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During the 20th century, there were various alleged instances of soap being made from human
body fat Adipose tissue, body fat, or simply fat is a loose connective tissue composed mostly of adipocytes. In addition to adipocytes, adipose tissue contains the stromal vascular fraction (SVF) of cells including preadipocytes, fibroblasts, vascular e ...
. During World War I the British press claimed that the Germans operated a corpse factory in which they made glycerine and soap from the bodies of their own soldiers. Both during and after World War II, widely circulated rumors claimed that soap was being
mass-produced Mass production, also known as flow production or continuous production, is the production of substantial amounts of standardized products in a constant flow, including and especially on assembly lines. Together with job production and batch ...
from the bodies of the victims of
Nazi concentration camps From 1933 to 1945, Nazi Germany operated more than a thousand concentration camps, (officially) or (more commonly). The Nazi concentration camps are distinguished from other types of Nazi camps such as forced-labor camps, as well as conce ...
which were located in German-occupied Poland. During the
Nuremberg trials The Nuremberg trials were held by the Allies against representatives of the defeated Nazi Germany, for plotting and carrying out invasions of other countries, and other crimes, in World War II. Between 1939 and 1945, Nazi Germany invaded ...
items were presented as evidence of such production.Justice at Nuremberg, Robert E. Conot, Carroll & Graf Publishers, 1984, pp. 298-9 The Yad Vashem Memorial has stated that the Nazis did not produce soap with fat which was extracted from Jewish corpses on an industrial scale, saying that the Nazis may have frightened camp inmates by deliberately circulating rumors in which they claimed that they were able to extract fat from human corpses, turn it into soap, mass-produce and distribute it.


History


1786

In 1780, the former
Holy Innocents' Cemetery The Holy Innocents' Cemetery (French: Cimetière des Saints-Innocents or Cimetière des Innocents) is a defunct cemetery in Paris that was used from the Middle Ages until the late 18th century. It was the oldest and largest cemetery in Paris and h ...
in Paris was closed because of overuse. In 1786, the bodies were exhumed and the bones were moved to the
Catacombs Catacombs are man-made subterranean passageways for religious practice. Any chamber used as a burial place is a catacomb, although the word is most commonly associated with the Roman Empire. Etymology and history The first place to be referred ...
. Many bodies had incompletely decomposed and had reduced into deposits of
fat In nutrition, biology, and chemistry, fat usually means any ester of fatty acids, or a mixture of such compounds, most commonly those that occur in living beings or in food. The term often refers specifically to triglycerides (triple est ...
. During the exhumation, this fat was collected and subsequently turned into candles and soap.


World War I

The claim that Germans used the fat from human corpses to make products, including soap, was made during World War I. This allegation appears to have originated as a rumor which was spread by the British and Belgian media. The first recorded reference was made in 1915 when Cynthia Asquith noted in her diary (16 June 1915): "We discussed the rumour that the Germans utilise even their corpses by converting them into glycerine with the by-product of soap."Neander, Joachim, ''The German Corpse Factory. The Master Hoax of British Propaganda in the First World War'', Saarland University Press, 2013, pp.79-85. It became a major international story when '' The Times'' of London reported in April 1917 that the Germans had admitted rendering the bodies of their dead soldiers for fat to make soap and other products. After the war
John Charteris Brigadier General John Charteris (1877–1946) was a British Army officer. During World War I he was the Chief of Intelligence at the British Expeditionary Force General Headquarters from 1915 to 1918. In later life he was a Unionist Party Memb ...
, the former head of army intelligence, was reported to have claimed in a 1925 speech that he had invented the story. He subsequently insisted that his remarks had been misreported. The controversy led the British Foreign Secretary Sir
Austen Chamberlain Sir Joseph Austen Chamberlain (16 October 1863 – 16 March 1937) was a British statesman, son of Joseph Chamberlain and older half-brother of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. He served as Chancellor of the Exchequer (twice) and was briefly ...
to officially state that the government accepted that the "corpse factory" story was untrue. The belief that the British had deliberately invented the story was later used by the Nazis.


