“To be dispossessed of one’s own name is among the most far-reaching and profound mutilations of the self. It documents the termination of one’s previous life history. … The number signified the metamorphosis of the individual into an element of the mass, the transformation of personal society into the serial society of the nameless.” (Sofsky 1997, 84)

“Hello, what’s your name?” – a banal question we are asked a thousand times during our lives, yet it touches on one of the very foundations of what makes us human: our name. Names are more than mere identifiers; they are deeply tied to our relationships, our identity – they are part of who we are. So, what if our name is violently taken from us? 

This is exactly what millions of people experienced in the Nazi concentration camps 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. 4), 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 micro-X-Ray Fluorescence (Fig. 5) or Scanning Electron Microscopy (Fig. 6). 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.

The project builds on an existing database (Fig. 3) developed by the project PI in recent years, which combines data on artifacts, biographical information on identified prisoners, and other relevant archival sources. This database is continuously expanded with further historical, iconographic, and scientific data. In addition to the more than 260 tags from Mauthausen, the database currently contains over 1,000 further records of prisoner tags from other camps and contexts. Tags have been identified in the following camps to date:

Auschwitz
Bergen-Belsen
Buchenwald
Dachau / Allach
Flossenbürg
Groß-Rosen
Majdanek
Mauthausen
Neuengamme
Sachsenhausen

The aim of the “TAGS”-project is to gain new insights into the lives of people persecuted by the Nazis (Fig. 7), to develop guidelines for the analysis and handling of metal artifacts from 20th-century archaeological contexts, and to develop a joint educational program for the participating memorials, thus contributing to the long-term preservation and appreciation of this unique material cultural heritage.

Acknowledgements
For this research, many concentration camp memorials, as well as archives and museums dedicated to commemorating the victims of National Socialism, grant access to their collections, archival materials, and knowledge. We are particularly grateful to our cooperation partners at the Sachsenhausen, Majdanek, and Dachau Memorials, as well as the Arolsen Archives. Photographs of prisoner tags from private family collections and/or information about prisoner tags and the biographies of the people associated with them are provided to us by dedicated individuals or relatives of people imprisoned by the Nazis. These insights are invaluable to the project, and we thank everyone who supports our efforts.

Contact: barbara.hausmair@uibk.ac.at