'Jewish Soap'

by Mark Weber

One of the most lurid and slanderous Holocaust claims is the story that the Germans manufactured soap from the bodies of their victims. Although a similar charge during the First World War was exposed as a hoax almost immediately afterwards, it was nevertheless revived and widely believed during the Second. [1] More important, this accusation was "proved" at the main Nuremberg trial of 1945-1946, and has been authoritatively endorsed by numerous historians in the decades since. In recent years, though, as part of a broad retreat from the most obviously untenable aspects of the "orthodox" extermination story, Holocaust historians have grudgingly conceded that the human soap tale is a wartime propaganda lie. In their retreat, though, these historians have tried to dismiss the soap story as a mere wartime "rumor," neglecting to mention that international Jewish organizations and then Allied governments endorsed and sanctioned this libelous canard.

Wartime rumors that the Germans were manufacturing soap from the corpses of slaughtered Jews were based in part on the fact that soap bars distributed by German authorities in Jewish ghettos and camps bore the impressed initials "RIF," which many took to stand for "Rein jüdisches Fett" or "Pure Jewish Fat." (It did not seem to matter that the letters were "RIF" and not "RJF.") These rumors spread so widely in 1941 and 1942 that by late 1942 German authorities in Poland and Slovakia were expressing official concern about their impact. [2] More