World War II

Rumors which alleged that the Nazis produced soap from the bodies of concentration camp inmates were widely circulated during the war. Germany suffered from a shortage of fats during World War II, and the production of soap was put under government control. The "human soap" rumours may have originated because bars of soap were marked with the
Fraktur Fraktur () is a calligraphic hand of the Latin alphabet and any of several blackletter typefaces derived from this hand. The blackletter lines are broken up; that is, their forms contain many angles when compared to the curves of the Antiq ...
initials (RIF), which some believed stood for "'" ("pure Jewish fat"); in German Blackletter font, I and J are only different in length ( vs. ). However, in fact, stood for ' ("National Center for Industrial Fat Provisioning", the German government agency which was responsible for the wartime production and distribution of soap and washing products). soap was a poor quality substitute for soap and did not contain any fat, human or otherwise. Rumors about the origin of soap and the meaning of the labeling were also spread in the concentration camps. In his book ''Solitary in the Overwhelming Turbulence: Five Years as a Prisoner-of-War in East Prussia'', Naphtali Karchmer describes his years in captivity as a Jewish-Polish POW. He writes about gray, rectangular, low-quality pieces of soap which he and other POWs received with the letters " " inscribed on a center depression. These were only claimed to be made of "'" ("pure Jewish fat") when prisoners complained about the low-foam, smooth soap. A version of the story is included in '' The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry'', one of the earliest collections of firsthand accounts of the Holocaust, assembled by Soviet writers Ilya Ehrenburg and
Vasily Grossman Vasily Semyonovich Grossman (russian: Васи́лий Семёнович Гро́ссман; 12 December (29 November, Julian calendar) 1905 – 14 September 1964) was a Soviet writer and journalist. Born to a Jewish family in Ukraine, then ...
. The specific story is part of a report which is titled "The Extermination of the Jews of Lvov" attributed to I. Herts and Naftali Nakht:
Raul Hilberg Raul Hilberg (June 2, 1926 – August 4, 2007) was a Jewish Austrian-born American political scientist and historian. He was widely considered to be the preeminent scholar on the Holocaust. Christopher R. Browning has called him the founding fath ...
reports that such stories were circulated in
Lublin Lublin is the ninth-largest city in Poland and the second-largest city of historical Lesser Poland. It is the capital and the center of Lublin Voivodeship with a population of 336,339 (December 2021). Lublin is the largest Polish city east of ...
as early as October 1942. The Germans were aware that the stories were being circulated, because SS-chief
Heinrich Himmler Heinrich Luitpold Himmler (; 7 October 1900 – 23 May 1945) was of the (Protection Squadron; SS), and a leading member of the Nazi Party of Germany. Himmler was one of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany and a main architect of th ...
received a letter which described the Poles' belief that Jews were being "boiled into soap", an indication that the Poles feared that they would suffer a similar fate. Because the rumors were circulated so widely, some segments of the Polish population boycotted the purchase of soap. Historian Joachim Neander, in a German paper which he presented at the 28th conference of the
German Studies Association The German Studies Association (GSA) is an international organization of scholars in history, literature, economics, cultural studies, and political science who study Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. The organization began in 1976 as the Wester ...
in Washington D.C., cites the following comment, which is contained in a letter Himmler wrote to the head of the Gestapo,
Heinrich Müller Heinrich Müller may refer to: * Heinrich Müller (cyclist) (born 1926), Swiss cyclist * Heinrich Müller (footballer, born 1888) (1888–1957), Swiss football player and manager * Heinrich Müller (footballer, born 1909) (1909–2000), Austrian ...
; the letter is dated 20 November 1942. Himmler wrote the letter to Müller in response to an exposé by Stephen Wise printed in '' The New York Times'' that mentioned the soap rumor: Müller was instructed to make inquiries if "abuse" had happened somewhere, and he was also instructed to report the results of his inquiries to Himmler "on an SS oath". Neander goes on to state that the letter represents circumstantial evidence which indicates that it was Nazi policy to abstain from processing corpses due to their known desire to keep their mass murder as secret as possible. While the soap-making rumor was widely circulated and published as fact in numerous books and newspaper articles after the war, the myth has been debunked for many decades. Historians such as Deborah Lipstadt have frequently stated: "It is a fact that the Nazis never used the bodies of Jews, or for that matter anyone else, for the production of soap �� The soap rumor was thoroughly investigated after the war and proved to be untrue." Despite this fact, many "believers" of the myth persist, and Joachim Neander believes that they are unwittingly playing into the hands of Holocaust deniers by giving them a chance to easily debunk the legend, allowing them to cast doubt upon the veracity of the entire Holocaust as such. Soap-making rumors were underlying a cycle of Holocaust jokes of the time: "Moishe, why are you using soap with so much fragrance?" - "When they turn me into soap, at least I will smell good"
הומור כמנגנון הגנה בשואה
Humor as a defense mechanism in the Holocaust"
or "Don't eat much: the Germans will have less soap!"Sover, Arie. 2021. Jewish Humor: An outcome of Historical Experience, Survival, and Wisdom. London: Cambridge Scholars
Section "Jewish Humor in the Holocaust"
pp. 139-142


