Nazi concentration camp badges, primarily triangles, were part of the system of identification in German camps. They were used in the concentration camps in the German-occupied countries to identify the reason the prisoners had been placed there. [1] The triangles were made of fabric and were sewn on jackets and trousers of the prisoners. These mandatory badges of shame had specific meanings indicated by their colour and shape. Such emblems helped guards assign tasks to the detainees. For example, a guard at a glance could see if someone was a convicted criminal (green patch) and thus likely of a tough temperament suitable for kapo duty.
Someone with an escape suspect mark usually would not be assigned to work squads operating outside the camp fence. Someone wearing an F could be called upon to help translate guards' spoken instructions to a trainload of new arrivals from France. Some historical monuments quote the badge-imagery, with the use of a triangle being a sort of visual shorthand to symbolize all camp victims.
The modern-day use of a pink triangle emblem to symbolize gay rights is a response to the camp identification patches.
The system of badges varied between the camps and in the later stages of World War II the use of badges dwindled in some camps and became increasingly accidental in others. The following description is based on the badge coding system used before and during the early stages of the war in the Dachau concentration camp, which had one of the more elaborate coding systems.
Shape was chosen by analogy with the common triangular road hazard signs in Germany that denote warnings to motorists. Here, a triangle is called inverted because its base is up while one of its angles points down.
Double-triangle badges resembled two superimposed triangles forming a Star of David, a Jewish symbol.
Like those who wore pink and green triangles, people in the bottom two categories would have been convicted in criminal courts.
In addition to color-coding, non-German prisoners were marked by the first letter of the German name for their home country or ethnic group. Red triangle with a letter, for example:
Polish emigrant laborers originally wore a purple diamond with a yellow backing. A letter P (for Polen) was cut out of the purple cloth to show the yellow backing beneath.
Furthermore, repeat offenders (rückfällige, meaning recidivists) would receive bars over their stars or triangles, a different colour for a different crime.
Later in the war (late 1944), to save cloth Jewish prisoners wore a yellow bar over a regular point-down triangle to indicate their status. For instance, regular Jews would wear a yellow bar over a red triangle while Jewish criminals would wear a yellow bar over a green triangle.
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Many various markings and combinations existed. A prisoner would usually have at least two and possibly more than six.
Limited preventative custody detainee (Befristete Vorbeugungshaft Häftling, or BV) was the term for general criminals (who wore green triangles with no special marks). They originally were only supposed to be incarcerated at the camp until their term expired and then they would be released. However, when the war began they were confined indefinitely for its duration.
Erziehungshäftlinge (reformatory inmates) wore E or EH in large black letters on a white square. They were made up of intellectuals and respected community members who could organize and lead a resistance movement, suspicious persons picked up in sweeps or stopped at checkpoints, people caught performing conspiratorial activities or acts and inmates who broke work discipline. They were assigned to hard labor for six to eight weeks and were then released. It was hoped that the threat of permanent incarceration at hard labor would deter them from further action.
Polizeihäftlinge (police inmates), short for Polizeilich Sicherungsverwahrte Häftlinge (police secure custody inmates), wore either PH in large black letters on a white square or the letter S (for Sicherungsverwahrt – secure custody) on a green triangle. To save expense, some camps had them just wear their civilian clothes without markings. Records used the letter PSV (Polizeilich Sicherungsverwahrt) to designate them. They were people awaiting trial by a police court-martial or who were already convicted. They were detained in a special jail barracks until they were executed.
Some camps assigned Nacht und Nebel (night and fog) prisoners had them wear two large letters NN in yellow.
Soviet prisoners of war (russische Kriegsgefangenen) assigned to work camps (Arbeitslager) wore two large letters SU (for sowjetischer Untermensch, meaning Soviet sub-human)[ citation needed ] in yellow and had vertical stripes painted on their uniforms. They were the few who had not been shot out of hand or died of neglect from untreated wounds, exposure to the elements, or starvation before they could reach a camp. They performed hard labor. Some joined Andrey Vlasov's Liberation Army to fight for the Germans.
