ROMANIES AND THE HOLOCAUST:
A REEVALUATION AND AN
OVERVIEW
The Romani Archives and
Documentation Center
The University of Texas at
Austin
�������������� �It was the wish
of the all-powerful Reichsfhhrer
Adolf Hitler to have the Gypsies disappear from the face of the earth�
� (SS Officer
Percy Broad, Auschwitz Political Division)1
�The motives invoked to justify the death of
the Gypsies were the same as those ordering the murder of the Jews, and the
methods employed for the one were identical with those employed for the other�
(Miriam Novitch, Ghetto Fighters�
House,�������� Israel)2�������������
�
�The
genocide of the Sinti and Roma was carried out from the same motive of racial
mania, with the same premeditation, with the same wish for the systematic and
total extermination as the genocide of the Jews.� Complete families from the very young to the very old were
systematically murdered within the entire sphere of influence of the National
Socialists�
(Roman Herzog, President of the Federal Republic of Germany, 16 March 1997)
Miriam Novitch (above) refers to the motives put forth to justify the
murder of the Romanies, or �Gypsies,� in the Holocaust, but in her small but
groundbreaking book she is only partly right: both Jews and Romanies did indeed
share the common status�along with the handicapped�of being targeted for
elimination because of the threat they were perceived to pose to the pristine
gene-pool of the German Herrenvolk or �Master Race;� but while the Jews
were considered a threat on a number of other grounds as well, political,
philosophical and economic, the Romanies were only ever a �racial� threat.��
Earlier writings on the
Holocaust, however, either did not recognise this at all, or else failed to
understand that the �criminality� associated with our people was attributed by
the Nazis to a genetically transmitted and incurable disease, and was therefore
ideologically racial; instead, writers focused only on the �antisocial�
label resulting from it and failed to acknowledge the genetic connection made
by the Nazi race scientists themselves.�
In 1950 the W�rttemburg Ministry of the Interior issued a statement to
the judges hearing war crimes restitution claims that they should keep in mind
that �the Gypsies were persecuted under the National Socialist regime not
for any racial reason, but because of their criminal and antisocial record,�
and twenty-one years later the Bonn Convention took advantage of this as
justification for not paying reparations to Romanies, claiming that the reasons
for their victimization during the Nazi period were for reasons� of�
security� only. Not one person
spoke out to challenge that position, the consequences of which have hurt the
survivors and their descendants beyond measure, though at that time the French
genealogist Montandon did observe, however, that �everyone despises Gypsies, so
why exercise restraint?� Who will avenge
them? Who will complain? Who will bear witness?�3 .
The past two or three
decades have seen a tremendous increase in Holocaust-focused activities, in the
establishment of museums and memorials, and in the creation of educational
programs for the schools.� Hand in hand
with this has emerged an increasingly strident debate over how the Holocaust is
to be defined, and who does or does not qualify for inclusion in it.� The Anti-Defamation League�s website defines
Holocaust as �the systematic persecution and annihilation of more than
six million Jews as a central act of state by Nazi Germany and its
collaborators between 1933 and 1945.� The program for the 33rd
Annual Scholars� Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches defines it as
�the Nazi attempt to annihilate European Jewry,� and makes no mention in its
pages of Romanies.� In February 1987,
the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum organized a conference entitled Other
Victims which included a panel on Romanies, but it included no Romanies
either in its organization or among its presenters; at this time (Summer 2003)
there is no Romani representation on the Holocaust Council at all.� An international conference entitled The
Roma, a Minority in Europe: Historical, Social and Cultural Perspectives
held at Tel Aviv University in December, 2002 similarly had no Romanies among
its organizers or speakers.� Yet it
would be unthinkable to have a conference on the fate of Jews in the Holocaust
that had no Jewish involvement.� We
cannot be treated any differently.
