Survivors
are loath to see that symbol
['soap' from 'fat of dead
Jews'] reduced to a
60-year-old rumor.
-- Jim Galloway, Atlanta
Journal and Constitution
|
Atlanta, Georgia (USA), September 25,
2000, p. 1A Illustrations
added by this website Bizarre
burial prods Holocaust angst Jim Galloway Before sunrise on a
cold March morning in 1970, a rabbi and an
architect slipped over the fence to
Greenwood Cemetery in Atlanta to scout out
a burial site for four bars of
soap.  A
hasty funeral service was conducted later
that afternoon --- Jewish law required
quick interment for the green-gray cakes,
which had surfaced days before. About 35
people, most of them survivors of European
concentration camps, gathered around a
small hole dug at the base of the local
Holocaust memorial.
None had any doubt that the soap bars
were made from human beings. The architect, Ben Hirsch,
devoted a chapter to the incident in a
memoir published this spring and urged
scholars to take a closer look at the
topic. As a result, the U.S. Holocaust
Memorial Museum has barred Hirsch from
conducting a book-signing on its premises
in Washington. Emory University professor
Deborah Lipstadt, who triumphed
over a Holocaust denier in a British
libel trial this year, endorses the
decision. During World War II, the Nazis killed
millions through gassing and starvation,
torture and firing squads. They conducted
bizarre human experiments, harvested hair
and gold fillings, and used human skin for
lampshades. But there's no proof that
Nazis made soap of their victims, museum
officials said, and the institution won't
endorse any book that argues
otherwise. "(Hirsch) was advocating hat we explore
what is essentially a dead end," said
Peter Black, chief historian at the
Holocaust museum. The issue has become a bone of
contention between scholars and the
dwindling number of Holocaust survivors,
who now watch a post-World War II
generation take control of their story. "I
think I've piqued the fraternity," said
Hirsch, 68, who still designs churches and
synagogues in metro Atlanta. But more than a generational rift is at
work. The making of soap from murdered
humans has long served as a particularly
horrific example of the Final Solution's
depravity. "It is something that symbolizes the
ultimate horror of using every molecule of
the murdered," conceded Black, the museum
historian. Survivors are loath to see that
symbol reduced to a 60-year-old rumor. Survivors wonder whether, in an effort
to secure the historical record against
those who argue that the Holocaust never
happened, scholars have set a standard for
proof that is too high -- and have
unilaterally cut off the debate. "There's a religious issue here,"
Hirsch said. "These are not just bars of
soap. They were buried as if they were
human beings." And that indeed raises the
uncomfortable question of what lies in the
cemetery off Cascade Road. Skepticism,
but no censorship Officials at the Holocaust museum in
Washington emphasize that they are not
censoring Hirsch or any other survivor.
"Hearing a
Different Drummer" (Mercer
University Press) remains on the shelves
of the museum's bookstore. But a book signing would be interpreted
as a sanctioning of Hirsch's views,
officials said. Hirsch had timed the signing to
coincide with a November reunion of Jewish
children who were sheltered from the Nazis
by a French network. Hirsch was one of
them. His parents and two siblings died in
the camps. Most of
"Different Drummer" is devoted to
Hirsch's experience as a U.S. soldier
in postwar Germany. But in the 10 pages
of Chapter 23, he expresses his
disappointment in the verdict of
historians on Nazi soap-making. He
cites the example of his uncle, a
chemist who was forced to work in
Auschwitz making soap. Hirsch says his uncle, who died in the
1950s, confessed to Hirsch's brother that
he had saved his own life by using human
corpses -- something that historians say
never happened. Hirsch also tells the story of the four
bars of soap in Atlanta. They were found
by a Jewish soldier who was part of a U.S.
force that liberated a concentration camp
near Stettin, Germany, near
Frankfurt.[*]
The soldier saw the soap cakes, which had
been stamped "RIF." Historians say the initials stand for
Reich Industrie Fett, or Reich Industrial
Fat. But at the time, the "I" was widely
interpreted as a "J," and the initials for
Reines Juden Fett --- or Pure Jewish
Fat. The soldier stuffed the soap bars in a
bag and took them home. He eventually
married a concentration camp survivor.
Twenty-five years later, the couple was
living on LaVista Road in DeKalb County.
The soap bars were stashed in the
basement. One night, the husband came home from
work and found that his wife, having run
out of detergent, was using the soap on
the laundry. As he explained what they
were, they both became highly
disturbed. At 3 a.m., the distressed couple called
Rabbi Emanuel Feldman of nearby
Congregation Beth Jacob, who consulted
rabbinical scholars in New York and
Israel, then set the burial service in
motion. Feldman accompanied Hirsch to the
cemetery on that early morning in
1970. New
scholarly sources yield nothing "I don't think (the soap bars) would be
buried if they were found today," said
Lipstadt, the Emory historian. She is a
member of the Washington museum's
executive council. One problem with scholarly research of
the Holocaust has been the seamless manner
in which World War II flowed into the Cold
War. The dropping of the Iron Curtain
sealed away many of the facts from the
first generation of Holocaust
scholars. But a great rush of information has
come in the last two decades with the
collapse of communism in Eastern Europe,
site of some of the worst Nazi atrocities,
and the dissolution of the Soviet
Union. Nothing in the newly opened archives
has shed any light on the topic of making
soap from Jews, historians say. "We
haven't found anything yet that would give
us something to grasp onto, that we didn't
have in 1945," said Peter Black, the
Holocaust museum historian. The Washington museum now has a
standardized summary that is faxed to
those who inquire about Nazi soap-making.
