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Concentration Camp Prisoners


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Chart of Prisoner Markings

Chart of prisoner markings from Buchenwald
International Tracing Service Archive

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

To see other documents and media about the formation of the Nazis' so-called "national community," please visit the related Experiencing History collection, Nazi Propaganda and National Unity. To learn more about the meanings of belonging and membership in the Nazi "national community," see Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2003); and Thomas Kühne, Belonging and Genocide: Hitler’s Community, 1918–1945 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010).

Roma are a diverse European ethnic group who can trace their ancestry to modern-day India and Pakistan many hundreds of years ago. There are many groups of Romani people with their own distinct cultural identities, such as Sinti, Lovari, Kalderashi, or Lalleri. Sinti are a large, culturally distinct Romani group that has lived in Central Europe since the Middle Ages. Most Romani people living in Germany in the early 20th century were Sinti.

 

Romani people have often been referred to by negative labels. In English, this word is "Gypsy." Most Romani people have long considered such terms insulting, and today these words are generally considered racial or ethnic slurs. These labels have also been used at times to include non-Romani people with trades or lifestyles typically associated with Roma. To learn more, see the Experiencing History collection, Roma and Sinti in Nazi Germany.

Over the first several years of Nazi rule, the first improvised concentration camps of 1933 were centralized and reorganized under the Nazi SS. Nazi concentration camps soon became notorious as sites of strict discipline and terror. Over the years of Nazi rule, the Nazi camp system grew to include a confusing array of concentration camps, ghettos, forced labor camps, prisoner of war (POW) camps, prisons, transit camps, and killing centers. Prisoners were often transferred from one site to another, and many of these places had overlapping or shared purposes.

 

To learn more about the development of the Nazi concentration camp system, see Nikolaus Wachsmann, "The Dynamics of Destruction: The Development of the Concentration Camps, 1933–1945," Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany: The New Histories, edited by Jane Caplan and Nikolaus Wachsmann (New York: Routledge, 2010): 21-5; and "The Genesis and Structure of the National Socialist Concentration Camps," The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945, Volume I: Early Camps, Youth Camps, and Concentration Camps and Subcamps under the SS-Business Administration Main Office (WVHA) (Washington, DC: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2009), 183–196.

See the USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia for another example of a chart depicting prisoner markings.

Many concentration camp kapos were "Aryan" German prisoners who had been assigned green triangles, but kapos were drawn from virtually all of the prisoner categories. Many kapos were known to be as violent and abusive as the SS guards, although some survivor testimonies recall that some kapos tried to be decent and fair. For survivor accounts of abusive kapos, see Henry J. Gwiazda II, “The Nazi Racial War: Concentration Camps in the New Order,” The Polish Review 61, no. 3 (2016), 59–84. 

For more on the experiences of Jewish concentration camp prisoners, see the Experiencing History item, USHMM Oral History with Ester Grun. To learn more about the experiences of those imprisoned for alleged violations of Paragraph 175 of the German criminal code outlawing sexual relations between men, see the related Experiencing History item, Prisoner Badge Worn by Josef Kohout and Heinz Heger, The Men with the Pink Triangle: The True, Life-and-Death Story of Homosexuals in the Nazi Death Camps, translated by David Fernbach (London: Gay Men’s Press, 1980).

After the fall of Nazi Germany, at least one targeted group turned these symbols of oppression into symbols of proud self-identification. Nazi camp authorities had assigned pink triangles to prisoners charged with violations of Paragraph 175 of the German criminal code outlawing sexual relations between men, but the LGBTQ community has since reclaimed the pink triangle and turned it into a symbol with positive meanings. To learn more, see W. Jake Newsome, Pink Triangle Legacies: Coming out in the Shadow of the Holocaust (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2022).

See the The Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos Vol. I: Early Camps, Youth Camps, and Concentration Camps and Subcamps under the SS-Business Administration Main Office (WVHA), volume editor Geoffrey P. Megargee (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2009), 291, 1301.

"K" is an abbreviation for the German word Kugel, meaning "bullet." This marking indicated prisoners accused of sabotage or political activities, Soviet officer POWs who had made unsuccessful escape attempts, and others.

 

 

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Appendix 6

 

Prisoner Markings

 

[Column 1]

Political prisoner

Habitual criminal

Emigrant

Homosexual male

Jehovah's Witness

Work shirker

Unworthy to bear arms,

Sept. 1, 1939, campaign [red]

Unworthy to bear arms, Sept. 1, 1939, campaign [green]

Political recidivist

 

[Column 2]

Political Pole

Habitual criminal Pole

Political Czech

“K” prisoner1

Dutch

Belgian

Spanish

French

Ordinary race defiler

 

[Column 3]

Political Jew

Habitual criminal Jew

Emigrant Jew

Homosexual male Jew

Jehovah’s Witness Jew

Work shirker Jew

Race defiler Jew

Pole Jew

Recidivist political Jew

Archival Information for This Item

Source (Credit)
International Tracing Service Archive
Accession Number Chart of Prisoner Markings, 1.1.5.0/82066189/ITS Digital Archive, Arolsen Archives
Date Created
Unknown
Language(s)
German
Location
Buchenwald, Germany
Document Type Official document
How to Cite Museum Materials

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