Another fun piece of ‘Remarkable Holocaust Nonsense’ is the claim from ‘Holocaust Survivor’ Gena Turgel who wrote in her 1987 memoir ‘I Light a Candle’ concerning how during her time at Bergen-Belsen – which remember was purely a concentration camp – when she was circa 22 in 1945 the following occurred:
‘Mother and I used to get up at four in the morning, to avoid the queues of people waiting to use the shower block about an hour later. We undressed and showered our bodies in ice-cold water. The only soap we had was a barrel of honey-coloured liquid soap manufactured out of human flesh from the bodies of people shot by the SS on the transports. Many times we wondered: ‘Could this be my brother, my sister, another relation?’ (1)
Now this is a variant of the ‘Germans made soap out of human fat from murdered jews’ claim which has long been rejected by historians as ridiculous and without foundation with even the otherwise utterly credulous Deborah Lipstadt declaring that:
‘[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 thoroughly investigated after the war and proved to be untrue.’ (2)
However the fact remains that Turgel claims that she saw just that and Turgel was in Plaszow – made famous by Steven Spielberg’s film ‘Schindler’s List’ – as well as Auschwitz in addition to Buchenwald before she arrived at Bergen-Belsen in early 1945; where apparently the German camp authorities were so kind as to ensure that the inmates – jewish and non-jewish – had ‘barrels of liquid soap’ to wash with that Turgel and her mother rather absurdly believed was in fact potentially the result of their relatives corpses being boiled down into soap so that they were washing themselves with the liquified remains of Uncle Shlomo.
I mean what do you say to such delusional claims?
References
(1) Gena Turgel, Veronica Groocock, 1987, ‘I Light a Candle’, 1st Edition, Grafton: London, p. 102
(2) Deborah Lipstadt, Letters to the Editor, Los Angeles Times, 16th May 1981