Prisoner’s Hand Marks, 1944

Prisoner’s Hand Marks, 1944

This photograph was taken after the German occupation of France during WWII. It depicts the wall of a torture chamber on the Boulevard Victor in Paris. The desperate hands of prisoners have inflicted themselves into the asbestos as the effects of electrical current became more than they could bear.

Such happenings may be forgiven but can’t be forgotten, not with this document. The Parsian Roger Schall had been allowed by the Nazis to photograph life there during the war, but with the liberation, he took very different kinds of pictures-like this one-and his work was used in postwar prosecutions. Schall’s brother published a book of such pictures at war’s end, and it became a mandatory buy in Paris.

Incoming prisoners were assigned a camp serial number which was sewn to their prison uniforms. Only those prisoners selected for work were issued serial numbers; those prisoners sent directly to the gas chambers were not registered and received no tattoos.

Initially, the SS authorities marked prisoners who were in the infirmary or who were to be executed with their camp serial number across the chest with indelible ink. As prisoners were executed or died in other ways, their clothing bearing the camp serial number was removed. Given the mortality rate at the camp and practice of removing clothing, there was no way to identify the bodies after the clothing was removed. Hence, the SS authorities introduced the practice of tattooing in order to identify the bodies of registered prisoners who had died.

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