Included on the fact sheet: "The soap rumor
seems to have been first mentioned in the
United States media in 1942." A recipe for soap in German, dated
February 1944, was found tacked to a piece
of plywood at the Danzig Anatomical
Institute in Poland. The recipe calls for
fat, but does not refer to human fat, the
museum says.  Raul
Hilberg, the dean of Holocaust
historians (left), has cited the testimony
of the postwar mayor of Danzig, who said
350 bodies were found at the plant, along
with a caldron containing the remains of
boiled human flesh. But
Hilberg failed to
verify the authenticity of the
testimony, the museum statement says.
The testimony of two British POWs who
labored at the same plant "is
contradictory and inconclusive," the
museum says. What historians say they lack are bills
of lading, evidence of a manufacturing
plant or receipts of purchase or exchange
-- documentation the Nazis carefully
maintained for other noxious
enterprises. "If you look at all the evidence
available about Nazis experimenting with
human beings . . . the composite of all
that evidence cannot permit you to
conclude that this happened," said Black.
He compares the soap-making stories with
the myth of Hitler's Jewish ancestry. But survivors think historians may be
too strict in their criteria, citing the
museum's statement that "There is
absolutely no evidence to indicate this
was ever done on an industrial basis or in
a centrally directed fashion." "Yes, there was no mass production,"
agreed Morris Spitzer, 77. "But
yes, there was production in smaller
quantities at many of the (extermination)
camps." Spitzer, a camp survivor and
resident of the Bronx, N.Y., is trying to
obtain recognition for a photograph of a
1946 funeral procession in Sighet,
Romania, involving bars of soap collected
by the village. The
proven facts are 'bad enough' Holocaust history is constantly being
adjusted as new evidence and research
surface. Hilberg, the eminent historian, has
recommended that the number of European
Jews killed by the Nazi machine be revised
downward, from 6 million to 5.1 million.
And even that number now may be nudged
slightly up --- based on even fresher
information coming out of the former
Soviet Union. Such revisions, while common enough in
other historical fields, are handled with
extreme care, with the expectation that
Holocaust deniers will twist any change in
the record into a retreat from the
truth. But Lipstadt, the Emory professor and
author, said deniers aren't driving the
standards of historians. "If deniers are a
concern, they are down at the bottom," she
said. At the top is a desire for rock-solid
historical accuracy. "It's important
because you don't want people to say it's
demi-fiction," Lipstadt said. Soap-making has been a handy metaphor
for Nazi cruelty, she said, but its
disappearance from the catalog of Nazis
atrocities shouldn't make much difference.
"The truth that we know is bad enough. We
don't need the soap," she said. If Lipstadt
has a regret, it might be that the
matter might have been handled more
diplomatically. Early in her career,
she stated categorically that
soap-making by the Nazis never
happened. If she had it to do again,
Lipstadt said, "I wouldn't say (the
Nazis) never did it. I would say we
have no evidence." She would leave the
door slightly cracked. "If they dug up those bars of soap and
DNA tests showed they were made from human
beings, I would say, 'Oh, my God, we need
to take another look at this, ' " Lipstadt
said. Science
has no answers now But science is an unlikely arbiter when
it comes to what is buried in Atlanta's
Greenwood Cemetery. The Holocaust museum says it has tested
some bars of soap for human DNA and found
nothing. But even if human DNA were found in the
suspect soap, it probably wouldn't prove
anything, according to Connie
Kolman of the C.A. Pound Human
Identification Laboratory in Gainesville,
Fla. A specialist in tracing ancient DNA,
Kolman said the bars of soap in Greenwood
Cemetery probably do contain some human
genetic material. The problem is one of
contamination. Regardless of whether they
were made from humans, human beings were
involved in the production. Anyone who has touched the cakes has
left minute DNA material on them,
including the housewife on LaVista Road,
the scientist said. A DNA test could not distinguish
between the genetic material left by the
casual handler, Kolman said, and material
left by a human ingredient. "It'd be nice
if science could provide an answer for
this, but right now there's no way," she
said. That limitation doesn't upset everyone.
Rabbi Feldman, who conducted the Atlanta
burial service for the bars of soap in
1970, was recently contacted in Israel via
e-mail. Asked if he favored exhuming the small
soap casket, the rabbi replied, " Maybe it
would be best for it to remain a
mystery."
*
Website
note: Stettin was in north-eastern
Germany, on the Baltic coast, captured by
the Red Army; the US troops were in south
and south-western Germany, hundreds of
miles away.
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| 
write
to David Irving