More historic colourized photos

RadishRose said:
Holly, I just remembered something about a neighbor I had long ago. I'd never met her, but another neighbor told me she had been rescued from a concentration camp in her youth and that she had a tattoo of numbers on her forearm, so it is as you said.
Click to expand...

I've seen so many documentaries on Tv of the survivors of concentration camps and they're tattoos were always on the fore-arm.. so I think that must have been the case for every German prisoner of war...

I'm loving this investigation by Tommy.. it makes sense as you say RR..that the SSA would stand for what you say..

I wonder if people routinely did this in the USA during the depression...
 
ssn.jpg
 

Name: Thomas U Cave
Name (Original): CAVE THOMAS U
Event Type: Military Service
Event Date: 29 Oct 1942
Term of Enlistment: Enlistment for the duration of the War or other emergency, plus six months, subject to the discretion of the President or otherwise according to law
Event Place: Portland, Oregon, United States
Race: White
Citizenship Status: citizen
Birth Year: 1912
Birthplace: OREGON
Education Level: Grammar school
Marital Status: Divorced, with dependents
Military Rank: Private
Army Branch: Branch Immaterial - Warrant Officers, USA
Army Component: Selectees (Enlisted Men)
Source Reference: Civil Life
Serial Number: 39320789
Affiliate ARC Identifier: 1263923
Box Film Number: 14216.187
---------------------------------------------
 
OH my lord..we're turning into little detectives..:D wouldn't it be great if some of his descendent saw this, and updated the history of their father or grandfather...
 
 
He was born on July 2, 1912 and died June 4, 1980. He was a Sergeant in WWII. His wife's name was Ann Kathryn Cave. She was born in January 23, 1916 and died on February 18, 2000.They are both buried at Willamette National Cemetery in Portland, OR.
Edit - Okay so some new information: He enlisted in the Army in 1942 and his status at that time was "Divorced." He later remarried Ann Kathryn, so the woman in that photo isn't Ann Kathryn. It's actually his first wife, Vivian, whom he was still married to in 1940. The woman in this photo is Vivian.
Edit 2 - So, per census records he was living in Shasta, OR in 1940 and was a truck driver with an 8th grade education. Vivian was a fruit picker on a farm. Thomas and Ann (his second wife) had a daughter Juanita on September 13, 1949. Why that's interesting is because census records have a Tillman T Cave and his sister Juanita with parents Tillman B and Sarah N Cave in a farm in Buckham, OR.
When searching for Tillman Cave there's a 1940 census record for Benjamin T and Sadie N Cave in Buckham, OR in 1918 with a WW1 draft registration for Tilman B. Then a 1930 census record for them in Los Angeles, CA, then a 1940 census record for them in Portland.
How these separate names come together is: there's a 1934 marriage record of Tillman T.U. Cave to a Vivian Couture, witnessed by Benjamin Cave and Sadie Cave in Multnomah County, OR. So Benjamin and Sadie (Sarah) were his parents and he named his daughter with his second wife after his sister, Juanita.
 
It seems that it was actively encouraged to have your SS number tattooed on back in those days..according to this article...

[This photo by Lange may shed some light. According to Tiffany West, a historical researcher, the US government stressed the "outright necessity" of carriers to know their numbers. Two tattoo artists, Red Gibbons and Sailor Walter, told a Portland newspaper in 1937 that they were working overtime in their Burnside Street shop tattooing SSNs "on the arms and legs of folks who didn't want to be caught without their numbers."](https://www.reddit.com/r/ColorizedH...t_1939_unemployed_lumber_worker_goes/dtosr9p/)
​
 
My question was "WHY did they tattoo SS numbers on people's arms?" so I googled that and got this:

The letters are SSA not SSN. They stand for Social Security Administration. SSN did not become a common acronym until after World War II. The first SSNs were issued in 1935, not long before this picture [the one Holly posted of Thomas Cave]. The New Deal agencies were referred to back then as “the alphabet agencies” and then “alphabet soup.” For example, Lange, a photographer working for the RA, had previously worked for FERA (forerunner of today’s FEMA) and later the FSA, took the picture under the auspices of the USDA. Before the New Deal, government was much smaller, and, saving the USDA, these “alphabetics” (as they were also called) did not exist.

