Nazi Soap Recipe! IMT USSR-196

Scott Smith · Post by **Scott Smith** » 22 Aug 2003 07:26

Nazi Soap MAZUR USSR-197

Nazi Soap WITTON USSR-264

Nazi Soap NEELY USSR-272

Additional commentary here.

Here is Exhibit USSR-196 submitted at the International Military Tribunal from U.S. National Archives microfilm:

Scott Smith · Post by **Scott Smith** » 22 Aug 2003 07:38

Pages 4-5 (of 5)

trower · Post by **trower** » 22 Aug 2003 10:24

Are these documents available in English or French?

Wulpe · Post by **Wulpe** » 22 Aug 2003 11:31

The translation of the instruction - [my remarks]

Soap production from fat residues

10 - 12 pound fat
10 liter water
1000 gram sodium hydroxide solution [NaOH] (sodium pellets for curd soap) or (1000 gram potassium oxide [K2O] for soft soap)

Put a hand full of soda [Na2CO3] in the pot, cook for 3 hours. Add a large hand full of cooking salt, let it boil a little and solidify. The solid surface is removed, cut in pieces and boiled with 1 to 2 liters water another 1 1/2 to 2 hours. Pour out into a shallow bowl and let it solidify. Cut in pieces for usage.

The remaining lye from the first cooling down can be used for cleaning purposes if diluted.

To deal with [no direct translation possible] the unpleasant odor, one can add an olfactory substance like benzoic aldehyde [C7H6O] to the soap before solidification

There´s a typo in the recipe. Instead of potassium oxide [K2O] you have to use potassium hydroxide [KOH] to produce soap.

The question is what´s written in russian. These instructions do neither confirm nor rebut the claim that the Nazis used to make soap out of Jews. The only interesting thing I see on the german original is that it´s written on the paper of an anatomical institute.

EDIT: this is of course not the way how you produce amounts of soap industrial. It´s an instruction how to produce a few pounds of soap in a small laboratory or at home in your kitchen.

Hurricane · Post by **Hurricane** » 22 Aug 2003 13:29

I thought you could just use ash, instead of potassium hydroxide (whatever that is

)

Dan · Post by **Dan** » 22 Aug 2003 14:06

Hurricane wrote:I thought you could just use ash, instead of potassium hydroxide (whatever that is )

You can but it takes much more experience because the ash is variable.

Wulpe, this was indeed stated to have been on the letterhead of the Danzig Anatomical Institite and said to have been found nailed to a peice of plywood.

Wulpe · Post by **Wulpe** » 22 Aug 2003 16:28

shame on me, it´s no typo, in fact you can also use K2O instead of KOH. I was mistaken about the solubility, but my books set me straight

But what they also told me is that it´s extremly complicated to make soap out of animal/human fat (compared to vegetable oil).

From the Jerusalem Post, May 29, 1990, p. 4:

To the Editor of the Jerusalem Post:

Sir, - Neil Kuchinsky (letters, May 20) quotes from the Nuremberg trial transcripts to show that the Germans made soap from human bodies at the Danzig Anatomic Institute, basing himself on the testimony of two British PoWs and a German laboratory assistant. The facts are correct. They were quoted in extenso in a Czech- language book by Ota Kraus and Erich Kulka, and are well-known to historians.

The reason why no historian has ever claimed that Germans made industrial use of human bodies for the production of soap is also contained in those very testimonies. They show that the "Institute" was established in the course of 1944 by a Danzig Nazi scientist (Dr. Spanner) who invented the method by which this could be done, and persuaded an apparently enthusiastic Berlin authority (we do not know who it was) to support his experiments.

According to the somewhat contradictory evidence, 25 kg. or perhaps more of this horrible substance was made, and one source claims that it was used experimentally in Danzig itself. It emerges very clearly that this was a first and unique experiment and that it was in its experimental stages. The bodies used may have been those of prisoners of war and forced labourers from the immediate vicinity. It is also clear that had the war continued, the Nazis were certainly capable of turning this into another mass horror.

There was no industrial production, and the pieces of soap inscribed R.I.F. which Jewish victims were told were made of human fat were found to contain ordinary non-organic fats (R.I.F. means Reichsstelle fuer Industrielle Fettversorgung, or State Centre for Supply of Fats, and not Pure Jewish Fat, as the victims were told by the Nazis).

The reason why one has to be accurate is that one has to exercise tremendous responsibility and deep respect towards the victims and their relatives and towards the memory of the millions of Jewish dead. What the Nazis did is horrendous enough; we do not need to believe the additional horrors they thought about but did not have time to realize. The Holocaust deniers waiting in the wings are eager to pick up any inaccuracies we may inadvertently commit, and we should not ease their "work."

Yehuda Bauer

Source

The Editor
The Jewish Standard
385 Prospect Avenue
Hackensack, NJ 07601
USA

Dear Sir,

It is only at this late date that the issue of your paper of May 25, 1990, reached me, with a letter by Mr. George Starkman, disputing my statement that there is no evidence whatsoever to substantiate the claim that Nazis made soap out of bodies of Jews.

Mr. Starkman states that the soap was distributed in Poland on rationing stamps starting in 1941 and bore the inscription RJF, which he translates as "rein Juden fett."

