Soap made from human corpses

During the 20th century, there were various alleged instances of soap being made from human body fat. During World War I it was claimed in the British press that the Germans had a corpse factory in which they used the bodies of their own soldiers to make glycerine and soap. After the war the British government accepted that the stories were untrue. During World War II it was believed that soap was being mass-produced from the bodies of the victims of Nazi concentration camps located in German-occupied Poland. While not mass-produced, the production of soap from human bodies by Nazis was undertaken on small scale.

The Yad Vashem Memorial has stated that the Nazis did not produce soap from Jewish corpses on an industrial scale, saying that rumors that soap from human corpses was mass-produced and distributed were deliberately used by the Nazis to frighten camp inmates.

Evidence was presented at the postwar Nuremberg trials that German researchers had developed a process for the production of soap from human bodies.

In 1780, the former Holy Innocents' Cemetery in Paris was closed because of overuse. In 1786, the bodies were exhumed and the bones were moved to the Catacombs. Many bodies had incompletely decomposed and had reduced into deposits of fat. During the exhumation, this fat was collected and subsequently turned into candles and soap.

The claim that Germans used the fat from human corpses to make products, including soap, was made during World War I. This appears to have originated as rumor among British soldiers and Belgians. The first recorded reference is 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." 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.

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