Social security numbers were tattooed on Americans under Roosevelt’s socialism before tattoos were used in Germany under the National Socialist German Workers Party.http://rexcurry.net/tattoos.html

This photograph [Thomas Cave]shows a tattooed social security number (SS number) on an American around 1939. The tattoo reads “SSA 535-07-5248.” http://rexcurry.net/social-security-number-tattoo3.jpg

The tattooed American was probably [hmmm, "probably" is not factual] part of a quasi-military socialist camp program in the USA, such as the Civilian Conservation Corps or a subsistence farming community created by the federal police state. For more on the Civilian Conservation Corps see http://rexcurry.net/bookchapter5a1.html

For more information about subsistence farming programs see http://rexcurry.net/socialism-roosevelt.html

In 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt imposed the Civilian Conservation Corps and created camps consistent with the dogma of military socialism touted by Edward Bellamy and Francis Bellamy (author of the “Pledge of Allegiance,” the origin of the stiff-arm salute adopted later under German National Socialism). Hitler at first remarked admiringly about Roosevelt’s “dynamic” leadership. http://rexcurry.net/bookchapter5a1.html

The American numbering program was known as the “social security” program, or SS program. The German National Socialist tattoo program was operated by the SS division. The German SS division used stylized alphabetical symbolism for its logo, similar to the crossed S-letters in the swastika (Hakenkreuz or hooked cross) for “socialism” under the National Socialist German Workers Party. See the work of the symbologist Dr. Rex Curry (author of “Swastika Secrets”).
http://rexcurry.net/book1a1contents-swastika.html

During the Holocaust, concentration camp prisoners received tattoos only at one location, the Auschwitz concentration camp complex, which consisted of Auschwitz I (Main Camp), Auschwitz II (Auschwitz-Birkenau), and Auschwitz III (Monowitz and the subcamps).
It was part of the Wholecaust (of which the Holocaust was a part): ~20 million slaughtered under the National Socialist German Workers Party; ~60 million under the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics; ~50 million under the Peoples Republic of China. http://rexcurry.net/tattoos.html

According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the SS authorities under German National Socialism 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, according to http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10007056Originally, a special metal stamp, holding interchangeable numbers made up of needles approximately one centimeter long was used. The entire serial number was punched in one blow onto the prisoner’s left upper chest. Ink was then rubbed into the bleeding wound.
When the metal stamp method proved impractical, a single-needle device was introduced, which pierced the outlines of the serial-number digits onto the skin. The site of the tattoo was changed to the outer side of the left forearm. However, prisoners from several transports in 1943 had their numbers tattooed on the inner side of their left upper forearms. Tattooing was generally performed during registration when each prisoner was assigned a camp serial number. Since prisoners sent directly to the gas chambers were never issued numbers, they were never tattooed.
Tattooing was introduced at Auschwitz in the autumn of 1941. Thousands of prisoners of war (POWs) arrived at the camp from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (two years earlier the Soviet socialists had been allies with German socialists at the beginning of WWII and the invasion of Poland in a pact to divide up Europr). Thousands of Soviet socialist prisoners rapidly died at the camp. The SS authorities began to tattoo the prisoners for identification purposes. At Auschwitz II (Birkenau), the SS staff introduced the practice of tattooing in March 1942 to keep up with the identification of large numbers of prisoners who arrived, sickened, and died quickly. By that time, the majority of registered prisoners in the Auschwitz complex were Jews. In the spring of 1943, the SS authorities throughout the entire Auschwitz complex adopted the practice of tattooing almost all previously registered and newly arrived prisoners, including female prisoners. Exceptions to this practice were prisoners of German nationality and “reeducation prisoners,” who were held in a separate compound. “Reeducation prisoners,” or “labor-education prisoners,” were non-Jewish persons of virtually all European nationalities (but at Auschwitz primarily Germans, Czechs, Poles, and Soviet civilians) who had run afoul of the harsh labor discipline imposed on civilian laborers in areas under German control.


 
Holy cats! I have to read you lady's posts again! And then again.

One thing that jumps out at me is it's nutty to draw any correlation of SS (Social Security number) and German SS troops. But yes, I have to read it all again.

What a fascinating journey.
 
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