The Myth of Nazi Human Soap
The list of actual atrocities associated with the Holocaust and other Nazi crimes is great enough without including any of spurious historicity or of questionable genocidal dimension. The horrendous deeds associated with the euthanasia program and the terrible suffering perpetrated by "physicians" on human beings, both on adults and children, Jewish and non-Jewish, in the name of "medical science" need not be rehearsed here except to reiterate that these facts are by no means enhanced by inserting in the list of Nazi crimes accusations of ones that did not take place. The unadorned truth is testimony enough and, if anything, is diluted if juxtaposed alongside events that did not take place or were not quite what they seem.
In question is the oft-repeated assertion that the Nazis manufactured soap out of the human fat of its Jewish victims. One can readily see why one might be inclined to believe this bizarre charge. After all, human skin was used to make lamp shades; gold teeth were extracted from the corpses (between gas chamber and crematorium) to be melted down into bars; and human hair was carefully collected for sundry uses, ranging from wigs to upholstery or pillow stuffing. In light of this efficient exploitation of every salvageable element from the bodies of murdered Jews, why not, by logical extension, subscribe to the notion of bars of soap made from human (Jewish) fat?
Besides, there seems to be the incontestable proof imprinted on the bars themselves. On them is found the abbreviation RJF, immediately interpreted as "Reichs-Juden-Fett", State Jewish Soap. However tempting this translation may be, it is an understandable but erroneous one, more an emotional reflex response than a cold, analytical analysis of the data.
In point of fact, RJF means "Reichs-Industrie-Fett", that is State Industrial Soap. In German, for abbreviations, it was not uncommon to use the "i" and "j" interchangeably, both in lower and upper cases, with the "j" substituting for the "i", or "J" for "I". Since 1933 and prior to 1918 when Germany was referred to as the "Reich", the abbreviation R in conjunction with other initials was printed on numerous items identifying them as state property. In this case, RJF referred to a commonly used soap, especially designed for workers to remove machine oil and heavy paint. The soap was issued to and distributed widely by the Wehrmacht, the German military.
Not uncommonly, the RJF soap was to be found in garages and factories where workers repaired military vehicles and performed tasks with large machinery requiring constant lubrication. Throughout the occupied northeast regions (the Baltics and Byelorussia), then known as Reichkommissariat Ostland and Byalistok Gebiet, tens of thousands of ghettoized Jews were forced to work for the German war effort in numerous capacities. Naturally, they encountered the RJF bars of soap at the work site. Besides, according to many survivor reports, these bars of soap were occasionally seen in concentration camps including in the forced labor section of Auschwitz.
Acutely aware of their dreadful fate, the Jewish workers in Auschwitz responded, indeed overreacted to their encounter with the initials RJF. The letter "J" had become an ubiquitous symbol, stamped on passports, whitewashed on stores before the war, and often sewn onto the star of David on outer garments. Thus, seeing the "J" inscribed on soap, Jews, especially those in the death camps, put two and two together and arrived at a conclusion fed by years of despair witnessing the then unimaginable. And, after the war, as news made from lamp shades of human skin and other perverse facts surfaced, there was no reason not to lend credence to the anecdote about "human" soap and add it to the list of macabre crimes. The story was fortified by other survivors who had also seen the bars of soap at SS locations where they had worked and immediately accepted the interpretation that "RJF" meant "made from Jewish fat", seeing no reason to believe otherwise. This, then, is how the myth of "Jewish soap" was incorporated into the story of the Holocaust, even though a scholarly rejection of the interpretation was made some ten years back by a researcher at Yad Vashem, Jerusalem.
Nevertheless, once fixed in the public mind, such a misunderstanding is next to impossible to expurgate, such as the oft repeated statement, "The Jews were sent to the crematoria," most commonly by media commentators, but all too often by Holocaust scholars on the lecture circuit (perhaps due to rank carelessness which comes from giving the same talk once too often, or because of the need to make a dramatic comment in order to gain the attention of the audience).
Jews, of course, were first sent to the gas chamber to be killed and only then burned to ashes in the incinerators in the crematoria located nearby. The transition was the task of the Sonderkommandos, special work gangs made up of Jewish prisoners, who, two to four weeks later, were themselves gassed and incinerated, the very men who removed gold teeth from the dead (gassed) victims. Only rarely was anyone burned alive, virtually all being individuals who somehow had not been asphyxiated by the lethal gas. In other words, the routine of mass killing did not include mass burning of live Jews; nor was there a policy of killing individual Jews by means of the crematoria, though exceptional incidents have been noted by survivors. The express purpose of the crematoria by design and overwhelming use was to destroy the bodies for several reasons: there were too many to bury in the winter when the ground was frozen solid; there was the fear of disease if the bodies were stored for too long in warm weather; and, lastly, there was the intent to destroy the evidence of genocide, hence the policy to disinter bodies from mass graves and to burn them.
It is sufficient, therefore, to keep the essential relationship of the crematoria to the gas chambers without distorting or blurring it. To proclaim "Jews were sent to the crematoria!" is emotive and borders on falsification. It is making out of actual isolated incidents a general event which did not take place. Classroom teachers especially should be careful of this trap. As stated before, the facts of the Holocaust need no enhancing. The facts suffice without appeals to artificial emotions. Like the myth of "Human or Jewish soap" the distortion made by the assertion "Jews were burned in the crematoria" should be carefully avoided.
Henry R. Huttenbach