Identity Destruction or Survival in Small Things? Rethinking Prisoner Tags from the Mauthausen Concentration Camp

In concentration camps across Europe, replacing prisoners' names with numbers was key to Nazi strategies for annihilating the identities of their victims. Number tags issued in the Mauthausen concentration camp are remembered by survivors as materializations of their destroyed identities and bureaucratic means in the murderous camp economy. However, several preserved tags carry prisoner-made decorations which point towards personalization strategies, making these items highly desired objects in current memorial practices for constructing narratives of survival. By taking an object-biographical approach, this chapter traces the ontological shifts the tags have gone through and discusses the relationships of camp life, the post-camp reading of material culture, and memorial practices.