A Dutch eBay vendor has been stopped from selling what he claimed was soap made from Jewish victims of the Nazis.
The vendor turned himself in to the authorities, and an investigation is underway as to the authenticity of his claim.
Esther Voet, director of the Netherlands-based Centre for Information and Documentation on Israel, said that the only way to stop such vendors was “to name and shame them”.
According to eBay company guidelines, items “that graphically portray, glorify, or attempt to profit from human tragedy or suffering, or that are insensitive to victims of such events” are banned from the site.
Ms Voet said it was the responsibility of auction sites such as eBay “to take care that this doesn’t happen again: it is, of course, an utter disgrace”.
She added that since eBay cannot screen everything, it was “a duty of the public, the moment they see that something like this is being sold, to name and shame”.
According to experts for the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, there is little evidence that soap was ever made from the bodies of death-camp victims.
The photographs used by the vendor on eBay showed a square, bluish-brown waxy square stamped with numbers and the letters RIF.
Aaron Breitbart, a senior researcher at the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, has reported in the past that the letters stand for Reich Industrie Fett (Reich Industry Fat), and that past analysis of the soap shows no trace of human DNA.
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