Labor education detainees (Arbeitserziehung Häftling) wore a white letter A on their black triangle. This stood for Arbeitsscheuer ("work-shy person"), designating stereotypically "lazy" social undesirables like Gypsies, petty criminals (e.g. prostitutes and pickpockets), alcoholics/drug addicts and vagrants. They were usually assigned to work at labor camps.
Asoziale (anti-socials) inmates wore a plain black triangle. They were considered either too "selfish" or "deviant" to contribute to society or were considered too impaired to support themselves. They were therefore considered a burden. This category included pacifists and conscription resisters, petty or habitual criminals, the mentally ill and the mentally and/or physically disabled. They were usually executed.
The Wehrmacht Strafbattalion (punishment battalion) and SS Bewährungstruppe (probation company) were military punishment units. They consisted of Wehrmacht and SS military criminals, SS personnel convicted by an Honor Court of bad conduct and civilian criminals for which military service was either the assigned punishment or a voluntary replacement of imprisonment. They wore regular uniforms, but were forbidden rank or unit insignia until they had proven themselves in combat. They wore an uninverted (point-upwards) red triangle on their upper sleeves to indicate their status. Most were used for hard labor, "special tasks" (unwanted dangerous jobs like defusing landmines or running phone cables) or were used as forlorn hopes or cannon fodder. The infamous Dirlewanger Brigade was an example of a regular unit created from such personnel.
A Strafkompanie (punishment company) was a hard labor unit in the camps. Inmates assigned to it wore a black roundel bordered white under their triangle patch.
Prisoners "suspected of [attempting to] escape" (Fluchtverdächtiger) wore a red roundel bordered white under their triangle patch. If also assigned to hard labor, they wore the red roundel under their black Strafkompanie roundel.
A prisoner-functionary (Funktionshäftling), or kapo (boss), wore a cloth brassard (their Kennzeichen, or identifying mark) to indicate their status. They served as camp guards (Lagerpolizei), barracks clerks (Blockschreiber) and the senior prisoners (ältesten, meaning elders) at the camp (lagerältester), barracks (blockältester) and room (stubenältester) levels of camp organization. They received privileges like bigger and sometimes better food rations, better quarters (or even a private room), luxuries (like tobacco or alcohol) and access to the camp's facilities (like the showers or the pool). Failure to please their captors meant demotion and loss of privileges and an almost certain death at the hands of their fellow inmates.
Detainees wearing civilian clothing (more common later in the war) instead of the striped uniforms were often marked with a prominent X on the back. [18] This made for an ersatz prisoner uniform. For permanence, such Xs were made with white oil paint, with sewn-on cloth strips, or were cut (with underlying jacket-liner fabric providing the contrasting color). Detainees would be compelled to sew their number and (if applicable) a triangle emblem onto the fronts of such X-ed clothing. [18]
Politisch Political prisoner | Berufsverbrecher Professional criminal | Emigrant Foreign forced laborer | Bibelforscher Bible Student (Jehovah's Witnesses) | Homosexuell Male homosexual/sex offender | Arbeitsscheu/Asozial Work-shy/Asocial | Zigeuner Gypsy (Roma or Sinti male) | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Basic colours | |||||||
Markings for repeaters | |||||||
Inmates of Strafkompanie (punishment companies) | |||||||
Markings for Jews | |||||||
Political prisoner nationality markings The capital letter of the name of the country on a red triangle | Belgier (Belgian) | Tscheche (Czech) | Franzose (French) | Pole (Polish) | Spanier (Spanish) | ||
Special markings | Jüdischer Rassenschänder Jewish race defiler | Rassenschänderin Female race defiler | Escape suspect | Häftlingsnummer Inmate number | Kennzeichen für Funktionshäftlinge Special inmates' brown armband | Enemy POW or deserter | |
Example | Marks were worn in descending order as follows: inmate number, repeater bar, triangle or star, member of penal battalion, escape suspect. In this example, the inmate is a Jewish convict with multiple convictions, serving in a Strafkompanie (penal unit) and who is suspected of trying to escape. |
Triangle-motifs appear on many postwar memorials to the victims of the Nazis. Most triangles are plain while some others bear nationality-letters [ broken anchor ]. The otherwise potentially puzzling designs are a direct reference to the identification patches used in the camps. On such monuments, typically an inverted (point down, base up) triangle (especially if red) evokes all victims, including also the non-Jewish victims like Poles and other Slavs, communists, homosexuals, Roma and Sinti (see Porajmos), people with disability (see Action T4), Soviet POWs and Jehovah's Witnesses. An inverted triangle colored pink would symbolize gay male victims. A non-inverted (base down, point up) triangle and/or a yellow triangle is generally more evocative of the Jewish victims.
