On Fri, 16 Aug 2002, a book reviewer (Jason Quinn?) was quoted saying of Bradley R. Smith that:
> Some evidence, like that for the soap-made-from-Jewish-corpses story
> we've all at one time heard, even seems to have been manufactured,
This is true. The soap story is propaganda. But it was contemporary with WWII. It wasn't made up afterwards. And the most interesting theory of how it happened is that the original fabricators of the story were the Nazis, who circulated it hoping to discredit their critics.
This isn't as convoluted as it sounds if you put it in context. Remember that before WWII started, people's main frame of reference was WWI. And one of the main experiences of WWI was the enormous destructive power of propaganda. It was in some ways the first experience the world had of global mass media and it felt traumatized afterwards, because everyone was so enormously gullible the first time around. Each paper competed to run the most horrible rumors and everyone believed them because they were printed in the paper. And then afterwards, none of them turned out to be true and the readers all felt like murderous saps. And every thinking person swore he'd never fall for that again. And this is supposedly why some Nazis thought they could discredit truthful rumors about the concentration camps by helping a really outlandish one to flourish.
Anyway, that's one of the speculations of Yehuda Bauer, an extremely mainstream Israeli historian of the holocaust and erstwhile director of Yad Vashem.
Michael