Spanner, Rudolf

Rudolf Spanner was a professor of human anatomy at the university of Danzig until 1946. Primitive soap cakes confiscated at his institute were submitted during the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal by the Soviets as proof that the Germans turned the bodies of murdered camp inmates into soap. It turned out that these pieces of soap had a completely harmless background that has nothing to do with processing deceased or murdered camp inmates. The investigations initiated against Spanner were shelved when the innocuous nature of this soap was established. (For more, see the entry on Soap, from Jewish Corpses.)