Today’s Classified Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
In the summer of 1937, the SS closed down Sachsenburg Concentration Camp, near Chemnitz, Germany. Most inmates were transferred to Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp in Oranienburg, Germany. This increased the number of prisoners there to about 3,000; more than half of them had been imprisoned for political reasons. The SS personnel from Sachsenburg introduced the so-called “Sachsengruss” (Saxon greeting) to Sachsenhausen. This was a method of torture whereby the prisoners were forced to stay for hours in a squatting position, with their arms raised.
Main entrance at Sachsenhausen
From the spring of 1938 onwards, prisoners had to wear a colored triangle on their clothes. The color of the triangle marked them out as “prisoners in protective custody,” “prisoners in preventive custody,” “antisocials,” “Jews,” or members of other groups. The prisoner categories were largely defined according to the Nazis’ social and racist theories. SS officers often decided arbitrarily which group a prisoner belonged to. As these groups were treated differently by the SS, the category could mean the difference between life and death.
Prisoners at Sachsenhausen, December 19, 1938
Strips with numbers were sewed onto the prisoners’ clothing. So-called “prisoners in preventive custody,” most of whom had previous convictions for minor criminal offenses, had to wear a green triangle. Homosexual men were made to wear pink triangles. The SS often assigned these to penal work details and drove many of them to death in the brickworks. More than 1,000 homosexual men were imprisoned in Sachsenhausen between 1936 and 1945.
Foreign prisoners were marked – if they were not Jews, Sinti or Roma – with a red triangle and the abbreviation of the name of their home country. After the war started, increasing numbers of people from German-occupied countries were brought to Sachsenhausen. The non-German prisoners were generally treated even worse by the SS than the Germans were.
From 1938 onwards, the SS marked Jewish prisoners with yellow triangles. In addition, they were forced to wear one other triangle, for example the red “political” triangle or the green one for “criminals”. The two triangles were placed one over the other to form a star. Jews were at the very bottom of the SS prisoner hierarchy and were treated most brutally of all.
Nazi uniform classification system
Culled from: Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp
Morbid Photo Du Jour
Inside Reactor 4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant which exploded on April 26, 1986.