Danzig Anatomical Institute

During the
Nuremberg Trials The Nuremberg trials were held by the Allies against representatives of the defeated Nazi Germany, for plotting and carrying out invasions of other countries, and other crimes, in World War II. Between 1939 and 1945, Nazi Germany invaded ...
, Sigmund Mazur, a laboratory assistant at the Danzig Anatomical Institute, testified that soap had been made from corpse fat at the institute, and he also claimed that 70 to 80 kg (155–175 lb) of fat which was collected from 40 bodies could produce more than of soap, and the finished soap was retained by Professor Rudolf Spanner. Two British POWs who had to perform auxiliary tasks at the Institute provided witness-accounts. In his book '' Russia at War, 1941–1945'',
Alexander Werth Alexander Werth (4 February 1901, St Petersburg – 5 March 1969, Paris) was a Russian-born, naturalized United Kingdom, British writer, journalist, and war correspondent. Biography Werth fled with his father and grandfather to the United Kingdo ...
claims that while visiting /Danzig in 1945 shortly after its conquest by the Red Army, he saw an experimental factory outside the city for making soap from human corpses. According to Werth, it had been run by "a German professor called Spanner" and it "was a nightmarish sight, with its vats full of human heads and torsos pickled in some liquid, and its pails full of a flakey substance—human soap". Historian Joachim Neander states that the rumors which allege that the Nazis produced soap from the bodies of Jews who they murdered in their concentration camps, long-since thoroughly debunked, are still widely believed, and they are exploited by Holocaust deniers. However, he goes on to say that even scholars who reject the aforementioned claim that the Germans made soap from human fat and mass-produced it are sometimes still convinced that the Germans attempted "experimental" soap production on a smaller scale in Danzig and this claim is still repeated as if it is a firm fact in several remembrance contexts. He, and the Polish historian Monika Tomkiewicz, who works in the investigative department of the
Institute of National Remembrance The Institute of National Remembrance – Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation ( pl, Instytut Pamięci Narodowej – Komisja Ścigania Zbrodni przeciwko Narodowi Polskiemu, abbreviated IPN) is a Polish state resea ...
(IPN) in Gdańsk, and Piotr Semków, formerly also an employee of the IPN, later a lecturer at the Naval Academy in Gdynia, have thoroughly investigated Spanner's claims which surround the Danzig Anatomical Institute and all of them have concluded that the Holocaust-related soap-making claims which surround it are myths, particularly cemented into Polish consciousness by
Zofia Nałkowska Zofia Nałkowska (, Warsaw, Congress Poland, 10 November 1884 – 17 December 1954, Warsaw) was a Polish prose writer, dramatist, and prolific essayist. She served as the executive member of the prestigious Polish Academy of Literature (1933–193 ...
's 1946 book '' Medaliony'', which was mandatory reading in Poland until 1990, was widely distributed in the Eastern Bloc, and it is still popular today. They all alleged that such secondary sources have played a far greater role in spreading information about the claim than scholarly research has. According to both Neander, and Tomkiewicz and Semków, "soap", made from human cadavers, came into existence at the Danzig institute, it was not related to the alleged Holocaust-related crimes of "harvesting" Jews or Poles for soap-making purposes, because the connection between "the Holocaust" on one side and the "Danzig soap" on the other side only exists by way of the confirmed false rumors of "concentration camp soap" which were circulated during the war. The idea that the Danzig Anatomical Institute, and Dr. Spanners work therein, was related to the Holocaust originally stemmed from the findings of bodies and bone maceration processes in the creation of
anatomical model An anatomical model is a three-dimensional representation of human or animal anatomy, used for medical and biological education. Model specs The model may show the anatomy partially dissected, or have removable parts allowing the student to re ...
s in a small brick building on the premise of the anatomical institute. This, and the soapy grease which was created for the purpose of injecting it into the models' flexible joints, was used by the Soviets and the newly established Polish Chief Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation as proof of human soap production in Nazi concentration camps. The latter claims had been presented as fact and they had also become a stock phrase in Soviet propaganda, but no evidence of it could be found in the liberated camps. The "human soap" which was made from the bone maceration which was found in Danzig was conflated with the separate rumors regarding the
Nazi concentration camps From 1933 to 1945, Nazi Germany operated more than a thousand concentration camps, (officially) or (more commonly). The Nazi concentration camps are distinguished from other types of Nazi camps such as forced-labor camps, as well as conce ...
and they were presented together during the Nuremberg trials. Semków states that the presence of human
fat tissue Adipose tissue, body fat, or simply fat is a loose connective tissue composed mostly of adipocytes. In addition to adipocytes, adipose tissue contains the stromal vascular fraction (SVF) of cells including preadipocytes, fibroblasts, vascular en ...
has been confirmed in the samples of soapy grease from Danzig which were presented at the trials (which was claimed to be "unfinished soap") through analysis which was performed by the IPN and
