I have read that in Nazi concentration camps, prisoners received a mark indicating the reason for their incarceration. For example, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum explains that
My question is, why were such distinctions marked? In modern prisons, the prisoners do not receive distinctive clothing or emblems according to their crimes. What possible benefit to the running of the concentration camps would the Nazis’ coloured triangles have served?
JMHO but ordinary criminals are incarcerated by a justice system to punish a specific crime and possibly rehabilitate the prisoner. The Nazi regime imprisoned people for who they were. At the very least I don’t think you can make a valid comparison for that reason.
IANAH, but:
I suppose if all the prisoners were intermingled and they wanted to move all the Jehovah’s Witnesses to a specific barracks, say, then if they shouted the order they could then scan the crowd and more easily pick out those who had failed to comply.
I suppose, but is there any reason they would have to have been separated (or intermingled) anyway? What would be the benefit of moving all the Jehovah’s Witnesses to a specific barracks? I can’t imagine they would have done this in consideration for those other prisoners who didn’t want to be proselytized to.
A few reasons, as far as I know. I think the main reason is, like Scupper said, it made it easy for the guards to pick out certain groups for orders like that, and it also made it hard for prisoners to hide or pretend to be someone else…
Also, lets say you were a guard and in the mood to say, beat somebody to death. The badges let you pick, say, a Jew to beat, who no one will miss, rather than, say, a common criminal, who, in theory at least, is being rehibilitated and will some day go back out into the real world.
The badges, in short, give everyone a clear sense of the pecking order.
They did often seperate them. I’m not sure why. It may have been part of the Nazi penchant to order and classify the world.
So if some order comes through respecting only them, it’s easier to implement. Lets say, for example, you get the order, “All Hungarian Jews to be liquidated on xx/xx/19xx.” That’s a lot easier to carry out if they’re all in the same barracks.
In order to understand the logic involved, you would have to understand the motive behind imprisoning these people in the first place. That reason being, at least to my understanding, group psychosis on a national level. Any system that is predicated on insanity tends to be difficult to understand. If anyone really understood this one, I would be afraid.
-CoffeeGuy
Nice hypothetical example, but did it ever occur, or was it ever expected to occur, in practice? If not, then I’m afraid we haven’t hit on the reason quite yet.
I don’t think you need national psychosis in order for atrocities to be committed on a mass scale. There is a famous experiment (Milgram, S. (1963) Behvioural study of obedience. Journal of Abnormal Social Psychology, 67, 371-378) which many believe shows that ordinary, healthy people will happily murder other human beings simply because someone in a position of authority tells them it’s OK. It’s been reproduced many times with similar results.
Oh, sure…lots. Take the Romany in Auschwitz, for example. They were put in a seperate barracks at Birkenau, to be used for “research”, and then all gassed on August 2-3, 1944. In July of '44, there was the gassing of a large number of Hungarian Jews, etc.
Remember, these were not prison camps in the way that you or I, in our countries, know prisons. The concentration camps weren’t about punishment or rehibilitation. They were about dehumanizing people, reducing them to badges and numbers, working them to death, and starving and murdering them. The badges were seen as needed because that way you could tell at a glance what that person was…where in the scale of humanity he or she ranked.
Yeah man, but first you’d have to really understand why anyone would need to divide people into various groups to be murdered in various ways. I mean, if you do, seek counseling.
–CoffeeGuy
A couple of theories.
One would be because of the heirarchy among the prisoners. The guards considered criminals and politicals to be better than Jews and gave them better jobs. The tags made it easy to distinguish who was who.
Another possibility was to keep the various groups from organizing together. If a guard saw a group of Russians meeting with a group of Jews for example, he’d suspect something unusual might be occuring.
Cofffeeguy,
I guess I need counseling then. The purpose of identifying divisions is to dehumanize the individuals by (there are fancy psychological terms for this, but I forget them) treating them as simply a member of a group.
To me, it’s painfully obvious why Nazis would want to highlight division and separation among their prisoners. It’s so the guards, or anyone else for that matter, thinks that they’re only attacking a group (and it’s relatively easy to convince people that a group is a threat- see Goering’s quote regarding scaring the masses, and today’s Western fears of the Arab and Muslim worlds) and not rather the individuals who constitute a group.
I know someone who insists that they hate Palestinians as a group but has no problem with any individual Palestinian who they might meet. It’s amazing what people can justify and rationalize.
The last thing the powers that be of the Third Reich would want to do is have people thinking that they were fighting a war on men, women, and children; and not a war on the enemies of the state (Jews, Gypsy-Romas, Homosexuals, etc.)
I know the holocaust was a horrible thing, but I understand why they felt that they needed to divide people. I don’t think its right, but I do understaind their reasoning, incorrect as it may be. Those who don’t learn the mistakes of the past are destined to repeat them, right? The holocaust was a huge mistake, so we need to learn about it that much more and try to understand the reasoning behind those people. That many people just don’t go crazy, or are “evil” as GWB likes to say. There are some interesting psychological experiments that do show that people do very bad things that they are averse to because of peer pressure.
But, they had to divide them. Acutally the prision camps were a very unequal place. The Brits had their own outhouses and could drink tea. The Jews, of course had it the worst. The Poles were often treated slightly better and were given positions. They actually made criminals leaders in the camps because they would be more abusive and psychotic.
I hope I haven’t missed anyone else’s contribution – it’s a lot of info to parse – but there is a reason I think is most valid:
Separate them into groups long before they know what’s cooking, then pin a mark onto them. When it’s useful, you’ve got this information at your fingertips.
I hope you all remember many of the experiments were performed on a specific demography, for example sleep deprivation tests on female slavic Jews, from which we have the data that shows female Slavs have extended resiliency under extreme sleep deprivation. We owe a lot of advances from which you and I personally, daily benefit to these types of directed experiments.
A rumor I’ve heard is some sub-groups, like gays and the autistic, were especially reserved for the pleasure of the Officers of the Reich. (Ad not necessarily in a lascivious way.)
sorry, fat fingers. “And not necessarily…”
Psychonaut, in your first post, you use the word ‘taxonomy’… I think is the right word in many ways. The Nazis were big on record-keeping and wanted to know who they were getting rid of.
Do you have a cite on that, such as the examples you gave in the other two cases? I emphatically don’t want to get into a game of “trauma-poker”, but as I have always understood it, the gay men, and the handicapped as groups had it “worst”.
There was a definte hierachy within the concentration camps (handicapped people weren’t sent to concentration camps, but to asslyums though)
The main groups were reds triangle: political prisoners, green triangle : professional criminals, black triangle: the ‘antisocial’ (gypsies, vagrants, pimps, beggars, alcoholics),yellow star: Jews, pink triangle: homosexuals.
The ‘reds’ had alot of power within the camp and assigned the work detail, the ‘greens’ also had a strong group affinity (honour among thieves) and were a reasonably powerful group. The ‘blacks’ lacked any real group affinity and generally were disliked by the socialist ‘reds’, next down the wrung came the Jews who being particularly disliked by the camp staff and some factions within the other groups didn’t have it easy, right at the bottom came the homosexuals who were universally persecuted by all the other groups within the camp (some of the homosexuals though were infact political prisoners who the Nazis delibrately classified as homosexual).
Information taken from Micheal Burleigh’s The Third Reich - A New History, see esp. pg 376 ‘Eugenics and Euthensia’, for the prison hierachy and the plight of the black triangle ‘antisocial’ prisoners.