Amerika

Probably WW1 propaganda:

I am told by an eminent chemist that six pounds of glycerine can be extracted from the corpse of a fairly well nourished Hun… These unfortunates, when alive, were driven ruthlessly to inevitable slaughter. They are sent as ruthlessly to the blast furnaces. One million dead men are resolved into six million pounds of glycerine.

This story, like the story of soap made from Jewish corpses, later merged in Soviet propaganda during WW2.

Andrew Hollinger, a spokesman at the USHMM department of media relations, provided a document written by the museum’s historian that concludes: “Available documentary evidence and eyewitness accounts have been unable to corroborate in a conclusive manner reports that the National Socialists and their collaborators used human fat from their victims in the manufacture of soap.” It goes on to say: “rumors that Germans made soap from human remains originated in French propaganda from the First World War.”

The scholars’ view is based in -part on analysis of the small blue-green cakes of soap that Holocaust survivors have presented over the years, claiming that they were made from human fat. Breitbart says the bars are stamped “R.I.F.,” for Reich Industry Fat, but in the camps some Jews believed that the I was a J and that the acronym stood for “Jewish Fat.” When analyzed, however, the bars turned up no evidence of human DNA.

By 1990, Yad Vashem, had unequivocally determined that the manufacture of soap was no more than a “mere rumor.”

During the first world war, many myths were circulated about the Germans, including them bayoneting babies and making books bound in human skin. Given the horror of gas warfare in the conflict, it was not surprising that this later appeared in the mythos of horror circulated after WW2.

Tags: soap, the holocaust