The badges that were used in Nazi concentration camps during the Second World War stand as one of the most stark and chilling symbols of dehumanization and the systemic categorization of human beings for the purposes of discrimination, forced labor, and extermination. These badges, or triangles of various colors sewn onto prison uniforms, were part of a broader classification system that identified prisoners according to why the Nazis had imprisoned them. Jews were marked with two overlapping yellow triangles to form the Star of David, while political prisoners wore red triangles, criminals wore green, homosexuals pink, Jehovah's Witnesses purple, and so on. Each color-coded badge, often with added markings such as letters or numbers, was intended to identify and stigmatize, stripping the wearer of their individuality and reducing them to the category deemed by the Nazi regime.
The origins of this system can be traced to the early concentration camps of the 1930s and evolved over time to include more categories, reflecting the expanding reach of Nazi persecution. The badges facilitated the Nazis' control, making it easier to segregate, punish, and execute prisoners according to the regime's racial and social hierarchies. By reducing people to a symbol, the badges served to erase personal identities, enforcing a brutal order within the camps and contributing to the psychological degradation of the inmates. These symbols have since become a haunting reminder of the atrocities of the Holocaust and the perils of dehumanizing ideologies.
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9 мар 2024