Gdańsk University of Technology The Gdańsk University of Technology (Gdańsk Tech, former ''GUT''; pl, Politechnika Gdańska) is a technical university in the Wrzeszcz borough of Gdańsk, and one of the oldest universities in Poland. It has eight faculties and with 41 fie ...
in 2011 and 2006 respectively, but his and Tomkiewicz research concluded that this was a by-product stemming from Spanner's work in bone maceration. Spanner, a well-respected physician who was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1939, would also not have been "experimenting" with soap production (which was widely understood and not something which needed experimentation) instead of teaching his students. An investigation also maintained that at least 10 kg of soap from human fat was produced, sourced from the Stutthof concentration camp, based on the aforementioned testimonies which were delivered in 1945 and the presence of
kaolin Kaolinite ( ) is a clay mineral, with the chemical composition Al2 Si2 O5( OH)4. It is an important industrial mineral. It is a layered silicate mineral, with one tetrahedral sheet of silica () linked through oxygen atoms to one octahedral s ...
in the samples indicated that it was probably used as a cleaning soap due to its abrasive qualities, but the criminal investigation of this claim was discontinued because it lacked grounds which would indicate that Spanner had incited killings in order to obtain corpses for the Institute. Neander points out that the soap-making recipe from Mazur's testimony was contradictory and unrealistic, with a testimony from 12 May 1945 which claimed that 75 kg of fat were produced and 8 kg of soap were produced from the first boiling, a testimony from 28 May 1945 which claimed that 70–80 kg of fat were produced from 40 bodies and 25 kg of soap were produced from both boilings, and a testimony from 7 June 1945 which claimed that 40 bodies produced 40 kg of soap from both boilings. These inconsistencies were even pointed out before the Chief Commission. The witness testimonies of the two British POWs were also noted and they were described as being "contradictory and inconclusive" in a 1990s report which was compiled by the newly established
Holocaust Memorial Museum A number of organizations, museums and monuments are intended to serve as memorials to the Holocaust, the Nazi Final Solution, and its millions of victims. Memorials and museums listed by country: __NOTOC__ A - D: AlbaniaArgentina AustraliaAust ...
in Washington D.C., which holds a cautious stance with regard to the Danzig Soap issue. Regarding the presence of kaolin, the abrasiveness of which has also been criticized as being unsuitable for flexible model-joints, it was noted by Tomkiewicz and Semków that Spanner had previously done research on kaolin injections into cadavers, meaning that the kaolin found in the soap could have come from the cadaver itself, rather than as later additive. Tomkiewicz and Semków write that when
Zofia Nałkowska Zofia Nałkowska (, Warsaw, Congress Poland, 10 November 1884 – 17 December 1954, Warsaw) was a Polish prose writer, dramatist, and prolific essayist. She served as the executive member of the prestigious Polish Academy of Literature (1933–193 ...
, Vice-Chairperson of the Chief Commission, was already writing her short-story "Professor Spanner" (which would be published in ''Medaliony''), Spanner was again working as a medical doctor, under his own name, in Schleswig-Holstein in September 1945, unaware that he was being linked to any possible crimes. He was arrested in May 1947, but was released after three days, later being arrested again, but he was once again released after explaining how he had conducted the maceration and injection process. Spanner would "''repeat my statement given at the police and add: At the Danzig Anatomic Institute soap was manufactured to a limited extent from human fat. This soap was only used for the manufacturing of joint preparations''". After being dismissed by intervention from the British occupation authorities he was declared "clean" by the denazification program in 1948, officially exonerated, and resumed his academic career, becoming director of the Institute of Anatomy in Cologne in 1957 and editor of the esteemed Werner Spalteholz anatomical atlas, before dying in 1960. Neander concludes that no research or experiments on soap-making were conducted in Danzig, that Mazur never made soap according to his "recipe", that corpses which were delivered to be boiled and turned into anatomical models were all the corpses of Germans who had not been killed in order to "harvest" their bodies, and that the only soap created was a byproduct of this. He also concludes that what the IPN called the "chemical substance which was essentially soap", obtained by human fat, was used for laboratory cleaning purposes towards the end of the war, with Spanner, as head of the institute, bearing responsibility for this, but that such handling of dead bodies amounted to a
misdemeanor A misdemeanor (American English, spelled misdemeanour elsewhere) is any "lesser" criminal act in some common law legal systems. Misdemeanors are generally punished less severely than more serious felonies, but theoretically more so than adm ...
as opposed to any criminal behavior, let alone a
crime against humanity Crimes against humanity are widespread or systemic acts committed by or on behalf of a ''de facto'' authority, usually a state, that grossly violate human rights. Unlike war crimes, crimes against humanity do not have to take place within the c ...
or involvement in any genocidal activities, something which is today officially acknowledged in Poland. As Holocaust deniers employ this controversy in order to criticize the veracity of the Nazi genocide, Neander states:


