People were imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps for a broad range of reasons. Nazi ideology branded a wide variety of different groups as “internal enemies” who supposedly posed a great threat to Germany and the Nazis’ “national community” (“Volksgemeinschaft”).1 This included Jewish people as well as non-Jewish people, such as Roma and Sinti,2 Communists and other political opponents of the Nazis, Jehovah’s Witnesses, gay men and others suspected of same-sex relationships, people designated as “career criminals,” and several others.
The featured chart shows some of the types of markings that camp authorities adopted to identify different groups of people imprisoned in concentration camps3 under Nazi rule. Such symbols appeared on prisoners’ camp identification cards and on the badges that prisoners were forced to wear on their camp uniforms. They immediately identified the categories assigned to concentration camp prisoners and showed why authorities had decided to exclude them from the “national community” and imprison them in the camp system.
This chart comes from a postwar collection of Nazi documents related to the registration of prisoners at Buchenwald concentration camp. But is not clear when the document was created—or by whom. Scholars often face such questions when working with primary sources. At first glance, it seems that this chart was created in Buchenwald’s prisoner registration office in the early 1940s. But small details suggest that it might have been made by Allied authorities during postwar investigations into crimes committed in Nazi concentration camps. The chart appears to depict the symbols and prisoner categories used at one point in time in the Buchenwald camp. These markings varied by location and shifted in appearance over the course of Nazi rule.
Whether this is an original document produced in the camp or a postwar attempt to document Nazi crimes, the chart illustrates how concentration camp authorities classified prisoners according to the alleged reasons for their incarceration, their nationality, Nazi ideas about race, or a combination of such factors. Camp officials used such symbols in order to show which categories had been assigned to prisoners.4
These assigned categories and their corresponding symbols influenced prisoners' experiences in the camps in many ways. For example, so-called “Aryan” German prisoners who had been assigned the green triangles of “career criminals” were often selected to become kapos—prisoner functionaries who lived in relative privilege and were given authority over the other prisoners.5 Jewish prisoners and so-called “pink-triangle prisoners” who had been imprisoned on suspicion of same-sex relationships were often targeted for vicious physical abuse and received the most brutal work assignments.6
Prisoners also used these symbols to identify one another and form group identities.7 Prisoner groups based on the triangle classification system sometimes competed with one another for influence and resources within the camps. For example, political prisoners assigned red triangles at the Sachsenhausen subcamp at Falkensee secretly formed a group to “eliminate” the influence of the “green and black triangles” within the prisoner functionary system there. There was also a bitter struggle for such positions between the so-called “green prisoners” and the “red” prisoners at Buchenwald.8