Guenther Lewy4
has attempted to argue that not only were our people not a part of the
Holocaust, but that our fate at the hands of the Nazis did not even qualify as
an attempted genocidal action; a similar position has been taken more recently
by Margalit5.� Already during
the question and answer session at a talk I gave in 20016, a member
of the audience called out�following my statement that the Romanies were only
ever a racial threat��and nothing more!��
It is this competitive�and I must say meanly motivated and
defensive�attitude which I want to question and challenge.� It is unscholarly and unprofessional in the
context of the Holocaust especially, and it serves no purpose to diminish the
fate of the Romanies; instead it must only reflect badly upon those who attempt
to do so.� If the Holocaust is to teach
us anything, it is concern for the treatment of human beings at the hands of
other human beings, and the wicked senselessness of hating others for being
different.� The present-day relevance of
this is clear from a recent editorial in The Economist which stated that
the Romanies in Europe were �at the bottom of every socio-economic indicator:
the poorest, the most unemployed, the least educated, the shortest-lived, the
most welfare dependent, the most imprisoned and the most segregated�7.� More energy is expended on making their case
by those seeking to distance Romanies from the Holocaust than on examining the
relevance of the Holocaust to the Romanies� present-day condition.
In an article published in
1996 I listed several of the arguments that have been made for diminishing the Porrajmos,
or Romani Holocaust8, addressing each one in turn.� In practically every case, statements were
made which were simply wrong�the result of assuming a situation to have existed
or not existed without bothering to check the historical record.� Several writers have written that there was
no Final Solution of the Gypsy Question, for example Breitman (1991:20) who
wrote �whatever its weaknesses, �Final Solution� at least applies to a single,
specific group defined by descent.� The
Nazis are not known to have spoken of the Final Solution of the Polish problem
or of the gypsy problem.�� Nevertheless
the earliest Nazi document referring to �the introduction of the total solution
to the Gypsy problem on either a national or an international level� was
drafted under the direction of State Secretary Hans Pfundtner of the Reichs
Ministry of the Interior in March, 1936, and the first specific reference to
�the final solution of the Gypsy question� was made by Adolf W�rth of the
Racial Hygiene Research Unit in September, 1937.� The first official Party statement to refer to the endg�ltige
L�sung der Zigeunerfrage was issued in March, 19389, signed by
Himmler.
Without getting into what
has been cynically called the �Suffering Olympics,� since my more subjective
feelings on the matter have already appeared elsewhere10, I will
instead try to provide an overview of the details and sequence of Nazi action
against Romanies for those for whom this information is new.�� I have paid a price for my outspokenness
and have lost friends and support from some quarters, while certainly gaining
it anew in others.� I put it to those
who have turned away from me to look deep into their own hearts and ask
themselves why�really why�they have done so, when nothing I have written
has been fabricated or ever written with malicious intent.�
While it is true that all of
the �minimizing� rhetoric originates with some Jewish authors, I must hasten to
add that most of the arguments in support of the Romani case originate
with Jewish scholars too; indeed, almost the entire body of research on the Romani
Holocaust is the result of Jewish scholarship.�
Despite the naysayers, the Jews are practically the only friends we
have, and we recognize that.
The reasons for antigypsyism
are complex, and are the result of several different factors coming together over
time.� I have discussed these in more
detail in another essay11, but briefly these are (a) that because
the first Romanies to arrive in Europe did so at the same time as, and because
of, the Ottoman Turkish takeover of the Christian Byzantine Empire they were
therefore perceived to be equally a threat; (b) the fact that Romanies were a
non-white, non-Christian, alien population (c) the fact that Romanies have
never had claim to a geographical territory or have had an economy, militia or
government, and (d) the fact that culture itself maintains a strict social
boundary between Romanies and the non-Romani world.� These resulted in excessively barbaric methods of control from
the very time of arrival in Europe at the end of the 13th century,
which included murder and torture, transportation and enslavement. The greatest
tragedy to befall the European Romani population, however, even greater than
the five and a half centuries of slavery in Romania, was the attempt to
eradicate it as part of the Nazis� plan to have a �Gypsy-free� land.� Although it wasn�t the first governmental
resolution to exterminate Romanies (German Emperor Karl VI had previously
issued such an order in 1721), it was by far the most devastating, ultimately
destroying over half of the Romani population in Nazi-occupied Europe.� Romanies were the only other population
besides the Jews who were targeted for extermination on racial/ethnic grounds
following the directives of a Final Solution.
