I've been reading recently on the way prisoners were visually classified in Nazi camps. There were: inverted triangles of different colors for different offenses (blue for foreign workers, green for convicts, purple for Jehovah's Witnesses…), bars of those same colors (added for “recividism”), and initials to signify nationalities (P = Poles, S = Spanish Republicans)
My question is: how did this branding work when someone belonged to several of these groups? If you were a gypsy and a convict, or communist and gay, was your branding based solely on the “crime” you had been originally imprisoned for? Was there some kind of hierarchy of faults? Were “recividism” bars added with new colors?
I know yellow triangles (Jews) was combined with all the rest, along with black triangles for “race defilers” but I don't seem to see any other combinations. I admit the original reason for this curiosity was a personal interest in how I'd have been classified myself, since I'm a bisexual male (pink triangle) and a leftist (red triangle).
An original chart in German: http://www.thepinktriangle.com/images/nazi_camp_marks.jpg An English translation: https://adignorantium.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/triangle-key.jpg
So, very generally, people were labelled for what they had been arrested for: If you were arrested for political reasons, you got a red triangle and so on. As you already pointed out this was true for everyone except Jews who got the extra yellow triangle in order to make clear that they were to be treated especially bad.
It is however important to mention that the famous chart you also linked, implied some kind of specific order that was never that well implemented. The chart is from the Dachau camp from the 1930s and not only does the English translation contain false info (blue triangles, the "emigrants", were not for forced labor but historically almost exclusively used for Germans who had fought on the republican side in the Spanish Civil War during their imprisonment in Mauthausen) but like the system of tattoos in Auschwitz at first suggest a strict system when historically, there really wasn't.
The problem is that for some of these symbols, no evidence has been found that they were really used. While we have either photographs, testimony or artifacts that show that these colors were used as well as the double triangle for Jews, for the race defilers symbols, the brown armband, the armed forces triangle and the repeater symbols there is an absence for evidence that they were ever used within the CC system on a broad scale. Similarly, there are reports that escape subjects, instead of getting the circle with the red dot, had instead a target painted on the back of their uniform in some camps.
The problem is that while maybe this chart was strictly adhered to in the 30s and maybe shortly after the war started, by the point when the Concentration Camp system expanded massively, first in 1938, then in 1940 and finally in 1942 swelling to over 500.000 inmates from what evidence we have, this system was not strictly adhered to beyond giving somebody the batch for which they were arrested and the extra badge for Jews.
As with all official regulations for the camp system, like the rules that guards were technically not allowed to hit prisoners (obviously that wasn't adhered to), we need to differentiate between the rules in place and practices of the reality of the camp system. In the reality of the system, it was mostly the basic triangles used with the additional one for Jews. All the rest like the repeaters and so on, are hardly documented and it is very likely that if they saw use at all, it was on a very small scale and maybe only in a limited number of camps.
I don't know why this got the orange LABOR banner. :/ If somebody can please tell me how to edit it, I gladly will. Sorry.
