From oneb!nntp.cs.ubc.ca!destroyer!gatech!howland.reston.ans.net!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!uunet!world!wmcguire Wed Aug 18 13:58:28 PDT 1993 Article: 3353 of alt.revisionism Xref: oneb soc.history:14873 alt.censorship:12161 alt.activism:26109 alt.revisionism:3353 alt.discrimination:7995 alt.conspiracy:18329 talk.politics.misc:90187 talk.politics.mideast:32418 Newsgroups: soc.history,alt.censorship,alt.activism,alt.revisionism,alt.discrimination,alt.conspiracy,soc.ethics,talk.politics.misc,talk.politics.mideast Path: oneb!nntp.cs.ubc.ca!destroyer!gatech!howland.reston.ans.net!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!uunet!world!wmcguire From: wmcguire@world.std.com (Wayne McGuire) Subject: Re: MULTI-MEDIA 'LIBERATORS' PROJECT EXPOSED AS FRAUD! Message-ID:Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA References: <1993Aug16.171446.517@seachg.com> <1993Aug18.133433.26410@dxcern.cern.ch> Date: Wed, 18 Aug 1993 16:51:34 GMT Lines: 129 To: Phill Hallam-Baker |>This is how the wacko revisionists get their foot in the door: by |>revealing that they are gullible enough to believe the original |>documentary, and implicitly defending it, the critics of the |>wackos begin to raise questions about whether any of the |>so-called facts they are defending are credible. This is the |>problem with widely circulated (and passionately defended) |>canards like the fairy tale that Nazis made soap from Jews. Big |>mistake. Once you allow too many cracks in your credibility, |>you're left vulnerable to be steamrolled. PHB> Yes, quite so. That is why you should have got your facts PHB> straight. PHB> The NAZIs attempted to make soap from corpses but found it PHB> to be unecconomic. That much is well documented. PHB> Thus Wayne's polemic falls rather flat. It is entirely true PHB> to claim that the NAZIs made soap from Jews. They didn't do PHB> it on a large scale, nor for very long. However the PHB> description of these facts as "fairy stories" is itself a PHB> canard. You claim this fact is well-documented, but you provide no documentation. Following are the facts. Segev's book has received high praise all around the Western world: Thus, Mr. Hallam-Baker, do you prove yourself to be as gullible as those who wanted to know where to bury the soap, and thus do you nicely demonstrate the dangers of promoting easily debunkable fairy tales. Trying to conceal your ignorance on this point with wild charges of anti-Semitism is also quite typical of the way in defenders of the truth about the Holocaust are being seriously damaged and undermined by people who can't get their facts straight. Even Yad Vashem, perhaps the world's foremost authority on the Holocaust, has rejected the human soap fairy tale. The soap story is a classic example of how a big lie can come to be accepted as fact. The real significance of the soap story, which you miss entirely, is the attitude it reflects towards European Jews and Holocaust victims by Israelis. There are many dramatic revelations in The Seventh Million, but perhaps the most significant are that the yishuv (pre-state Israel) barely lifted a finger to help Jewry under the Nazi gun, and in fact held bigoted attitudes towards Diaspora Jews that were barely less anti-Semitic than those held by many non-Jewish Europeans. Jewish anti-Semitism was rife among the Zionist pioneers who built Israel. The yishuv frequently used the term "human material" to describe and judge many Disapora Jews, including Holocaust victims, and often found this this "human material" to be severely wanting. The charge that Nazis made human soap from Jews is a myth rejected even by the Jerusalem Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem. The term "sabon" (soap) expresses the contempt that native-born Israelis felt towards Holocaust survivors. (Segev The Seventh Million 1993 p183-4) book Segev, Tom The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust New York Hill and Wang 1993 183-4 A few days after he came home from his mission to Hungary, paratrooper Yoel Palgi went to a veterans' club in Tel Aviv. It was June 1945. Everyone received him warmly and with admiration, he later wrote. They all wanted to hear what had happened over there. But no one was interested in accounts of Jewish suffering. They wanted a different story, about the few who had fought like lions. "Everywhere I turned," Palgi wrote, "the question was fired at me: why did the Jews not rebel? Why did they go like lambs to the slaughter? Suddenly I realized that we were ashamed of those who were tortured, shot, burned. There is a kind of general agreement that the Holocaust dead were worthless people. Unconsciously, we have accepted the Nazi view that Jews were subhuman.... History is playing a bitter joke on us: have we not ourselves put the six million on trial?" The bluntest expression of this was in yishuv slang. At some point the word sabon , "soap," came to be used to refer to Holocaust survivors. There is some dispute as to when it first appeared, but there is no denying that it was widespread. It reflected the general belief that the Nazis used the bodies of murdered Jews to produce soap, a charge that was constantly repeated and became an accepted truth that also found its way into Knesset speeches, textbooks, and Israeli literature ("On the shelf in the store, wrapped in yellow paper with olive trees drawn on it, lies the Rabinowitz family," wrote Yoram Kaniuk inMan, Son of Dog ). It seems unlikely that anything could better express the contempt that native-born Israelis felt toward the survivors. The Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, Yad Vashem, has received many letters from people asking about bars of soap left over from the war years. Some offered to contribute the soap to the museum, while others asked whether the soap ought to be buried. Yad Vashem always officially replies that the Nazis did not make soap out of Jews. During the war, Germany suffered a shortage of fats, and soap production came under government supervision. Bars of soap were imprinted with the initials RIF, a German acronym for "pure industrial fat." Some mistakenly read the letters as RJF, or "pure Jewish fat." The rumor spread quickly, particularly in the ghettos. There is evidence that senior officials in the Nazi regime, among them the governor of Poland, Hans Frank, also believed that the soap was indeed produced from human fats. A few months before the end of the war, a laboratory in Danzig began conducting experiments to find out whether human fats could be used in food production. Yad Vashem has concluded that Jews were not murdered with this purpose. Here, then, is the history of a myth.
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