����������� �When the Nazis
came to power in 1933, German laws against Romanies had already been in effect
for hundreds of years.� The persecution
of the Romani people began almost as soon as they first arrived in
German-speaking lands because as outsiders, they were, without knowing it,
breaking the Hanseatic laws which made it a punishable offence not to have a
permanent home or job, and not to be on the taxpayers� register.� They were also accused of being spies for
the Muslims, whom few Germans had ever met, but about whom they had heard many
frightening stories; it was not illegal to murder a Romani and there were
sometimes �Gypsy hunts� in which Romanies were tracked down and killed like
wild animals.� Forests were set on fire,
to drive out any Romanies who might have been hiding there.
����������� By the nineteenth century, scholars in Germany and
elsewhere in Europe were writing about Romanies and Jews as being inferior
beings and �the excrement of humanity�12; even Darwin, writing in
1871, singled out our two populations as not being �culturally advanced� like
other �territorially settled� peoples13.� This crystallized into specifically racist attitudes in the
writing of Dohm, Hundt-Radowsky, Knox, Tetzner, Gobineau, Ploetz, Schallmeyer
and others14.� By the 1880s,
Chancellor von Bismarck reinforced some of the discriminatory laws, stating
that Romanies were to be dealt with �especially severely� if apprehended.�
����������� In or around 1890, a conference on �The Gypsy Scum� (Das
Zigeunergeschmei8) was held in Swabia, at which the military was
given full authority to keep Romanies on the move.� In 1899 the Englishman Houston Chamberlain, who was the composer
Richard Wagner�s son-in-law, wrote a book called The Foundations of the
Nineteenth Century, in which he argued for the building of a �newly shaped
. . . and . . . especially deserving Aryan race�15.� It was used to justify the promotion of
ideas about German racial superiority and for any oppressive action taken
against members of �inferior� populations.��
In that same year, the �Gypsy Information Agency� was set up in Munich
under the direction of Alfred Dillmann, which began cataloguing data on all
Romanies throughout the German lands.�
The results of this were published in 1905 in Dillmann�s Zigeuner-Buch16, which laid
the foundations for what was to happen to our people in the Holocaust
thirty-five years later.
����������� The Zigeuner-Buch
is nearly 350 pages long, and consists of three parts: first, an introduction
stating that Romanies were a �plague� and a �menace� against which the German
population had to defend itself using �ruthless punishments�, and which warned
of the dangers of mixing the Romani and German gene pools.� The second part was a register of all known
Romanies, giving genealogical details and criminal record if any, and the third
part was a collection of photographs of those same people. Dillmann�s ideas
about �race mixing� later became a central part of the Nuremberg Law in Nazi
Germany.�
����������� In� 1920, a psychiatrist, Karl Binding and a
magistrate, Alfred Hoche, published a jointly-authored book called The Eradication
of Lives Undeserving of Life17,
using a phrase first coined by Richard Liebich with specific reference to
Romanies nearly sixty years earlier18, and used shortly after him,
again specifically referring to Romanies, by Rudolf Kulemann19.� Among the three groups that they said were
�unworthy of life� were the �incurably mentally ill�, and it was to this group
that Romanies were considered to belong. Euthanasia, and particularly
non-propagation through sterilization, were topics receiving a good deal of
attention at that time in the United States; Nazi programs were to an extent
based upon American research20. A law incorporating the phrase lives
undeserving of life was put into effect just four months after Hitler
became Chancellor of the Third Reich.
����������� Perceived Romani �criminality� was seen as a transmitted
genetic disease, though no account was taken of the centuries of exclusion of
the Romanies from German society, which made subsistence theft a necessity for
survival.� The �crimes� listed in the Zigeunerbuch
are almost exclusively trespassing and the theft of food.
