Auschwitz was the only camp in the system that tattooed its prisoners. From the autumn of 1941 onwards, prisoners selected on the ramp for labour rather than immediate killing had a number tattooed on the inside of their left forearm. The tattoos became, after the war, the most-recognised single physical mark of Holocaust survival. They are also one of the cleanest pieces of evidence against the deniers, because the camp office maintained a numerical record of every tattoo it issued, and those records survived the war.
Why Auschwitz did it
Auschwitz had a particular practical problem. Prisoners died in such numbers, often within days of arrival, that the camp office found it difficult to identify the dead. The German bureaucracy required that each death be recorded with the prisoner’s name and number. The traditional method of identification, the number sewn onto the uniform, did not survive on a corpse stripped of its clothes for reuse. The solution adopted in late 1941 was to tattoo the number directly onto the body, where it could not be removed.
The tattoo was originally only applied to Soviet prisoners of war, who were the largest dying category in the early period. From early 1942 it was extended to all prisoners admitted to the camp, including Jews who had been selected for labour rather than immediate killing on the ramp. Children selected for labour from around the age of fourteen were also tattooed. The Sonderkommando were tattooed. The medical experiment subjects were tattooed. The Roma and Sinti held in the family camp at Birkenau were tattooed, sometimes with a Z prefix for Zigeuner, the German word for Gypsy.
How it was done
The tattoo was applied with a stamp tattooing device or, more commonly in the later period, with a single needle and a bottle of ink. The work was done by other prisoners, almost always Jewish prisoners who had been assigned to the office for that purpose. The numbers were issued in sequence as prisoners arrived, with letters indicating the category. Numbers without a letter were Polish political prisoners. A number with an A or B prefix was a Jewish prisoner. The prefixes restarted at intervals as the sequence reached its limits, so reading a tattoo without the records is an inexact science.
The tattoo was on the inside of the left forearm by convention but the placement was not standardised in the earliest months. Some early prisoners were tattooed on the chest. Some children were tattooed on the upper arm or the leg. The standard left-forearm placement became universal from mid-1942 onwards.
What the records show
The Auschwitz registration office kept a numerical record of every tattoo it issued. Those records were partially destroyed by the SS in the last weeks of the camp’s operation, but several thousand pages survived and are now held at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and at Yad Vashem. The records make it possible to identify, by tattoo number, the date of arrival of any prisoner who survived. Survivors who do not remember the date of their arrival can have it told to them from their tattoo. The records are also the basis on which the documented prisoner population of Auschwitz can be reconstructed.
Not every prisoner who arrived at Auschwitz received a tattoo. The vast majority of arrivals were sent straight to the gas chambers and never registered. Only those selected for labour on the ramp had their numbers tattooed. The tattoo numbers therefore underrepresent the camp’s actual through-flow by a factor of around four to one. Around 400,000 numbers were issued in the camp’s career. Around 1.1 million people were murdered there.
What the tattoo meant after the war
The tattoo was the visible badge of survival for the rest of each survivor’s life. Some survivors had it removed surgically. Most kept it, often without speaking about it for years afterwards. Many survivors found that strangers asking about the tattoo at the swimming pool or in the changing room of a gym was a recurring difficulty. Many would simply roll their sleeve down. Others would explain.
The tattoo also became, in the second and third generations after the war, a deeply private inheritance. Some children of survivors had tattoos in matching numbers done on their own forearms, as a deliberate act of memory. The practice has produced its own debates within survivor communities. The original tattoos, though, are gradually leaving the world. Almost all the surviving Auschwitz tattoo holders are now over 90, and most are gone. Within ten years there will be very few left.
The tattoo and the deniers
Holocaust deniers occasionally claim that the camp tattoos prove very little, since the records can be doubted and the survivors themselves can be accused of fraud. The argument fails on the documented evidence. The German records of issued numbers, recovered after the war, list each number with the name and date of the prisoner registered. Those records cross-reference with the deportation lists kept by the German railway and by the deporting authorities in each occupied country. They cross-reference with the survivor lists compiled at liberation by the British, American and Soviet armies. The number on the forearm of a living survivor in 2026 ties to a deportation list filed in Berlin in 1942 and signed by an SS officer who was later hanged at Nuremberg. The chain of evidence is one of the cleanest in the documentation of any genocide in modern history.
See also
- Political Prisoners
- Soviet Prisoners of War
- Roma and Sinti
- Yad Vashem Jerusalem
- Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum
Sources
- Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, prisoner registration records
- Robert Jan van Pelt, The Case for Auschwitz, Indiana University Press, 2002
- Danuta Czech, Auschwitz Chronicle 1939-1945, Henry Holt, 1990
- USHMM: Tattoos and Numbers