Germany has a long history of body decoration. In 1988, a carved figure was found in a cave at Hohlenstein-Stadel, in Germany and was carbon-dated to 32,000 years old. The body had thin lines running across the upper arm.
Frederich Barbarossa - Red Beard, Roman King and emperor of Germany from 1152 to 1190, had cross designs on the back of his hands. Dominican priest and German mystic Heinrich Suso (1295-1366) tattooed the name of Christ over his heart
Kaiser Wilhelm, who was emperor in 1908, was rumored to have an eagle tattooed on his chest. German ports on the North and Baltic Seas added a naval component to German tattoo history.
During the Holocaust, concentration camp prisoners received tattoos at the Auschwitz concentration camp complex. The camp authorities assigned more than 400,000 prisoner serial numbers (not counting approximately 3,000 numbers given to police prisoners interned at Auschwitz due to overcrowding in jails who were not included in the daily count of prisoners).
Waffen SS blood group tatoo:
When the war ended, the Allies were keen to catch all W-SS members on account of the high volume of war crimes commited by some units. The blood group tattoo helped greatly in identifying former members, leading to the prosecution of guilty men, and in some cases the execution of W-SS men, regardless of what they had or had not done during the war. Many W-SS men tried to remove the tattoo, some by burning it off with a lit cigarette, but the scar left behind was almost as incriminating, leading some to make a similar scar on the opposite side of the their arm, and claiming the scars were from a bullet which had passed through their arm. In these cases, the Allies would X-ray the arm to see if any bone damage had occurred, as would have if a bullet had passed through the arm at those points.