Don’t give me the gory details. [WWII]

Sorry, I should have said more about that. Basically, no. There were lots of rumors about both during the war. In fact, the British were saying the soap stuff about the Germans in the First World War, also. At the end of the war they kind of shuffled their feet and boldly admitted to just plain making it up. As for the soap, the rumor party came from the initials that were put on bars of German soap during the war. They used the initials RIF on the soap, which was rumored to mean Reichs-Juden-Fett ("State Jewish Fat"). It actually stood for Reichsstelle für industrielle Fettversorgung ("National Center for Industrial Fat Provisioning", the German government agency responsible for wartime production and distribution of soap and washing products). RIF soap was a poor quality substitute product that contained no fat at all, human or otherwise. In addition, concentration camp guards would sometimes threaten inmates with things like "we're going to make soap out of you," but this was an intimidation thing. There were rumors that fat from Jewish victims was made on a small scale by a few individuals into soap, but I don't think that was ever more than a rumor. It might be true, I'm not sure. The lampshades thing was bullshit. That came about when [Isle Koch](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilse_Koch), the wife of the Buchenwald commendant, was accused of having lampshades made from the skin of Jewish victims. She was tried after the war and it was found to be bullshit. She did have some lampshades made of skins, but they were made of goat skin IIRC. She was later rearrested after some new, possibly incriminating info, but that turned out to be bullshit too and she was released. ________________________________ **Edit:** >was this fear mongering by the Rabbi? Maybe not entirely. Both of these things were rumored or believed to be true DURING the war. In fact, the Polish were so sure that Nazis were making soap out of people during the war (thanks to rumors that the Nazis themselves were often happy to keep going for intimidation or entertainment purposes), that at one point Polish citizens boycotted German soap. ________________________________ **tl;dr:** That the Nazis made soap from human fat may have been true in a few, isolated incidents, but did NOT happen on an industrialized scale and even those few isolated incidents may also be false. That the Nazis made lampshades from human skin was proven false. Someone was officially accused of it but there was no evidence and it turns out the lampshades were made out of goatskin, not human skin.