����������� During the 1920s, the legal oppression of Romanies in Germany intensified considerably, despite the official statutes of the Weimar Republic that said that all its citizens were equal. In 1920 they were forbidden to enter parks and public baths; in 1925 a conference on� �The Gypsy Question� was held which resulted in the
creation of laws requiring unemployed Romanies to be sent to work camps �for reasons of public security�, and for all Romanies to be registered with the police.� After 1927 everyone, even Romani children, had to carry identification cards bearing their fingerprints and photographs.� In 1929, The Central Office for the Fight Against the Gypsies in Germany was established in Munich, and in 1933, just ten days before the Nazis came to power, government officials in Burgenland, Austria, called for the withdrawal of all civil rights from the Romani people.
����������� In September 1935, Romanies became subject to the
restrictions of the Nuremberg Law for the Protection of German Blood and
Honour, which forbade intermarriage between Germans and �non-Aryans�,
specifically Jews, Romanies and people of African descent.� In 1937, the National Citizenship Law
relegated Romanies and Jews to the status of second-class citizens, depriving
them of their civil rights.� Also in
1937, Heinrich Himmler issued a decree entitled �The Struggle Against the Gypsy
Plague� which reiterated that Romanies of mixed blood were the most likely to
engage in criminal activity, and which required that all information on
Romanies be sent from the regional police departments to the Reich Central
Office.� In their book published in
1943, the Danish sociologists Erik Bartels and Gudrun Brun echoed this
position, evidently unaware that the sterilization of Romanies had already been
in effect for a decade:
The pure Gypsies present no
great problem, if only we realise that their mentality does not allow of their
admittance to the well-ordered general society . . . the mixed Gypsies cause
considerably greater difficulties (. . . nothing good has) come from a crossing
between a Gipsy and a white person . . . Germany is at present contemplating
the introduction of provisions of sterilization in the case of such families21
.
����������� �Calling a
population vermin, or a disease, rather than recognising them as being part of
the human family is a technique used to dehumanize it and to distance it from
society.� Such terms were constantly
used to refer to Jews and Romanies in the Third Reich in an effort to
desensitize the general population to the increasingly harsh treatment being
meted out against them; after all, vermin and diseases need to be
eradicated.� Disturbingly, this language
is still with us�in 1992 the Badische
Zeitung carried the headline �A pure disease, these Gypsies!�22
���������� Between June 13-18 1938 �Gypsy Clean-Up Week�(Zigeunerauf-r�umungswoche, also called Aktion Arbeitschau Reich
and Bettlerwoche in the documentation) took place
throughout Germany which, like Kristallnacht for the Jewish people that same
year, marked the beginning of the end; for both populations it sent a clear
message to the general public: there would be no penalty for their mistreating
Jews and Romanies, since the very institution meant to safeguard German
society�the police�was itself openly doing so.�
����������� Also in 1938, the first party-issued reference to �The
Final Solution of the Gypsy Question� (die endg�ltige L�sung der
Zigeunerfrage) appeared in print in a document dated March 24, and was
repeated in an order issued by Himmler on December 8 that year and announced
publicly in the NS Rechtsspiegel the following February 21st.� Thus in the Auschwitz Memorial Book we
find �The final resolution, as formulated by Himmler in his �Decree for Basic
Regulations to Resolve the Gypsy Question as Required by the Nature of Race� of
December 8th, 1938, meant that preparations were to begin for the complete
extermination of the Sinti and Roma�23.� Also in 1938, Himmler issued his criteria
for biological and racial evaluation which determined that each Romani�s family
background was to be investigated going back for three generations; the Nazis�
racial motive for exterminating Romanies is clear from the fact that they even
targeted Romani-like people, taking no chances lest the German
population be contaminated with Romani blood. Kenrick writes:
In general, a person with
one Jewish grandparent was not affected in the Nazi anti-Jewish legislation,
whereas one-eighth �gypsy blood� was considered strong enough to outweigh
seven-eighths of German blood�so dangerous were the Gypsies considered24.
����������� These was twice as strict as the criteria determining who
was Jewish; had the same also applied to Romanies, nearly 20,000 would have
escaped death.� On 16 December 1941 Himmler
issued the order to have Romanies throughout western Europe deported to
Auschwitz-Birkenau for extermination.