In fact, the bars of soap, some of which can be seen in Jewish Memorial museums, including in Jerusalem, have the letters "R.I.F." written on them, and they mean "Reichsstelle fuer Industrielle Fettversorgung," or Reich Center for Industrial Supplies of Fats. The terms "rein Juden fett" spelt in this form does not exist in German in any case, and in 1941, when Mr. Starkman correctly states the soap was being distributed, there were as yet no extermination camps in existence. The first, Chelmno, started operating on December 8, 1941, the second, Belzec, in March. Auschwitz had experimental gassings going on since January, 1942.

The source of the legend was a rumor current in World War I, spread by the British, that the Germans were using bodies of their own soldiers for fat or manure production -- the rumor was disproved after 1918. The Nazis resuscitated the rumor, and used it as a form of additional sadism, in words this time, on their Jewish victims: it was the Nazis who told the Jews they would be made into soap, and the Poles heard it from the Nazis.

At the end of the war, the Russians uncovered, near Gdansk [then known as Danzig (JD)], a small laboratory in which parts of human bodies were used, of Polish and Russian slave workers probably, for some chemical purposes. These experiments could possibly have involved attempts to make soap out of human fats (which we know today is an almost impossible thing to do), but the Nazis apparently never managed to go beyond the experimental stage, if indeed that is what they were trying to do there. The laboratory was small, and it had been established only towards the end of the war. It did not involve Jewish bodies. The Russian prosecutor at Nuremberg brought the issue up in the trials, but had to drop it because no proof could be presented that these were actual experiments for the production of soap.

One has to fight wrong perceptions of the Holocaust, even if large numbers of survivors accept them as true. It is not as though the Nazis were not capable of this atrocity -- they certainly were -- but they, factually, did not do it. To claim, on the basis of Polish antisemitic slogans, or on the basis of rumors current in the camps -- in Auschwitz this was an accepted rumor -- that soap was produced of Jewish bodies, simply plays into the hands of the deniers of the Holocaust, who can easily prove that nothing of the kind ever happened. I deeply respect survivors' testimonies, and Mr. Starkman's is one of these, but that does not mean to say that such testimonies are free from misperceptions.

Sincerely,
Yehuda Bauer
Professor of Holocaust Studies

Source

Scott Smith · Post by **Scott Smith** » 22 Aug 2003 19:23

Wulpe, thank you for the translation! Do you know what the handwritten document is on the notebook paper?

Also, I think the K2O is indeed a typo because it is commonly known that KOH (pottassium lye) is used to make soft soap and NaOH (sodium lye) to make cake soap. I know you can hydrate pottasium oxide with water, but why would that be more available than KOH?

Also, in my experience it is not hard at all to make soap from animal fats. The only difficulty is getting a hard cake if the grease is not solid at room temperature (i.e., vegetable oil). The soap has no unpleasant odor either way but if the fat were rancid from salvaged kitchen grease perhaps it could benefit from something to change the smell. A really good soap can be made from kitchen cooking grease, lye, and borax (a hard-water "builder." I can't recall comparing sodium carbonate (washing soda Na2CO3) as a building agent as opposed to borax (sodium borate Na2B4O7). I see that sodium carbonate is used in the Nazi formula.

Basically this recipe is no more sinister than one used at a high school or on a ranch.

Wulpe · Post by **Wulpe** » 23 Aug 2003 09:49

Scott Smith wrote:Wulpe, thank you for the translation! Do you know what the handwritten document is on the notebook paper?

082495 seems to be a handwritten translation of the recipe, but it´s not in german. The only german text in the copies is the original recipe. Maybe you should post them in the Breaking the Sound Barrier section too ?

Oleg Grigoryev · Post by **Oleg Grigoryev** » 23 Aug 2003 09:52

The Russian text is verabtim translation of the German one, so is handwritten page.

Wulpe · Post by **Wulpe** » 23 Aug 2003 13:07

oleg wrote:The Russian text is verabtim translation of the German one, so is handwritten page.

Thanks. And what is this page about ?

qdave · Post by **qdave** » 24 Aug 2003 00:35

it says:
Me, USSR Military Colonel Dmitry Karev, ??Helper of main prosecutor of ussr and director of ??Soviet Archive in Nurnberg procesion, tell you that that these documents are real and give them to nurnberg military tribune, the proof is (all those CCCR-number) are documents captured from germans between 1941-1945 by red army
then there is: colonel and his signature
2nd august 1946
city of nurnberg

i put ?? near the words i am not sure about

and anybody with better knowledge of russian than mine please translate it better

hope this helps a bit

Scott Smith · Post by **Scott Smith** » 30 Aug 2003 06:29

Pieter Kuiper · Post by **Pieter Kuiper** » 19 Sep 2005 08:47

From the Nuremberg proceedings, where also the evidence shown above was introduced:

I submit some semi-finished and some finished soap as exhibit USSR 393. Here you can see a small piece of finished soap, which on the outside, after lying about for a few months, reminds you of ordinary household soap. I hand it to the Tribunal.

http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/imt/tgmwc/tg ... 2-06.shtml

This is probably a good place to link to pictures of these exhibits:

I cannot read Russian, but the last words on the label are "institut DANZIG".