Adam Tooze at Chartbook:
In 1944 after the liberation of Majdanek, where the soviet troops discovered warehouses of shoes and human hair, the term “death factory” gained general currency. Through wartime propaganda channels the Soviet pamphlet, Majdanek the death factory near Lublin by Konstantin Simonov acquired a circulation in the West. In the exhibitionary complex of the holocaust, the shoes from the Majdanek warehouse have become another icon, especially since a large collection of them were donated to the Holocaust memorial museum in Washington DC.
As the researcher Joachim Neander showed in his remarkable essay – “”Seife aus Judenfett” – Zur Wirkungsgeschichte einer Urban Legend” – the soap myth is itself an instance of the conceptualization of the Holocaust as industrialism. The idea that the Germans turned their victims into soap originated in fact in the generation before the Holocaust in a fearful rumor that began to circulate at the end of World War I. As the economic situation of Wilhelmine Germany became desperate and POW along with Germans began to starve, rumors began to circulate that the Kaiser’s regime was rendering the bodies of Belgian and other prisoners of war to make soap.
More here.
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