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Concept
Rudolf Spanner
Summary
Rudolf Spanner (born 17 April 1895 in Metternich bei Koblenz; died 31 August 1960) was Director of the Danzig Anatomical Institute during World War II and Nazi party member (party membership ID 2733605). During the Second World War Spanner used human corpses in the creation of anatomical models for the institute, which after a soap-like byproduct from the model-creation process was presented in the Nuremberg trials as soap made from victims of the Holocaust, has led to numerous accusations against Spanner of crimes against humanity.
Historian Joachim Neander states that the rumors which allege that the Nazis produced soap from the bodies of Jews who they murdered in their concentration camps, long-since thoroughly debunked, are still widely believed, and exploited by Holocaust deniers. He however goes on to say that even scholars who reject the aforementioned claims that the Germans made soap from human fat and mass-produced it are sometimes still convinced that the Germans attempted "experimental" soap production on a smaller scale in Danzig and that this claim is still repeated as if a firm fact in several remembrance contexts. He, and the Polish historians Monika Tomkiewicz, who works in the investigative department of the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) in Gdańsk, and Piotr Semków, formerly also an employee of the IPN, later a lecturer at the Naval Academy in Gdynia, have thoroughly investigated the claims around the Danzig Anatomical Institute by Spanner and have all concluded the Holocaust-related soap-making claims surrounding it to also be myths, particularly cemented into Polish consciousness by Zofia Nałkowska's 1946 book Medaliony, which was mandatory reading in Poland until 1990, was widely distributed in the Eastern Bloc, and is still popular today. They all alleged that such secondary sources have played a far larger role of spreading information about the claim than scholarly research.
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