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Montreal Police Test Holocaust Soap

Not of the clean variety

by
Ashley Tedesco
April 09, 2010

Montreal police are conducting an extensive scientific analysis of a bar of soap that a St. Laurent Boulevard store was peddling for $300 last week. Why? Well, this is that bar of soap, stamped with a swastika, that shopkeeper Abraham Botines claimed was discovered at a Nazi concentration camp in Poland and was therefore “probably” made from … yeah, you get the idea. Botines said he bought it from a Canadian soldier who discovered it in Poland. The assumption that the soap was the product of human remains was apparently left up to Botines himself.

This isn’t the first talk of Nazis allegedly having produced soap from human remains. Last year, Tablet Magazine covered the “Nazi Soap Myth,” with Holocaust scholar Michael Berenbaum asserting that the making of soap from human fat would have been financially infeasible for the Nazis, and that several tests have shown that soap presented as “human soap” has in fact been nothing of the sort. As the good folks at Montreal PD will no doubt soon learn.