This witness himself did not witness the application of the soap, but I am submitting to the Tribunal as Exhibit Number USSR-272 (Document Number USSR-272), the written testimony of a British citizen, William Anderson Neely, a corporal of the Royal Signals. The members of the Tribunal will find this excerpt on Page 498 of the document book, Volume 2. I begin the quotation:
“The corpses arrived at an average rate of 2 to 3 per day. All of them were naked and most of them had been beheaded.”
I interrupt the quotation—I omit two paragraphs and continue the quotation:
“A machine for the manufacture of soap was completed some time in March or April 1944. The British prisoners of war had constructed the building in which it was housed in June 1942. The machine itself was installed by a civilian firm from Danzig by the name of AJRD. It consisted, as far as I remember, of an electrically heated tank in which bones of the corpses were mixed with some acid and melted down.
“This process of melting down took about 24 hours. The fatty portions of the corpses and particularly those of females were put into a crude enamel tank, heated by a couple of bunsen burners. Some acid was also used in this process.
“I think it was caustic soda. When boiling had been completed, the mixture was allowed to cool and then cut into blocks for microscopic examination.”
I continue the quotation from the following paragraph:
“I cannot estimate the quantity produced, but I saw it used by Danzigers in cleaning tables in the dissecting rooms. They all told me it was excellent soap for this purpose.”
I submit half-finished and some finished soap. (Exhibit USSR-393) Here you shall see a small piece of finished soap, which from the exterior, after lying about a few months, reminds you of ordinary household soap. I give it over to the Tribunal. Beside this I now submit to the Tribunal the samples of semi-tanned human skin (Exhibit USSR-394). The samples which I now submit prove that the process of manufacturing soap was already completely worked out by the Institute of Danzig; as to the skin it still looks like a semi-finished product. The skin which resembles most the leather used in manufacture is the one you see on top at the left. So one can consider that the experiments on the industrial fabrication of soap from human fats were quite completed in the Danzig Institute. Experiments on tanning of human skin were still incomplete and only the victorious advance of the Red Army put an end to this new crime of the Nazis.
Gentlemen, I have now to submit to you only one more piece of evidence, which is the last among the proofs concerning war crimes against the peaceful population presented by the U.S.S.R. Prosecution. Besides, certain witnesses may arrive here from the Soviet Union who may testify concerning the points which I have submitted. I will beg the permission of the Tribunal to examine these witnesses after the presentation of further evidence is finished.