In June 2020, the re-election campaign of Donald Trump posted an advertisement on Facebook stating that "Dangerous MOBS of far-left groups are running through our streets and causing absolute mayhem" and identifying them as "ANTIFA", accompanied by a graphic of a downward-pointing red triangle. The ads appeared on the Facebook pages of Donald Trump, the Trump campaign, and Vice President Mike Pence. Many observers compared the graphic to the symbol used by the Nazis for identifying political prisoners such as communists, social democrats and socialists. Many noted the number of ads – 88 – which is associated with neo-Nazis and white supremacists. [20] [21] [22]
As an example of the public outcry against the use of the downward-pointing red triangle, as reported by MotherJones, the Twitter account (@jewishaction), [23] the account of Bend the Arc: Jewish Action, [24] a Progressive Jewish site stated:
"The President of the United States is campaigning for reelection using a Nazi concentration camp symbol.
Nazis used the red triangle to mark political prisoners and people who rescued Jews. Trump & the RNC are using it to smear millions of protestors.
Their masks are off. pic.twitter.com/UzmzDaRBup" [25]
Facebook removed the campaign ads with the graphic, saying that its use in this context violated their policy against "organized hate". [26] [27] [28] [29] [30] [31] The Trump campaign's communications director wrote that "The red triangle is a common Antifa symbol used in an ad about Antifa." Historian Mark Bray, author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook , disputed this, saying that the symbol is not associated with Antifa in the United States. [32]
Some sources have suggested that the inverted red triangle symbol used by Hamas in its propaganda videos is reminiscent of the same red triangle used by the Nazis, with regards to antisemitism during the ongoing Israel-Hamas war. However, the Nazis used the inverted red triangle to identify prisoners with political views opposed to Nazism, not necessarily Jewish prisoners. [33] [34]
Before 1933, male homosexual acts were illegal in Germany under Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code. The law was not consistently enforced, however, and a thriving gay culture existed in major German cities. After the Nazi takeover in 1933, the first homosexual movement's infrastructure of clubs, organizations, and publications was shut down. After the Röhm purge in 1934, persecuting homosexuals became a priority of the Nazi police state. A 1935 revision of Paragraph 175 made it easier to bring criminal charges for homosexual acts, leading to a large increase in arrests and convictions. Persecution peaked in the years prior to World War II and was extended to areas annexed by Germany, including Austria, the Czech lands, and Alsace–Lorraine.
A pink triangle has been a symbol for the LGBT community, initially intended as a badge of shame, but later reappropriated as a positive symbol of self-identity. In Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, it began as one of the Nazi concentration camp badges, distinguishing those imprisoned because they had been identified by authorities as gay men or trans women. In the 1970s, it was revived as a symbol of protest against homophobia, and has since been adopted by the larger LGBT community as a popular symbol of LGBT pride and the LGBT movements and queer liberation movements.
Karl-Otto Koch was a mid-ranking commander in the Schutzstaffel (SS) of Nazi Germany who was the first commandant of the Nazi concentration camps at Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen. From September 1941 until August 1942, he served as the first commandant of the Majdanek concentration camp in occupied Poland, stealing vast amounts of valuables and money from murdered jews. His wife, Ilse Koch, also participated in the crimes at Buchenwald.
