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Politics : War -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Elmer Flugum who wrote (8330)	11/9/2001 8:19:10 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 23908

I checked out the soap. It seems that this was not true although it was widely believed by the Holocaust survivors. The Nazis did, after all, use human hair for various purposes, extract dental gold, and make lampshades out of human skin. So when newsreels showed bars of soap next to the lampshades, soap stamped "RJF", immediately interpreted as "Reichs-Juden-Fett", State Jewish Soap, who would doubt it? (That's where I recalled it from) Hardly a big stretch considering the circumstances. chgs.hispeed.com Now as to Masada: Josephus says that Masada was held by the Sicarii and he calls them "bandits". But who were these Sicarii? Josephus describes their mode of operation as going around festivals with little daggers (Latin sicarii) killing their opponents. Ordinary bandits don't have opponents; they just have people they steal from. It's clear from the description that the Sicarii were motivated by ideology, not gain. You have to rememember that Josephus was a client of Vespasian and Titus when he wrote the Jewish Wars. The Zealots were the chief war-party in Jerusalem; at one point, Josephus refers to the followers of Menachem as Zealots and at another he calls them Sicarii. The Sicarii thus seem to be a Zealot splinter group favoring guerilla and terrorist tactics. Certainly ordinary bandits don't kill themselves en masse with their wives and children to avoid capture as these Sicarii did at Masada.

To: Elmer Flugum who wrote (8330)	11/9/2001 8:35:01 PM
From: Brumar89	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 23908

Hmm. Sicarri as 1st century Hamas. Course, due to technological limitations of the time, they didn't have bombs and had to settle for knives and swords. Similar violence for a political end with a religious rationale. The same willingness to commit suicide and sacrifice family members for the cause. The same bringing of disaster on their own people. Now we need to find a 1st century Len Grasso (say, isn't that an Italian name?) to say the Romans "created" the Sicarri for their own imperial ends.

To: Elmer Flugum who wrote (8330)	11/9/2001 10:11:04 PM
From: chalu2	Respond to of 23908

Not pure fiction at all. The Nazis repeatedly promised to turn "fat Jews" into soap bars, and told Jews in Poland they were doing so to further terrify them. There is a photo backing up this horrific threat. In Danzig, Germany (now Gdansk, Poland), pictures of dead, heavyset people cut into pieces and a recipe for soap were discovered in 1945 at the Stutthof camp. You can read all about this stuff in the works of Raul Hilberg. Hilberg reports that the technology to turn human fat into soap was not known at that time so, no, the Nazis did not turn Jews into soap bars. The Gdansk photo suggests that they did try, however.