Soap made from human corpses

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During the 20th century, there were various alleged instances of soap being made from human body fat. 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. During the Nuremberg trials items were presented as evidence of such production.^[1][2] Today it is known that while Nazi Germany produced small amounts of soap made of human corpses, it wasn't done on industrial scale.^[3] The Yad Vashem Memorial has stated that the Nazis did not produce soap with fat which was extracted from Jewish corpses on an industrial scale, saying that the Nazis may have frightened camp inmates by deliberately circulating rumors in which they claimed that they were able to extract fat from human corpses, turn it into soap, mass-produce and distribute it.^[4][5][6]

History[]

1786[]

In 1780, the former Holy Innocents' Cemetery in Paris was closed because of overuse. In 1786, the bodies were exhumed and the bones were moved to the Catacombs.^[7] Many bodies had incompletely decomposed and had reduced into deposits of fat. During the exhumation, this fat was collected and subsequently turned into candles and soap.^[8]

World War I[]

The claim that Germans used the fat from human corpses to make products, including soap, was made during World War I. This appears to have originated as rumor among British soldiers and Belgians. The first recorded reference is 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."^[9] 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.^[10]

After the war John Charteris, the former head of army intelligence, was reported to have claimed in a 1925 speech that he had invented the story. He subsequently insisted that his remarks had been misreported. The controversy led the British Foreign Secretary Sir Austen Chamberlain to officially state that the government accepted that the "corpse factory" story was untrue.^[11] The belief that the British had deliberately invented the story was later used by the Nazis.^[12]

World War II[]

Rumours that the Nazis produced soap from the bodies of concentration camp inmates circulated widely during the war. Germany suffered a shortage of fats during World War II, and the production of soap was put under government control. The "human soap" rumours may have originated from the bars of soap being marked with the Fraktur initials ℜℑ