Details about a human soap factory

That day the blinding artificial lights were turned off in the courtroom, plunging it almost into darkness. In the wavering dim light the witness-box was occupied by corpses …

The art of the courageous Soviet documentary film makers (some of whom are no longer alive) resurrected these corpses and brought them into the courtroom. It was as if they had risen from the grave and were hurling indisputable evidence in the defendant’s faces…

A bluish light flashed in the darkness, a beam of light cut across the court-room and the following text appeared on the screen: “Documentary Film Evidence on the Atrocities of the German Fascist Invaders.” A documentary film presented by the Chief Prosecutor from the USSR. … [Transcription note: Filmed movie takes and stills of several other camps follow]

“Danzig, a room in the Technological Institute, where the methods and technology for the industrial utilization of human bodies were elaborated,” droned the commentator’s voice in the earphones.

We already knew about this. We had seen the exhibits and outputs of this factory in court. Yet, it was still dreadful. You felt like closing your eyes tightly, jumping up and running out of the courtroom. But you had to pass through all the circles of this hell on earth, peer into the very heart of nazism and find out absolutely everything that it had brought mankind.

We saw a basement, again full of corpses that were stacked in neat piles like raw material in factory warehouses. In fact, this really was raw material graded according to the fat content. Severed heads were lying separately in a corner. They were waste material, unsuitable for soapmaking, or perhaps nazi science had failed to keep pace with the requirements of life and had still not found a way of industrially utilizing them. Then we saw dismembered human bodies that had been piled into vats to be boiled in an alkaline solution.

Source:

Boris Polevoi
The Final Reckoning: Nuremberg Diaries
Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1978 (English Edition)
pp. 108-184


Webmaster note: Found at http://www.nizkor.org/ftp.cgi/camps/ftp.py?camps/stutthof/danzig-soap-evidence Archive/File: pub/people/p/polevoi.boris/danzig-soap-evidence, presumably as some kind of proof of Holocaust extermination claims. After all, Communists don’t lie, even about their hated foes, Nazi Germany.