Dachau was one of the first concentration camps built by Nazi Germany and the longest-running one, opening on 22 March 1933. The camp was initially intended to intern Hitler's political opponents, which consisted of communists, social democrats, and other dissidents. It is located on the grounds of an abandoned munitions factory northeast of the medieval town of Dachau, about 16 km (10 mi) northwest of Munich in the state of Bavaria, in southern Germany. After its opening by Heinrich Himmler, its purpose was enlarged to include forced labor, and eventually, the imprisonment of Jews, Romani, German and Austrian criminals, and, finally, foreign nationals from countries that Germany occupied or invaded. The Dachau camp system grew to include nearly 100 sub-camps, which were mostly work camps or Arbeitskommandos, and were located throughout southern Germany and Austria. The main camp was liberated by U.S. forces on 29 April 1945.
The purple triangle was a concentration camp badge used by the Nazis to identify Jehovah's Witnesses in Nazi Germany. The purple triangle was introduced in July 1936 with other concentration camps such as those of Dachau and Buchenwald following in 1937 and 1938. In the winter of 1935–36, before the onset of the war, Jehovah’s Witnesses have been reported to make up 20–40% of the prisoners in concentration camps. Although Jehovah's Witnesses made up the vast majority of those wearing the purple triangle, a few members of other small pacifist religious groups were also included.
Gross-Rosen was a network of Nazi concentration camps built and operated by Nazi Germany during World War II. The main camp was located in the German village of Gross-Rosen, now the modern-day Rogoźnica in Lower Silesian Voivodeship, Poland, directly on the rail-line between the towns of Jawor (Jauer) and Strzegom (Striegau). Its prisoners were mostly Jews, Poles and Soviet citizens.
From 1933 to 1945, Nazi Germany operated more than a thousand concentration camps, including subcamps on its own territory and in parts of German-occupied Europe.
Sachsenhausen or Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg was a German Nazi concentration camp in Oranienburg, Germany, used from 1936 until April 1945, shortly before the defeat of Nazi Germany in May later that year. It mainly held political prisoners throughout World War II. Prominent prisoners included Joseph Stalin's oldest son, Yakov Dzhugashvili; assassin Herschel Grynszpan; Paul Reynaud, the penultimate prime minister of the French Third Republic; Francisco Largo Caballero, prime minister of the Second Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War; the wife and children of the crown prince of Bavaria; Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera; and several enemy soldiers and political dissidents.
Holocaust victims were people targeted by the government of Nazi Germany based on their ethnicity, religion, political beliefs, disability or sexual orientation. The institutionalized practice by the Nazis of singling out and persecuting people resulted in the Holocaust, which began with legalized social discrimination against specific groups, involuntary hospitalization, euthanasia, and forced sterilization of persons considered physically or mentally unfit for society. The vast majority of the Nazi regime's victims were Jews, Sinti-Roma peoples, and Slavs but victims also encompassed people identified as social outsiders in the Nazi worldview, such as homosexuals, and political enemies. Nazi persecution escalated during World War II and included: non-judicial incarceration, confiscation of property, forced labor, sexual slavery, death through overwork, human experimentation, undernourishment, and execution through a variety of methods. For specified groups like the Jews, genocide was the Nazis' primary goal.
Identification of inmates in Nazi concentration camps was performed mostly with identification numbers marked on clothing, or later, tattooed on the skin. More specialized identification in Nazi concentration camps was done with badges on clothing and armbands.
Josef Kohout was an Austrian Nazi concentration camp survivor, imprisoned for his homosexuality. He is best known for the 1972 book Die Männer mit dem rosa Winkel, which was written by his acquaintance Hans Neumann using the pen name Heinz Heger, which is often falsely attributed to Kohout. The book is one of very few first-hand accounts of the treatment of homosexuals in Nazi imprisonment. It has been translated into several languages, and a second edition published in 1994. It was the first testimony from a homosexual survivor of the concentration camps to be translated into English, and is regarded as the best known. Its publication helped to illuminate not just the suffering gay prisoners of the Nazi regime experienced, but the lack of recognition and compensation they received after the war's end.
