Montreal vendor’s offering sparks outrage
Two merchants at a trinket shop in Montreal that claims to have a bar of soap made from Second World War victims ordered a reporter and photographer out of the shop on Friday.
Photograph by: Marcos Townsend, canwest news service, Canwest News Service
A vendor’s claim that soap for sale in his Montreal trinket shop is made from the corpses of Second World War victims is under investigation by Montreal police after the B’nai Brith League for Human Rights lodged a complaint under a Criminal Code ban on violating human remains.
A CBC radio reporter first disclosed that a shop on St. Laurent Boulevard was selling a bar of soap allegedly made from the fat of Holocaust victims. The light brown bar had a swastika and was on display with a card that said it was from Poland, from approximately 1940, according to CBC.
In spite of rumours to the contrary, there is no evidence the Germans ever made soap out of human flesh, most Holocaust experts agree.
But Marvin Kurz, B’nai Brith’s national legal counsel, said just the offer to sell such an item is outrageous.
“It is despicable to claim you’re selling the remains of a dead person, when it would be the product of the greatest crime in history,” he said. “Nobody would go around selling the fingers of a murder victim.”
Frank Chalk, director of the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies at Concordia University, doubted the soap is authentic as the vendor claims.
“The consensus among historians of the Holocaust is that the Germans never made fat out of human remains.”
