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Grandma's Lie Soap
By John Weir
Many years
ago a comic named Johnny Stanley was featured on
a novelty record called "It's in the Book." On this
record Stanley delivered a mock sermon using the
"Little Bo Peep" nursery rhyme. The second part
of the recording was a hymn which had nothing to
do with religion, just as the sermon was not based
on scripture. The hymn was "Grandma's Lye Soap"
which poked fun at the homemade soap produced, mostly
in rural areas, three or four generations ago.
One can still find soap-making demonstrations
at arts and crafts fairs and heritage festivals
in small towns. Lye soap is also made at rustic
tourist venues which rely heavily on nostalgia like
Silver Dollar City in Branson, Missouri. Instructions
for making soap can be found on the Internet. Making
soap is not a complicated business. It requires
very simple equipment and very few ingredients (i.e.
lye -- the caustic chemical used in many drain cleaners
-- and fat.)
A rumor having to do with soap circulated in
Europe during World War II. It was one of several
rumors which had ghoulish behavior of Nazis as the
central theme. This rumor was a variation on a black
propaganda story concocted by the British about
the Germans during World War I. During that war
a story appeared in the German press that the Germans
were taking dead horses and rendering the fat from
them to be used in soap. Germany is a country of
shortage during wartime and nothing is let go to
waste. The British altered the story and fed it
back into Germany that dead German soldiers were
being rendered for their fat for soap production
instead. After the war was over, Great Britain apologized
for this and other atrocity stories it spread during
the war.
Grave marker in Atlanta's Greenwood
Cemetery. It reads, "Here rest four bars of soap,
the last Earthly remains of Jewish victims of the
Nazi Holocaust."
This
story was resurrected during World War II in a Germany
again beset by war shortages. There are at least
three versions of the human soap story as it relates
to Nazi Germany. The first and one most widely circulated
was that soap was made using fat rendered from the
bodies of murdered Jews. This soap was stamped with
the initials "RJF" which allegedly meant the soap
was made from pure Jewish fat. Actually, the stamp
on the soap was "RIF" which stood for Reichsstelle
Industrielle Fettversorgung, the organization
that made the soap.
A second version resulted in several people being
either imprisoned or executed. In this version,
the Nazis merely experimented with making soap from
dead people. It is not known who the dead people
were since the corpses used in the experiments had
already been decapitated before being delivered
to laboratory in Danzig where they were rendered
and turned into soap. The Soviets obtained confessions
that these experiments took place. They released
photos of dead bodies sticking out of what looks
like a deep freezer, a quantity of soap, and recipe
for soap. A trial was held in which several people
were convicted and sentenced.
Finally, there is a story that an unsavory brigade
of the Waffen-SS known as "Dirlewanger" made soap
from the bodies of Jewish women it had executed.
This tale is contained in Konrad Morgen's affidavits
obtained after the war. According to Morgen, Oskar
Dirlewanger, the brigade's commander, injected women
with poison, cut them into pieces, mixed the pieces
in with horse meat and boiled the concoction into
soap. (I hope you are not eating while reading this.)
There is no evidence to indicate any of these
stories are true, but many who lived during the
war believe,particularly the first of the soap stories
even though this version is the one which is most
demonstrably false. Because people will believe
the worst about their enemies, any horrible accusation
having to do with them, particularly when the source
is considered credible, will be enthusiastically
accepted as a proven truth. Leather gloves, lamp
shades, and book covers made from human skin a la
Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal;
bones ground into fertilizer; hair- stuffed mattresses
and soap from human fat are all tales readily swallowed
because enemies are supposed to be hated. Yes, rumor
had it, the Nazis put everything to use except the
squeal. Consequently, anything they got, they deserved
because they were the enemy and they were evil.
The propaganda does it's bit for the war effort
and the incitement to hate ends with the war. It
is part of the pattern of war. It works every time.
People will believe anything about people they hate
if it aids them in their hatred and assures them
of their own moral superiority. World War II ended
over fifty-six years ago. These horror stories have
been debunked for decades for the blood-libel that
they are.
Nevertheless, according to The Jewish Journal
of Greater Los Angeles, an elderly Romanian
Jew named Lupu Gutman has resurrected the horror
story of Nazi ghoulishness in a documentary called
"Monuments of Soap." In it, European graveyards
are visited where RIF soap had been buried under
the pretense that it had been made from the bodies
of murdered Jews. Belief in this canard still persists
in those who are still cling to their hatred. The
fact that this old man, who was still in his teens
when the war ended, wants to pass on his hatred
to today's gullible teenagers tells us how much
he values it.
The Germans didn't make
soap from human corpses. The fact that, at the end
of the war, a few credulous Jews buried cakes of
RIF soap in cemeteries and raised monuments on the
sites to their own stupidity and hatred for Germans
doesn't make the human soap lie a fact.
Lies die when they outlive their usefulness.
The soap story has been largely forgotten in the
last half century like the embarrassing markers
erected to buried soap and intense hatred. Gutman
does not want his hatred to die, not even when he
does. He wants "kids who go to libraries" to keep
the fire of his hatred alive and to share his paranoid
world view, so that it outlives him.
A woman once commented to Winston Churchill that
if he were her husband she would give him poison.
Churchill responded that if she were his wife he
would gladly take it. One can only hope that when
given a choice, teens who go to libraries will leave
this stupid and false propaganda piece on the shelf
to collect dust so that it too will be forgotten
along with the head stones raised to Mr. Bubble,
and Mr. Clean erected in neglected European graveyards
by a poisoned past to poison the future. This poison--offered
by a dying, hateful man--is a poison that need not
be taken.
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