were sometimes sold as fertilizer. One Danzig firm, according to a document offered by the Russian prosecution, constructed an electrically-heated tank for making soap out of human fat. Its "recipe" called for "12 pounds of human fat, 10 quarts of water, and 8 ounces to a pound of caustic soda ... all boiled for two or three days and then cooled. (4: p. 1264)
As "authority" Shirer states in his footnote 59: Nürnberg document "ND USSR-8, p. 197. Transcript" (4: p. 1518). I suppose he must mean the same "electrically-heated tank" which appears in the Encyclopedia Judaica described above. Unfortunately, the encyclopedia does not give a source for this illustration.
Let us pause for a moment and examine this Soviet soap recipe. We must assume, first of all, that quite a few corpses will be needed to obtain 12 pounds of fat, since we are told the Jews were just skin and bone anyway. But the Soviet idea of boiling "all" the ingredients together just does not coincide with established soap formulas. Norman Stark's Forrnula Book calls for "a lot of rendered animal fat" and states that the water and caustic soda should be mixed with cold water (20: p. 63). Our Soviet "experts" must have missed some basics on soap-making, for Stark tells us that the caustic soda should not be boiled with the water as the mixture will heat up anyway by the chemical action of the lye. The tallow is then melted, and after proper adjustment of the temperature, the lye solution is poured into the tallow and then stirred. This process would seem to make redundant the "electrically heated tank" shown in the encyclopedia. One also wonders about capacity.
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Undoubtedly the "human soap" World War Two version is just about as real as the World War One yarn about the wicked Huns turning the bodies of their dead soldiers into soap. At the end of WWI, a certain Virginia newspaper editorialized that in future wars "propaganda must be more subtle and clever." (Ponsonby, pp. 102-113). But obviously the paper did not have a high circulation in Russia, for the Soviets did not heed their advice in the later conflagration.
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Eight ounces of caustic soda for each pound of human fat must mean 96 ounces for this recipe. Most of the water, 10 quarts of it, would mix with the lye. I simply cannot understand how the ultra-efficient Germans, working with the mass extermination of millions of people (as they were supposed to), would have bothered with such a small "factory," fussing around with eight ounces of this and ten quarts of that. Surely the "mills of death" could do better than this?
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With such admissions as these, one wonders how long it will be before the Exterminationists realize that they have overdone it a little bit, and begin to switch horses. I firmly predict that before very long the Exterminationists will announce that the "gas chambers" were all communist propaganda, and that the Six Million were in fact worked to death, not gassed to death. The paucity of evidence for the "gas chambers," "human soap," "lampshades," et al. will necessitate that.
[url]http://vho.org/GB/Journals/JHR/1/2/HarwoodFelderer131-139.html[/url]
More on the "Soap" story:
[url]http://64.143.9.197/jhr/v11/v11p217_Weber.html[/url]
2003-09-18 03:14 | User Profile
Soap and Lampshades: The Lies Persist
by Richard A. Widmann
In his recently published book, Why People Believe Weird Things, Skeptic editor Michael Shermer recounts an exchange from the Phil Donahue show. On that particular episode, CODOH director Bradley Smith stated, "It [is] a lie that Germans cooked Jews to make soap from them." Shermer, who is skeptical of many things, but generally a believer in the Holocaust story, replied, "No, not a lie. It's a mistake."
For some the tales of vicious Germans manufacturing Jews into bars of soap and lampshades are indeed a lie, for others, like Shermer, they are the products of innocent mistakes; for still others, the stories remain an unassailable truth. In fact, these propaganda lies have been dispelled many times, but continue to be repeated frequently in establishment sources. It is no wonder that many people still believe these horror stories.
General Lucius Clay, the military governor of the US zone of occupied Germany, explained the lampshade story, "Well, it turned out actually that it was goat flesh [sic --clearly the general meant skin]. But at the trial [of Ilse Koch] it was still human flesh." (Interview with Lucius Clay, 1976, Official Proceeding of the George C. Marshall Research Foundation Quoted in M. Weber, "Buchenwald: Legend and Reality," The Journal of Historical Review, Winter 1986-87 7(4), pp. 406-407.)
In regard to the human soap story, darling of the establishment media and virulent anti-revisionist 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.) 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." (Y. Gutman, M. Berenbaum, Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1994, p.80.) One would clearly think that the case is closed, and that further repetition of these propaganda stories would constitute nothing more (and nothing less!) than arrant anti-German bigotry.
Still, the lies persist. On 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.
The month of May also saw a revival of the hateful story of human lampshades. In a mailing from Time-Life Video designed to hawk their "World at War" series of videos, the advertisement reads: "More than 60 million people were shot, hanged, bombed, starved, gassed, frozen or drowned. Nazis turned humans into lampshades... Now you can see what hell is really like in the most definitive war footage you can find today!"
Obviously, anti-German hatred still sells. Those who profit from spreading these hateful lies should be called to account. It's up to those with a sense of justice and respect for the truth to let the offenders know that countenancing, let alone spreading, such lies can't and won't be tolerated.
New York Times 229 West 43rd Street New York, New York 10036
Time Life Video 1450 E. Parham Road Richmond, VA 23286-4257
[url]http://www.codoh.com/newrevoices/nwidmann/nwidsoap.html[/url]