In Nazi concentration and labor camps the system of Funktionshäftlinge, or prisoner functionaries was developed. These were the prisoners with certain duties of supervision of over fellow prisoners assisting the camp administration and guards (SS-Totenkopfverbände), in exchange for various privileges. These should be distinguished from various work units known as Sonderkommando (not to be confused with theSS-Sonderkommandos. Of these, best known are Kapos.
In World War II, Nazi Germany established brothels in the concentration camps to increase productivity among inmates. Their use was restricted to the more privileged Aryan prisoners, primarily the Kapos, or "prisoner functionaries", and the criminal element. Jewish inmates were prohibited from using the brothels according to rules against racial mixing. In the end, the camp brothels did not produce any noticeable increase in the prisoners' productivity levels but, instead, created a market for coupons among the more privileged camp prisoners.
International concentration camp committees are organizations composed of former inmates of the various Nazi concentration camps, formed at various times, primarily after the Second World War. Although most survivors have since died and those who are still alive are generally octogenarians, the committees are still active.
During the Holocaust, death marches were massive forced transfers of prisoners from one Nazi camp to other locations, which involved walking long distances resulting in numerous deaths of weakened people. Most death marches took place toward the end of World War II, mostly after the summer/autumn of 1944. Hundreds of thousands of prisoners, mostly Jews, from Nazi camps near the Eastern Front were moved to camps inside Germany away from the Allied forces. Their purpose was to continue the use of prisoners' slave labour, to remove evidence of crimes against humanity, and to keep the prisoners to bargain with the Allies.
In Nazi Germany, Sonder- und Ehrenhaft was an administrative status assigned to certain particularly prominent political prisoners, notably political leaders of Nazi-occupied countries and disgraced members of the German elite. Because of their political value or former status, they were treated uncommonly well, and all but a few of them survived the war.
Ravensbrück was a Nazi concentration camp exclusively for women from 1939 to 1945, located in northern Germany, 90 km (56 mi) north of Berlin at a site near the village of Ravensbrück. The camp memorial's estimated figure of 132,000 women who were in the camp during the war includes about 48,500 from Poland, 28,000 from the Soviet Union, almost 24,000 from Germany and Austria, nearly 8,000 from France, almost 2,000 from Belgium, and thousands from other countries including a few from the United Kingdom and the United States. More than 20,000 of the total were Jewish. Eighty-five percent were from other races and cultures. More than 80 percent were political prisoners. Many prisoners were employed as slave laborers by Siemens & Halske. From 1942 to 1945, the Nazis undertook medical experiments on Ravensbrück prisoners to test the effectiveness of sulfonamides.
Approximately 30,000 Jews in Germany and Austria were deported within the region or the country after the Kristallnacht of 9/10 November 1938. They were taken to the concentration camps Buchenwald, Dachau and Sachsenhausen by the NSDAP organizations and the police in the days after the pogrom. This put pressure on the deportees and their relatives in order to speed up the only seemingly voluntary emigration from their homeland and to "Aryanize" Jewish assets. The vast majority of the detainees were released by the beginning of 1939. Around 500 Jews were murdered, committed suicide or died as a result of ill-treatment and refused medical treatment in the concentration camps.
The Osthofen concentration camp was an early Nazi concentration camp in Osthofen, close to Worms, Germany. It was established in March 1933 in a former paper factory. The camp was administered by the People's State of Hesse's Political Police, with guards first drawn from SA and SS, later only SS men. The first prisoners were mostly Communists or Social Democrats, but later Jehovah's Witnesses, Seventh-Day Adventists and non-political Jews were also sent to the camp.
Since the Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip, an inverted red triangle has been used by pro-Palestinian protesters. The red triangle as a Palestinian symbol dates back to the Arab Revolt, after which it was also used in the Palestinian flag. More recently, combat footage published by Hamas uses an inverted red triangle as an arrow to indicate Israeli military targets, such as tanks, just before they are struck. Usage of the triangle has spread to the international war-related protests, with some anti-Israel protesters using the symbol.
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