I just saw this over 90 Miles:
Are we still doing this stuff in school? I remember back in the prehistorical ages when I was a kid in elementary school and we go typed. It was a nice thing watching the little kit come up with the answer and we were issued a card by the Red Cross rep. For the rest of the school year, we were supposed to carry our card, tell on demand our blood type and show the card to confirm. The result was that we had the type ingrained to the point it has been an automatic response ever since.
The optional thing was learning who you can donate to and who could donate to you. Mine being O Positive was simple: I can give to everybody except the Negatives and I can get only from O Pos and O Neg.
One of the things I thought when I got to my majority was to get a tattoo with my blood type in my arm, only to find out that the fuckers of the Wafffen-SS had done it and that kinda soured the idea. That and the fact that I do not like being stung by a needle several hundred times a minute put the whole idea in the waste basket.
The blood type tattoo idea was pretty common with previously deployed soldiers when i first got in the army around 2007-2008 expecially amongst guys who were in the early years of Iraq and Afganiatan. I saw fewer of them as the combat levels died down, never knew about the SS connection though.
http://www.axishistory.com/various/124-germany-waffen-ss/germany-waffen-ss-other/1522-blood-group-tattoo
Immediately after the war, Nazi hunters would use the scars or removal as proof of they having the right man as it was the case with Adolf Eichmann.
In the movie The Oddessa Files, a journalist trying to infiltrate an organization of former SS personnel, gets a burn scar to make it look like he had the tattoo removed.
I thought everyone knew that SS members had their blood types tattooed on their armpits. I guess I gave the educational system too much credit. (It’s an easy thing to do.)
(Not disparaging those who didn’t know that; you can’t know something if nobody tells you.)
The SS also wore underpants and shoes, drank beer, ate bread and sausage, and had German Shepherds.
Presumably nobody’s walking around naked, is a teetotaler, or skips whole classes of foods or pets simply because once upon a time, actual Nazis did it.
I don’t have tattoos at all, but if I did, this is the only one I can think of worth the trouble, and whether someone despicable did it 80 years ago wouldn’t enter into the decision tree whatsoever. YMMV.
Whether or not you do, know your blood type.
Currently, hospitals will always type and screen you before a transfusion, and won’t concern themselves with your body art.
But you may not helpfully be conscious when it counts, and that rule may not apply in all times and places for your entire time on earth.
Back in my motorcycle road racing days, it was pretty common to magic marker your name and blood type on your chest and inside one thigh. Never heard of that saving anyone’s life, but at the time it seemed a reasonable precaution. Haven’t heard of it being done elsewhere, or since, but I travel in different circles now.
Just don’t do it in the same place or in freakin’ Gothic and you should be okay. How about upper left chest, since the EMT’s are gonna pull your clothes off of there anyway in case they have to shock you?
Besides, let’s face it: the odds these days of an observer having enough of a sense of history to see a blood type tattoo and immediately go, “Dude must be SS!” are pretty slim.