When the numbers were tattooed on their arm, I imagine that some people protested. I cant find any information on that. I would imagine that if you refused the worst would happen to you. Are there any references to those who refused and survived? How did the procedure work? Did they hold you down, restrain you if you protested?
After being stuffed in a train for a week or two, I don’t think you’d have a whole lot of fight left in you. At least nothing that a guard holding you down would have a hard time dealing with. Also, at least for a while, the tattoos were done with stamps. Similar to a leather stamp, the numbers were formed out of sharp pieces of metal that could be dipped in ink and stamped onto the person. They did eventually move to single needles, but it’s not like these tattoos are winning awards. Even with single needles they likely only took a minute or two each.
Also, a nitpick, WW11 is different than WWII.
Hrm. I’m going to make some guesses with what’s missing from the O.P., so I’m gonna sound stupid or presumptuous, or whatever. But anyway …
The processing of criminals, in this situation, involved tattooing the prisoner number. That was the process, that was how it was done. I suppose, any prison processing can be protested, but as has already been stated, there comes a point where the protest isn’t worth the effort.
Granted, the “crime” in question, is “being Jewish” and the “opportunity for the crime” was “living where the Nazis were in power.” Conceptually, that’s different from, say, “robbing a bank, anywhere humans make laws” but technically, they are the same thing. Punishment for a violation.
I’m also assuming, the tattooing is some sort of point the O.P. is trying to make, in regard to a specific violation of Moasic law, as something someone would have to resist specifically. Even after being arresting and imprisoned simply for existing, having previously been deprived of property, civil rights, and citizenship, this tattooing was the last straw. However, that simply isn’t true. I have a reference to a New York Times article, that itself references eight rabbinical scholars in – https://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/17/fashion/17SKIN.html
They told you to stop protesting, and if you continued to resist, they took you outside and shot you.
That’s one of the differences between a typical bureaucracy and the Nazis.
No, they didn’t. That would have been a waste of a bullet that was needed by the fighting troops. They just beat you some and sent you in the other direction, toward the gas chambers.
Remember that tattoos were only applied to prisoners who were going to be kept for 100 days or so of work. The majority of arrivals (women, children, sick, disabled, the elderly, etc.) were sent directly to the gas chambers.
Then how do you explain all the women and children and others who survived?
Are you serious? What’s the denominator? He said the “majority” were sent to the gas chambers. I doubt you’re disputing that.
The women worked (until they couldn’t). And in many cases, the kids were ‘studied’ (and sometimes the women, too). Hence their survival.
(In some cases, if the father might have been an Aryan, i.e. a kid born in the camp, it was also felt reasonable to let the kid live)
By the way, the kids were also tattooed.
I’m not sure why the OP would think that anyone cooperated.
The Nazis weren’t concerned about child labor, so many that we consider children they considered old enough to get some useful work out of them. Or some ‘medical’ experimentation. Same with women – srurdy ones were kept for work. (And pretty ones for other reasons.)
And “all … who survived”. Really? That was less than 20,000 out of some 12 million sent to the camps (and many more killed directly, without going to a camp). About .0016 of 1% survived. “All” indeed.
Please. Bullets weren’t issued to SS guards for nothing. No one was going to complain about the waste of one bullet.
Literally hundreds of thousands of the Nazis’ victims were shot to death.
I was responding to your statement that “The majority of arrivals (women, children, sick, disabled, the elderly, etc.) were sent directly to the gas chambers.” To my knowledge, that was seldom true because the arrivals took place over a number of years to a variety of different types of camps. Yes, it’s true that pregnant women were considered useless, and it’s true that late in the war, victims were brought into extermination centers with the intention of sending them to the gas chambers. That is not necessarily the norm over the entirety of the holocaust.
As for less than 20,000 women surviving, I haven’t been able to find any confirmation of that number. Could you give me a cite?
I saw one, once.
A tattoo, like that.
It was the 1960s, & I saw a little kid.
Grandma, Mom & my two brothers & I were in Jewel Foods, & there was an Orthodox man, with a camp tattoo.
I was little.
I asked Mom, what it meant.
She shushed me.
I saw one, once.
A tattoo, like that.
It was the 1960s, & I was a little kid.
Grandma, Mom & my two brothers & I were in Jewel Foods, & there was an Orthodox man, with a camp tattoo.
I was little.
I asked Mom, what it meant.
She shushed me.
Indeed, and just to elaborate.
The Holocaust went into overdrive with the invasion of the USSR in June 1941. The Einsatzgruppen close on the heels of the invading Wehrmacht (and at times in intermingled with them) were there for one purpose - murdering Jews (the Holocaust by Bullets). Forty percent of the Jews murdered during the Holocaust are said to have been shot.
Likewise, Operation Reinhard (the extermination of Polish Jews in particular, but accepting ‘cargo’ from all over Europe) was definitely not about getting work out of the Jews. Its fundamental and unyielding goal was to murder European Jews. The survival rate at Belzec was 1/100000, at Sobibor about 1/1000 (with most survivors having successfully escaped during the camp revolt), and at Treblinka something like 1/10000. Indeed, when Operation Reinhard ‘closed’ in the fall of 1943 with Aktion Erntefest, all remaining Jews, workers and non-workers, were killed.
Later in the war, when manpower was growing short, Jews who could work were often not murdered. If/when they could no longer work due to exhaustion, disease, or starvation, they would then be shuttled from their place of work to Auschwitz for disposal (or, if already at Auschwitz, just to the extermination side of the camp) most often in the gas chambers there. In other words, Auschwitz included both an extermination center and a work camp.
When you say, “late in the war, victims were brought into extermination centers with the intention of sending them to the gas chambers”, this is true insofar as Auschwitz became the major killing after 1943, with sick and ‘useless’ Jews who were no longer able to work, sent there for disposal. But it continued to act as extermination center at least until the summer of 1944 when Eichmann sent some 500,000 Hungarian Jews there.
Yes, I used to caddy in a country club in Toronto. There were two moderately old fellows (50? 60?) with Jewish names who had those prisoner numbers still tattooed on their forearms. (About 1970) They always golfed together and shared a cart and argued like a bunch of little old ladies. But they were the lucky ones - they survived.
Yes, I used to caddy in a country club in Toronto. There were two moderately old fellows (50? 60?) with Jewish names who had those prisoner numbers still tattooed on their forearms. (About 1970) They always golfed together and shared a cart and argued like a bunch of little old ladies. But they were the lucky ones - they survived.
There used to be a lady that played at the bridge club here, that wore a bandaid on her forearm.
Judging by recent changes to the law on euthanasia here, there must not be many like her left around.
Note: it was pretty much only AUSCHWITZ that tattooed prisoners. The tattoo was used for processing purposes: it identified residents when dead and naked, which had an effect on the labour pool and accommodation.
Could you please elucidate? I’m not sure how changes in euthanaisa laws mean there are fewer Holocaust survivors?
I don’t remember this, but apparently when I was a kid I once saw a man with a tattoo on his arm and told my mother he must be bad because he wrote on his arm. She was completely mortified. My grandmother had Jewish cousins back in Germany; as far was we know none of them survived.
You’ve already been conditioned to certain humiliations (the star patches on your clothing), dragged/forced from your home, denied rest and basic considerations and brought to a camp, terrorized and afraid. What else can you do but cooperate to some degree? My understanding is that by the time you were getting numbered you were pretty much under firm control so its no great surprise. That people did resist at that point is more the surprise to me.