Were Jews Tattooed During The Holocaust

Consignment of Army camp Serial Numbers and the Introduction of Tattooing

Incoming prisoners were assigned a camp serial number which was sewn to their prison uniforms. Only those prisoners selected for work were issued serial numbers; those prisoners sent directly to the gas chambers were not registered and received no tattoos.

Initially, the SS authorities marked prisoners who were in the infirmary or who were to be executed with their campsite series number across the chest with indelible ink. As prisoners were executed or died in other ways, their habiliment bearing the camp series number was removed. Given the bloodshed charge per unit at the camp and practise of removing habiliment, at that place was no mode to place the bodies subsequently the clothing was removed. Hence, the SS authorities introduced the practice of tattooing in order to place the bodies of registered prisoners who had died.

But earlier I turned half dozen, my family was deported to Auschwitz from the Theresienstadt ghetto. My arm was tattooed with the number 169061. There, I was separated from my sister and mother and put into a billet with older boys—many seemed to exist twins.
—Rene Guttmann

There was one person who would rub the...a petty slice of muddied alcohol on your arm, and the other one had the...had the needle with the inkwell, and he would exercise the numbering. So my number is 65,316.
—Miso (Mike) Vogel

Method of Tattooing

Originally, a special metal stamp, property interchangeable numbers fabricated upwards of needles approximately one centimeter long was used. This allowed the whole serial number to exist punched at one accident onto the prisoner's left upper chest. Ink was then rubbed into the bleeding wound.

When the metal stamp method proved impractical, a single-needle device was introduced, which pierced the outlines of the serial-number digits onto the skin. The site of the tattoo was inverse to the outer side of the left forearm. Nevertheless, prisoners from several transports in 1943 had their numbers tattooed on the inner side of their left upper forearms. Tattooing was generally performed during registration when each prisoner was assigned a camp serial number. Since prisoners sent straight to the gas chambers were never issued numbers, they were never tattooed.

Adoption of Tattooing Throughout the Auschwitz Circuitous

The first prisoners to be tattooed were Soviet prisoners of state of war who were brought to Auschwitz, showtime in October 1941, for forced labor. The post-obit month, the SS fabricated the determination to tattoo these prisoners. Because of mistreatment, starvation, and disease, almost all these 10,000 Soviet prisoners died inside months of arrival.

In spring 1942, the SS began systematically tattooing all incoming Jewish prisoners. This form of identification too was applied to very ill prisoners, predominantly Poles, who had been transferred from the camp hospital at Auschwitz I to the newly constructed camp at Birkenau (Auschwitz II). In early 1943, the practice of tattooing prisoners at the Auschwitz campsite complex expanded. Following the escape of a female Shine prisoner in February, the Army camp Commandant's Office decided that all incoming prisoners would henceforth be tattooed on the lower left arm. Prisoners who had already been registered in the army camp complex as well were tattooed.

Sure categories of prisoners, however, were exempt from the tattooing process. It did not utilise to German prisoners, indigenous German language inmates, police prisoners, or "labor-education prisoners." The latter grouping was composed of non-Jewish persons from various nationalities, simply primarily Germans, Czechs, Poles, and Soviet civilians, who had been imprisoned for failing to adhere to the harsh discipline imposed on civilian laborers in German-occupied areas. Such inmates, in theory, were to exist detained for upwardly to 56 days and forced to work no less than 10 hours a 24-hour interval to "re-educate" them. In addition, Smoothen civilians deported to Auschwitz after the Warsaw Insurgence in 1944 were non tattooed. Some Jewish prisoners who were held in transit to other camps did not accept to undergo this procedure.

Prisoner Numbers

The get-go series of prisoner numbers was introduced in May 1940, well before the practise of tattooing began. This first series was given to male person prisoners and remained in apply until January 1945, ending with the number 202,499. Until mid-May 1944, male Jewish prisoners were given numbers from this series.

A new series of registration numbers was introduced in October 1941 and remained in apply until 1944. Approximately 12,000 Soviet POWs were given numbers from this series (some of the POWs murdered at Auschwitz were never registered and did not receive numbers).

A third series of numbers was introduced in March 1942 with the inflow of the outset female prisoners. Approximately 90,000 female prisoners were identified with a series of numbers created for female prisoners in March 1942 until May 1944.

Each new series of numbers introduced at Auschwitz began with "i." Some Jewish prisoners (but not all) had a triangle tattooed beneath their series number.

In order to avoid the assignment of excessively high numbers from the general series to the big number of Hungarian Jews arriving in 1944, the SS authorities introduced new sequences of numbers in mid-May 1944. This series, prefaced by the letter of the alphabet A, began with "1" and ended at "20,000." Once the number 20,000 was reached, a new series beginning with "B" series was introduced. Some xv,000 men received "B" series tattoos. For an unknown reason, the "A" series for women did not terminate at twenty,000 and continued to 30,000.

A separate serial of numbers was introduced in January 1942 for "reeducation" prisoners who had not received numbers from the full general series. Numbers from this new series were assigned retroactively to "reeducation" prisoners who had died or been released, while their superseded full general-series serial numbers were reassigned to new "full general" arrivals. This was the only example in the history of Auschwitz of numbers being "recycled." Approximately 9,000 prisoners were registered in the "reeducation" series. Outset in 1943, female person "reeducation" prisoners were given serial numbers from their own new series, which besides began with "1." In that location were approximately two,000 serial numbers in this series.

Beginning in February 1943, SS government issued two separate series' of number to Romani (Gypsy) prisoners registered at Auschwitz: one for the men and one for the women. Through August 1944, 10,094 numbers were assigned from the former series and ten,888 from the latter. Romani prisoners were given the letter Z ("Zigeuner" is German for "Gypsy") in add-on to the serial number.

The camp authorities assigned more than than 400,000 prisoner serial numbers (not counting approximately 3,000 numbers given to police prisoners interned at Auschwitz due to overcrowding in jails who were not included in the daily count of prisoners).

Concluding Edited: Dec ix, 2019

Author(due south): U.s.a. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC