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- the charge that the Germans manufactured soap from human beings is a falsehood, as Holocaust historians are now belatedly acknowledging. The RIF soap bar initials that supposedly stood for Pure Jewish Fat actually indicated nothing more sinister than Reich Center for Industrial Fat Provisioning (Reichsstelle fr Industrielle Fettversorgung), a German agency responsible for wartime production and distribution of soap and washing products. RIF soap was a poor quality substitute that contained no fat at all, human or otherwise.
Shortly after the war the public prosecutor's office of Flensburg, Germany, began legal proceedings against Dr. Rudolf Spanner for his alleged role in producing human soap at the Danzig Institute, but after a preliminary investigation the charge was quietly dropped. In a January 1968 letter, the office stated that its inquiry had determined that no soap from human corpses was made at the Danzig Institute during the war.
More recently, Jewish historian Walter Laqueur, "denied established history," by acknowledging in his 1980 book, The Terrible Secret, that the human soap story has no basis in reality. Gitta Sereny, another Jewish historian, noted in her book, Into That Darkness, "The universally accepted story that the corpses were used to make soap and fertilizer is finally refuted by the generally reliable Ludwigsburg Central Authority for Investigation into Nazi Crimes."
Deborah Lipstadt, a professor of modern Jewish history, similarly rewrote history when she confirmed 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."
In April 1990, professor Yehuda Bauer of Israel's Hebrew University, regarded as a leading Holocaust historian, as well as Shmuel Krakowski, archives director of Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust center, confirmed that the human soap story is not true. "Camp inmates were prepared to believe any horror stories about their persecutors," Bauer said.
In fact, blame for the soap story lies rather with individuals such as Simon Wiesenthal and Stephen Wise, organizations like the World Jewish Congress, and the victorious Allied powers, none of whom has ever apologized for promoting this falsehood.
Why did Bauer and Krakowski decide that this was the appropriate time to officially abandon the soap story? Krakowski himself hints that a large part of the motivation for this tactical retreat has been to avoid aiding the Holocaust revisionists. In the face of the growing Revisionist challenge, easily demonstrable falsehoods like the soap story have become dangerous embarrassments because they raise doubts about the entire Holocaust history. As Krakowski put it, "Historians have concluded that soap was not made from human fat. When so many people deny the Holocaust ever happened, why give them something to use against the truth?"
The bad faith of those making this calculated and belated concession to truth is shown by their failure to note that the soap myth was authoritatively confirmed at Nuremberg, and by their unwillingness to deal with the implications of that confirmation for the credibility of the Tribunal and other supposedly trustworthy authorities in establishing other, more fundamental aspects of the Holocaust story.
The striking contrast between the prompt postwar disavowal by the British government of the infamous human soap lie of the First World War, and the way in which a similarly baseless propaganda story from the Second World War was officially endorsed by the victorious Allied powers and then authoritatively maintained for so many years not only points up the dispiriting lack of integrity on the part of so many Western historians, but underscores the general decline in Western ethical standards during this century.
The human soap story demonstrates anew the tremendous impact that a wartime rumor, no matter how fantastic, can have once it has taken hold, particularly when it is disseminated as a propaganda lie by influential individuals and powerful organizations. That so many intelligent and otherwise thoughtful people could ever have seriously believed that the Germans distributed bars of soap brazenly labeled with letters indicating that they were manufactured from Jewish corpses shows how readily even the most absurd Holocaust fables can be -- and are -- accepted as fact.
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