Members of Romani groups suffered persecution and victimization all over Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. Known as “Gypsies”—Zigeuner, zingari, tsiganes, cigany, Cikáni, ţigani…—to outsiders, the people who called themselves Roma, Sinti, and Manouches (among others) were declared to be of alien blood under Germany’s Nuremberg Laws and suffered under the same genocidal regime as Europe’s Jews. At the end of the war and in its aftermath, however, their experiences were quite different.
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“…to start dealing with the Gypsy problem on the basis of their racial character…”
Heinrich Himmler, 1938
In Nazi Germany, its occupied territories and its allied states between 1935 and 1945, Romani groups—who were already subject to a long history of discrimination—experienced forms of intensified harassment, internment, exploitation, and persecution, culminating in mass murder. Campaigns of cultural and physical genocide all over Europe led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands and the blighting of the lives of many more. Existing data confirm that of those living in Greater Germany in 1939, about 70 percent of German, 80 percent of Austrian, and as many as 90 percent of Czech Sinti and Roma perished. Of territories subject to German occupation and domination, Poland lost around 45 percent, Ukraine 75 percent, Estonia 90 percent, Latvia 60 percent, and the remaining Soviet Union 35 percent of their Romani populations as a direct result of the persecution.
New research, particularly in Eastern European archives, is continuing to identify new victims.
If we are still uncertain about the overall numbers of victims, that is partly because of the wide variety of forms that the persecution took. In Germany itself (including Austria from September 1938), the first internment camps for “Gypsies” were set up by local governments as early as 1935. Branded a priori as criminal, hundreds of men were sent to concentration camps like Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, and Dachau during campaigns against the “work-shy” and “antisocial” in 1937 and 1938.
A significant number of them remained in the camp system for the next seven or eight years, dragged from one camp to another; many died there. In late 1938, Himmler ordered that the “Gypsy problem” be dealt with “on the basis of their racial character.” Sinti and Roma were excluded from schools; traditional occupations—peddling, horse trading, fortune telling—were criminalized, and they were subject to forced labor.
At the outbreak of the war they were prohibited from leaving their places of residence, and in separate actions in 1940 and 1941 about 5,000 were deported to labor camps and ghettos in Poland. At the end of 1942, Himmler ordered that all “Gypsies” be sent to Auschwitz. In the Czech lands incorporated into the Reich in 1939, local gendarmes managed two concentration camps for Roma (Lety and Hodonin), from which the inmates were deported to Auschwitz in 1943-44. Similarly, “Gypsies” in Belgium and the Netherlands fell victim to deportation to Auschwitz under the German occupation.
For Sinti and Roma, Auschwitz involved particular kinds of trauma. On Himmler’s orders, none were killed on arrival and they were held as families in a special section of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Before the camp was closed at the beginning of August 1944, with the gassing of some 4,000 remaining prisoners, most had already died of disease, hunger or exhaustion, or been murdered by guards. Others were selected for slave labor and returned to Germany, often passing through three or four concentration camps and enduring death marches before the liberation. For many, Bergen Belsen was their last stop.
Having to watch the misery and death of close family members, including small children (about 200 of whom were born in the camp) was remembered by survivors of Auschwitz as particularly traumatic, as was the total reversal of the gender and generational norms and the brutal denial of the conditions for hygiene, mutual respect, and honor that defined traditional Romani family life.
As a relatively young population, the inmates of the so-called “Gypsy Family Camp” were also preferred subjects for the “medical” experiments of Josef Mengele, whose infirmary was immediately adjacent to their camp. But in other concentration camps, too, “Gypsy” men and women were selected for experiments with new drugs and procedures. These included new (and painful and dangerous) methods of sterilization, in pursuit of a more swift and efficient way to carry out a programme of sterilizing “racial undesirables” that was already being deployed against “Gypsies” from the mid-1930s.
Auschwitz has become symbolic of the Romani Holocaust experience (as it is of the Shoah), and the victims are now commemorated internationally on August 2, the date of the “liquidation” of the “Gypsy Family Camp.” But only a fraction of the Romani genocide victims died in Auschwitz. On the Eastern Front and in occupied Poland and the Soviet Union, “Gypsies” were hunted down and massacred by the Einsatzgruppen, death squads that accompanied the German armies, or fell victim to mass killings alongside Jews; several hundred Roma from around Kiev died at the notorious massacre site of Babi Yar, for example.
Fascist regimes that were allies or clients of Nazi Germany implemented their own measures. In the puppet Slovak Republic, “Gypsies” were subject to escalating persecution that left them isolated and impoverished, although no form of internment or deportation was introduced; some fell victim to German reprisals against suspected partisans late in the war. Croatia is notorious for the Jasenovac concentration camp in which some 20,000 Roma were detained and murdered alongside Serbian and Jewish prisoners.