TAGS – Materialities of Annihilation and Resistance. Prisoner Tags from the Mauthausen Concentration Camp
Cooperation project of University of Innsbruck (PI Barbara Hausmair), the Mauthausen Memorial (Yvonne Burger) and the Lern- und Gedenkort Schloss Hartheim (Florian Schwanninger)
“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.
FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THE PROJECT ON THE UNIVERSITY OF INNSBRUCKS WEBSITE TAGS - Materialities of Annihilation and Resistance