The History of Soap and Regulated Medical Waste

In 1999, the American movie Fight Club was adopted from the Chuck Palahniuk's novel of the same title, creating one of the most polarizing and controversial cult films of all time. With its bloody fight scenes and deep homoerotic overtones, the film starring Brad Pitt and Edward Norton is memorable for a series of different aspects. Perhaps none of these aspects are as recognizable throughout popular culture as the films depiction of using regulated medical waste, specifically human liposuction fat, to make bars of soap.

The idea of using regulated medical waste to create soap would be an appealing one. We are quickly becoming a more green-conscious nation, and the thought that medical waste disposal could create, ironically, something to clean ourselves, would be advantageous and beneficial. However, the fact that the characters in Fight Club use human liposuction fat is twisted, despite its 'recycling' theme.

Soapmaker Kathy Miller of millersoap.com shares this disdain at the idea of using human parts to make soap. However, she does admit that human fat would be similar to swine lard, "since humans and pigs are both omnivores. Lard-based soaps do exist today.

Shockingly, the idea of using human bodies to manufacture soap is tragically not restricted to the world of fiction.

During the First World War, Allied forces claimed that Germany was using deceased human corpses to make a series of products, such as lamp-shades, candles, lubricants, boot dubbings, and soap. Allegedly, the "Kadaververwertungsanstalt" ("corpse utilization factories") was a German-operated facility built because the British naval blockade was forcing fat to become a rare commodity in Germany.

However, the Kadaververwertungsanstalt has been debunked as a British anti-German propaganda method. In fact, British Foreign Secretary Sir Austen Chamberlain official declared that the Kadaververwertungsanstalt story had been incorrect in 1925.

However, similar medical waste removal rumors arose against the Germans again during World War II, a claim found much easier to believe when viewed alongside the Nazi-led atrocities of the Holocaust.

The Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, the official Israeli memorial to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust has gone on the record as saying Nazis did not produce soap from the corpses of deceased Jews on an industrial scale. They do agree, however, that the rumors of human-soap were a scare tactic used by the Nazis to frighten concentration camp prisoners.

The rumors were bases largely on the soap being distributed in Jewish ghettos and concentration camps, which typically had the initials "RIF" inscribed into it. The rumor was that RIF stood for "Rein Judisches Fett" ("Pure Jewish Fat"). Allegedly, when trains filled with Jewish deportees were stopped at railway stations, Poles would chant "Jews to Soap!" helping carry the rumor not only through the ghettos, but throughout Europe.

The medical waste management into human soap story was present during the Post-War Nuremberg Trials as well. L.N. Smirnov, the Chief Counselor of Justice for the U.S.S.R., testified that the SS "devised such methods of complete annihilation of human bodies to serve in the manufacturing of certain products."

Smirnov would later reference the Danzig Anatomical Institute, where he claimed "semi-industrial experiments in the production of soap from human bodies and the tanning of human skin for industrial purposes were carried out."

Sigmund Mazur, a lab assistant at that same Institute, would also testify at the Nuremberg Trials, claiming soap was in fact made from human corpse fat, and was retained by the Institutes Director, Professor Rudolf Spanner. Witnesses of human-soap making at the Danzig Anatomical Institute include Dr. Stanislaw Byczkowski, a plethora of British POWs, and even Nazi soldiers.

Holocaust survivor Thomas "Toivi" Blatt, a Jew from Poland who investigated the idea, found no evidence of mass human-soap production, though he did conclude there was proof of experimental human-soap making.

In 2006, a sample of soap created at the Danzig Anatomical Institute was analyzed by Professor Andrej Stolyhwo, who concluded that some of the fat in the soap was in fact made from humans.