Postwar

Alain Resnais Alain Resnais (; 3 June 19221 March 2014) was a French film director and screenwriter whose career extended over more than six decades. After training as a film editor in the mid-1940s, he went on to direct a number of short films which included ...
, who treated the testimony of
Holocaust survivors Holocaust survivors are people who survived the Holocaust, defined as the persecution and attempted annihilation of the Jews by Nazi Germany and its allies before and during World War II in Europe and North Africa. There is no universally acce ...
as fact, continued the accusation in his noted 1955 Holocaust documentary film '' Nuit et brouillard''. Some postwar Israelis (in the army, schools) also referred disdainfully to Jewish victims of Nazism who arrived in Israel with the Hebrew word (', "soap"). In fact, this offensive word was not linked to the rumours about Nazi crimes and human soap, but it had the sense of "soft", "weaklings". Though some still claim that evidence of "human soap" from the Danzig institute as proof,''
Denying history ''Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It?'' is a 2002 book about Holocaust denial by Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman with collaboration of Arthur Hertzberg. Reviews ''Publishers Weekly'' gave the book a p ...
: who says the Holocaust never happened and why do they say it?'' by Michael Shermer and
Alex Grobman Alex Grobman is an American historian.
"Holocaust revisionism deconstructed," Feb. 4, 2006, Josh Bains ...
, University of California Press, 2002: "The Human Soap Controversy," pp. 114–117.
mainstream scholars of the Holocaust consider the idea that the Nazis manufactured soap as part of the Holocaust to be part of World War II folklore.Bill Hutman, "Nazis never made human-fat soap," ''The Jerusalem Post - International Edition'', week ending May 5, 1990."Holocaust Expert Rejects Charge That Nazis Made Soap from Jews," ''Northern California Jewish Bulletin'', April 27, 1990. (JTA dispatch from Tel Aviv.) Facsimile in: ''Christian News'', May 21, 1990, p. 19."A Holocaust Belief Cleared Up," ''Chicago Tribune'', April 25, 1990. Facsimile in: Ganpac Brief, June 1990, p. 8. Historian Israel Gutman has stated that "it was never done on a mass scale".


