Deceit & Misrepresentation Apprendix 5
Here's the text of "Nazi Soap Rumor During World War II," a letter to the editor in Los Angeles Times, 16 May 1981, part II, page 2:
Rachel Patron's moving piece (Editorial Pages, April 30) about a
childhood in Siberia during World War II highlighted the way in which war can make the most mundane of niceties, in this case soap, a luxury.
She survived four years of hunger, horror and brutalities meted
out by a regime that treated the foreigners in its midst and even
its own people with less than humane consideration. Patron and
her family were among the thousands of Jews who were forcibly
moved by the Russians from sectors of Russian-occupied Poland
into the Siberian interior and held in a semi-state of captivity
for the war's duration. As hard as their lot might have been,
they were saved from the systematic annihilation the Germans
visited on those Jews who had the miserable fate of living in
German-occupied Poland.
At the war's end as the Patrons returned to Poland they stopped in the
Ukrainian town of Dobra Matka. While waiting for the train Rachel discovered
a shed full of soap and after joyously lathering herself and washing off the
Siberia stench brought an armful back to her mother. The easy availability of
this common household item seemed to indicate to Rachel and her mother that the
war was over.
The child's joy quickly evaporated when her mother discovered the
letters "RJF" on the bars of soap. The mother explained through her tears
of horror that the letters stood for Rein Judisch Fett: Pure Jewish Fat. A childhood joy had become a nightmare.
Rachel Patron probably has many nightmares from that period. Had her
family lived in a different part of Poland she probably would not have survived
to have those nightmares. She would have become one of the millions of Jewish
children who perished at the hands of the Nazi murderers. She would have
become a statistic and not a storyteller. But she would not have been
rendered into soap.
The fact is that the Nazis never used the bodies of Jews, or for that
matter anyone else, for the production of soap. The soap rumor was prevalent
both during and after the war. It may have had its origin in the cadaver
factory atrocity story that came out of World War I. The letters "RJF" probably stood for the name of the factory that produced the soap. The soap rumor was thoroughly investigated after the war and proved to be untrue.
The Nazis performed innumerable acts of horror. Acts which, were there not definite and undeniable proof of them, could be dismissed as too unbelievable to be true. The hair of Jewish women was sent back to the Reich for use by the German people. The gold was extracted from the teeth of Jews and sent to German banks to be melted down.
In certain camps, e.g. Buchenwald, there were acts even more macabre.
There, the young wife of the commandant used the skin of Jews to make
lampshades and other bric-a-brac for her home. The greatest act of horror,
of course, was the well-nigh successful plan of the Nazis to eliminate the
Jewish people from the face of the European continent.
During the war the Nazis went to great effort to hide their actions
from the public. They used all sorts of euphemisms to camouflage their
actions in official reports: "eliminated," "finished off," "subject to
special treatment," and "solution of the Jewish question." It would have
been entirely at odds with their policy of subterfuge for them to have
printed the abbreviation of "Pure Jewish Fat" on bars of soap that were
distributed to the population of the Reich and Reich-occupied countries.
The necessity for exactitude when dealing with the horrors of the
war becomes even more pressing today when there are those groups that would haveus believe that the Holocaust is a "hoax." The Torrance-based Institute of
Historical Review (IHR) emerged as the American front for this argument.
Similar groups exist in Europe. These groups contend that while many Jews
may have died as a result of "normal" wartime privations, no one ever died in
a gas chamber or as a result of systematic murder. The basis for their
argument is that the only ones to benefit from the myth of the Holocaust are
the Zionists.
The IHR would have you believe that Zionists propagated the story of
the Holocaust and use the sympathy of the world to foster their own ends. In
reaching this conclusion they ignore reams of detailed eyewitness accounts by
both the victims and perpetrators of this crime.
Faculty and students at the University of California have become
particularly sensitive to the dangerous antics of the IHR. In November 1981
the IHR will hold a conference on the "hoax of the Holocaust" at the University
of California retreat center in Lake Arrowhead. They have leased the retreat center under the guise of being an educational entity. It should be noted that
since the Arrowhead center is subsidized, the residents of the state of
California whose tax dollars support the University of California are for all
intents and purposes supporting the IHR and its attempt to make a mockery of all
that is truth.
In the face of such frightening endeavors it is imperative that all
those who write and speak of the annihilation of European Jewry do so with the
greatest of care and precision. It is equally imperative that all those who
value truth and honesty fight the attempts of the IHR to propagate their
mendacious views.
Deborah Lipstadt
Lipstadt is on the faculty of UCLA, where she teaches modern Jewish
history.
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The Techniques of Holocaust Denial
Deborah Lipstadt's letter to the LA Times
Los Angeles