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The original was posted on /r/askhistorians by /u/JimmyRecard on 2023-10-31 09:55:37+00:00.

I’m reading Anthony Beevor’s Berlin: The Downfall 1945. It features the following passage:

Yet even while the city of Danzig swarmed with frightened refugees desperate to escape, vile work continued in the Danzig Anatomical Medical Institute. After the Red Army captured the city a special commission was sent there to investigate the manufacture of soap and leather from ‘corpses of citizens of the USSR, Poland and other countries killed in German concentration camps’. In 1943 Professor Spanner and Assistant Professor Volman had begun to experiment. They then built special facilities for production. “The examination of the premises of the Anatomical Institute revealed 148 human corpses which were stored for the production of soap of which 126 were male corpses, eighteen female and four children. Eighty male corpses and two female corpses were without heads. Eighty-nine human heads were also found.’ All corpses and heads were stored in metal containers in an alcoholcarbolic solution. It appears that most of the corpses came from Stutthof concentration camp, near the city. “The executed people whose corpses were used for making soap were of different nationalities, but mostly Poles, Russians and Uzbeks.’ The work evidently received official approval, considering the high rank of its visitors. ‘The Anatomical Institute was visited by the Minister of Education Rust and Minister of Health Care Konti. Gauleiter of Danzig Albert Forster visited the institute in 1944, when soap was already being produced. He examined all the premises of the Anatomical Institute and I think that he knew about the production of soap from human corpses.’ The most astonishing aspects of this appalling story are that nothing was destroyed before the Red Army arrived and that Professor Spanner and his associates never faced charges after the war. The processing of corpses was not a crime.

Beevor makes it seem like this was a production scale operation. A known undisputed fact.

But, when I Googled for more on this, the narrative seems to be that this is a long debunked Polish and/or Soviet talking point. That Rudolph Spanner was simply making some anatomical models from bodies of murdered holocaust victims (!) and that he simply made a soap like solution to fill the joints and make them more… realistic.

Yet this also seems like like a technical distinction without meaning favoured by Holocaust deniers in the spirit of making a huge deal about whether Waffen SS or Wehrmacht killed a particular group of Jews, which while historically interesting and important to historians, is morally a distinction without a difference.

So, then, the question is: did Nazis make human soap from Holocaust victims at the Danzig Anatomical Institute?