Legacy

A BBC documentary about the death camps which was produced at the end of the war shows bars of "RIF" soap, which were alleged to be made of human fat, and evidence of similar atrocities including shrunken prisoner heads and preserved tattoos, which were put on display in
Buchenwald Buchenwald (; literally ' beech forest') was a Nazi concentration camp established on hill near Weimar, Germany, in July 1937. It was one of the first and the largest of the concentration camps within Germany's 1937 borders. Many actual or s ...
and shown to the population of Weimar after the camp's liberation. Several burial sites in Israel include graves for "soap made of Jewish victims by the Nazis". These are probably bars of RIF soap. Following a heated discussion about these graves in the media in 2003, Yad Vashem publicized Professor Yehuda Bauer's research which says that RIF soap was not made of human fat, and the RIF myth was probably propagated by the Nazi guards in order to taunt the Jews. Yad Vashem includes an image of an emotional funeral and a burial of "Jewish" soap in Romania. A small bar of soap was on display at the Nazareth holocaust memorial museum in Israel, and a similar bar of soap was buried in the "holocaust cellar" live-museum in mount Zion in Jerusalem, Israel, during the museum's inception in 1958. A replica was on display there. Following the publication of Yad Vashem Professor Yehuda Bauer's conclusion that soap was not manufactured from the bodies of Jews or other Nazi concentration camp inmates in industrial quantities,
Tom Segev Tom Segev ( he, תום שגב; born March 1, 1945) is an Israeli historian, author and journalist. He is associated with Israel's New Historians, a group challenging many of the country's traditional narratives. Biography Segev was born in Jeru ...
, a "new historian" and an
anti-establishment An anti-establishment view or belief is one which stands in opposition to the conventional social, political, and economic principles of a society. The term was first used in the modern sense in 1958, by the British magazine ''New Statesman'' ...
Israeli author, wrote in his book "The Seventh Million" that the belief in the existence of the Holocaust-Cellar soap was "idol worshiping in Jerusalem". A bar of soap is displayed at the
National Museum of the History of Ukraine in the Second World War The National Museum of the History of Ukraine in the Second World War ( uk, Музей історії України у Другій світовій війні) is a memorial complex commemorating the German-Soviet War located in the southern out ...
inside the Motherland Monument in Kyiv, Ukraine. The manufacture of soap from stolen
liposuction Liposuction, or simply lipo, is a type of fat-removal procedure used in plastic surgery. Evidence does not support an effect on weight beyond a couple of months and does not appear to affect obesity-related problems. In the United States, lipo ...
waste is a major plot point in the 1999 film ''
Fight Club ''Fight Club'' is a 1999 American film directed by David Fincher and starring Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, and Helena Bonham Carter. It is based on the 1996 novel of the same name by Chuck Palahniuk. Norton plays the unnamed narrator, who is di ...
''. In September 2016, Dutch artist, Julian Hetzel, created an art installation called Schuldfabrik using soap made from donated human fat, highlighting human excess and waste. ''Schuld'' is a German term that has two different yet related meanings: 'guilt' as a moral duty, and 'debt' as an economical obligation.


See also

* '' The Soap Myth'' *
Anthropodermic bibliopegy Anthropodermic bibliopegy is the practice of binding books in human skin. , The Anthropodermic Book Project has examined 31 out of 50 books in public institutions supposed to have anthropodermic bindings, of which 18 have been confirmed as human ...
(in some cases, skin with tattoos was preserved in Nazi concentration camps) *
Jewish skull collection The Jewish skull collection was an attempt by the Nazis to create an anthropological display to showcase the alleged racial inferiority of the "Jewish race" and to emphasize the Jews' status as ''Untermenschen'' ("sub-humans"), in contrast to the ...
(Jews who were killed for their skeletons) * German Corpse Factory, one of the most notorious anti-German atrocity propaganda stories to be circulated during World War I *
Lampshades made from human skin There are two notable instances of lampshades made from human skin. After World War II it was reported that Nazis had made at least one lampshade from murdered concentration camp inmates: a human skin lampshade was reported to have been displaye ...
* ''
Fight Club ''Fight Club'' is a 1999 American film directed by David Fincher and starring Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, and Helena Bonham Carter. It is based on the 1996 novel of the same name by Chuck Palahniuk. Norton plays the unnamed narrator, who is di ...
'', a novel (and subsequent film) in which soap is made out of rendered human fat stolen from the dumpsters of liposuction clinics. *


Notes


External links


U.S. National Archives, Still Picture Branch, College Park, MD, document 238-NT-270. Introduced at IMT on Feb. 19, 1946 as exhibit USSR-393
{{Urban legends Animal fat products The Holocaust Propaganda legends Soaps Urban legends