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 the British press claimed that the Germans operated a corpse factory in which they made glycerine and soap from the bodies of their own soldiers. Both during and after World War II, widely circulated rumors claimed that soap was being mass-produced from the bodies of the victims of Nazi concentration camps which were located in German-occupied Poland. During the Nuremberg trials items were presented as evidence of such production. The Yad Vashem Memorial has stated that the Nazis did not produce soap with fat which was extracted from Jewish corpses on an industrial scale, saying that the Nazis may have frightened camp inmates by deliberately circulating rumors in which they claimed that they were able to extract fat from human corpses, turn it into soap, mass-produce and distribute it. 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. German Corpse Factory The claim that Germans used the fat from human corpses to make products, including soap, was made during World War I. This allegation appears to have originated as a rumor which was spread by the British and Belgian media. The first recorded reference was made 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. After the war John Charteris, the former head of army intelligence, was reported to have claimed in a 1925 speech that he had invented the story.