“Hello, what’s your name?” – a banal question, yet touching on one of the very foundations of what makes us human: our name. In Nazi concentration camps (KZ), the SS launched one of the most vicious attacks on their victims’ humanity by replacing their names with numbers. In the KZ Mauthausen, prisoner numbers were sewn onto the prisoners’ clothes, but also issued on metal tags worn as bracelets or necklaces. The Mauthausen and Hartheim Memorials retain a collection of over 260 such tags, recovered from mass graves during post-war exhumations and later archaeological excavations. Interestingly, this ensemble includes not only SS-issued tags, but also tags crafted by prisoners, some of them adorned in a highly skilled and artistic manner. By mobilising the interdisciplinary strengths of heritage sciences (archaeology, history, traceology, metallurgy, conservation) this project of the University of Innsbruck, the Mauthausen Memorial and the Lern- und Gedenkort Schloss Hartheim explores the tags’ materiality in order to understand their role in camp administration and processes of annihilation, how prisoners resisted dehumanisation by re-appropriating these objects of violence, and if tags became tokens of memory after 1945. The aims are to create new insights into the lives of people murdered by the Nazis, to produce fundamental guidelines for handling metal artefacts from 20th-century archaeological contexts, to ensure the preservation of the tags, and to develop sensitive object-biographies for a shared outreach program of the involved Memorials.

In the Nazi concentration camps, millions of people experienced the destruction of their identities between 1933 and 1945. The Schutzstaffel (SS) replaced names with numbers – a cruel practice designed to systematically strip the victims of their humanity. The assignment of numbers was part of the registration procedure in all concentration camps, to which deportees were subjected after often days-long, catastrophic transports. The prisoner numbers played a crucial role in the administration of the camps. Survivors remember them primarily as a symbol of humiliation, suffering, and the destruction of their identity.

In the Mauthausen concentration camp, as in many other concentration camps, numbers were not only sewn onto prisoners’ clothing but also issued on metal tags that had to be worn around the wrist or neck. No SS documents are known to explain the exact purpose of these tags. However, surviving artifacts (Fig. 1), documents from postwar exhumations (Fig. 2), and – albeit very few – survivor accounts attest to their existence and suggest that these tags served for additional control and harassment of the prisoners.

The “TAGS” project, funded by the Austrian Academy of Science, is an interdisciplinary collaborative project between the University of Innsbruck, the Mauthausen Memorial, and the Lern- und Gedenkort Schloss Hartheim. Its focus is on a collection of over 260 prisoner tags from the Mauthausen concentration camp system, which are curated by the memorials. These tags were largely recovered during post-war exhumations of mass graves from the Mauthausen concentration camp and its subcamps, or discovered in 2002 during archaeological excavations at the former Nazi killing center Hartheim Castle, where concentration camp prisoners were murdered as part of Action 14f13.

Contrary to the SS’s intention of dehumanizing and anonymizing prisoners through numbering, the numbers on the recovered tags allow in over 90% of cases to identify individual prisoners using historical camp documents (Fig. 1/center). This allows to link the tags to individual biographies of victims, camp chronology (deportation, transfer, and death dates), and prisoner groups. Furthermore, this collection includes not only official tags issued by the SS (Fig. 1/left) but also objects made by prisoners (Fig. 1/right). These are often elaborately designed, for example with initials, dates, or place names, indicating that such self-made objects were important means of self-assertion and prisoners’ attempts to resist annihilation.

“TAGS” investigates the prisoner tags from Mauthausen using a Heritage Science approach that combines archaeology, traceology, metallurgy, and history. Our research builds on an ethnographic study by Marlene Schütz (2013) and an archaeological pilot study of prisoner tags from the Mauthausen concentration camp by Barbara Hausmair (2018). The interdisciplinary approach aims to comprehensively explore the materiality of dehumanization and resistance in  Nazi camps by examining the tags, their material properties, archaeological contexts, object biographies, shifts in meaning during different phases of Nazi rule and in different camps, as well as their transformation into objects of identification and remembrance after the end of the Nazi regime.

Using innovative approaches in metal traceology (Fig. 3), we examine traces of manufacture and use that provide information about the production of official tags, as well as the techniques used to manufacture prisoner-made tags. The chemical composition of the metals tags are made of are determined with state-of-the-art metallurgical methods such as Scanning Electron Microscopy (Fig. 5) and micro-X-Ray Fluorescence (Fig. 6) or. Together with archaeological contextualization, these approaches allow us to shed light on source materials, the circulation of tags within the concentration camp system, the possibilities available to prisoners to produce their own tags, and usage and disposal processes. The combination of archaeological contextualization, archival research, and oral history focuses on the function and meaning of the tags for various actors and explore individual victims’ lives through object biographies. A comparison with tags from other concentration camps aims to provide insights into the rationale of numbering systems used throughout the entire concentration camp apparatus.