����������� In 1939 Johannes Behrendt of the Office of Racial Hygiene
issued a brief stating that �[a]ll Gypsies should be treated as hereditarily
sick; the only solution is elimination.�
The aim should therefore be the elimination without hesitation of this
defective element in the population�25.� In January 1940 the first mass genocidal action of the Holocaust
took place when 250 Romani children from Brno were murdered in Buchenwald,
where they were used as guinea-pigs to test the efficacy of the Zyklon-B
cyanide gas crystals that were later used in the gas chambers26.� In June 1941 Hitler ordered the
extermination of all Jews, Romanies and communist political functionaries in
the entire Soviet Union.� Reinhard
Heydrich, who was Head of the Reich Main Security Office and the leading
organizational architect of the Nazi Final Solution, ordered the
Einsaztkommandos to kill all Jews, Romanies and mental patients, although not
all of the documentation regarding its complete details, relating to both Jews
and Romanies, has so far been found.�
M�ller-Hill writes:
Heydrich, who had been
entrusted with the �final solution of the Jewish question� on 31st
July 1941, shortly after the German invasion of the USSR, also included the
Gypsies in his �final solution�. . . The senior SS officer and Chief of Police
for the East, Dr. Landgraf, in Riga, informed Rosenberg�s Reich Commissioner
for the East, Lohse, of the inclusion of the Gypsies in the �final
solution�.� Thereupon, Lohse gave the
order, on 24th December 1941, that the Gypsies should be given the
same treatment as the Jews27.
Burleigh & Wippermann
write further that:
A conference on racial
policy organised by Heydrich took place in Berlin on 21st September
1939, which may have decided upon a �Final Solution� of the �Gypsy
Question�.� According to the scant
minutes which have survived, four issues were decided: the concentration of
Jews in towns; their relocation to Poland; the removal of 30,000 Gypsies to
Poland, and the systematic deportation of Jews to German incorporated
territories using goods trains.� An
express letter sent by the Reich Main Security Office on 17th
October 1939 to its local agents mentioned that the �Gypsy Question will
shortly be regulated throughout the territory of the Reich�. . . . At about
this time, Adolf Eichmann made the recommendation that the �Gypsy Question� be
solved simultaneously with the �Jewish Question� . . . Himmler signed the order
dispatching Germany�s Sinti and Roma to Auschwitz on 16th December
1942.� The �Final Solution� of the
�Gypsy Question� had begun28.
Himmler�s order stated that
�all Gypsies are to be deported to the Zigeunerlager at Auschwitz concentration
camp, with no regard to their degree of racial impurity�.� The Memorial Book for the Romanies
who died at Auschwitz-Birkenau also says:
The Himmler decree of
December 16th 1942 (Auschwitz-Erla�), according to which the Gypsies
should be deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, had the same meaning for the Gypsies
that the conference at Wannsee on January 20th 1942, had for the
Jews.� This decree, and the bulletin
that followed on January 29th 1943, can thus be regarded as a
logical consequence of the decision taken at Wannsee.� After it had been decided that the fate of the Jews was to end in
mass extermination, it was natural for the other group of racially persecuted
people, the Gypsies, to become victims of the same policy, which finally even
included soldiers in the Wehrmacht29.
In a paper delivered in
Washington in 1987, at a conference on the fate of the non-Jewish victims of
the Holocaust sponsored by the U S Holocaust Memorial Council, Dr Erika Thurner
of the Institut f�r Neuere Geschichte und Zeitgeschichte at the University of
Linz stated that:
Heinrich Himmler�s infamous
Auschwitz decree of December 16th, 1942, can be seen as the final
stage of the final solution of the Gypsy Question.� The decree served as the basis for complete extermination.� According to the implementation instructions
of 1943, all Gypsies, irrespective of their racial mix, were to be assigned to
concentration camps.� The concentration
camp for Gypsy families at Auschwitz-Birkenau was foreseen as their final
destination . . . opposed to the fact that the decision to seek a final
solution for the Gypsy Question came at a later date than that of the Jewish
Question, the first steps taken to exterminate the Gypsies were initiated prior
to this policy decision.
This order appears to have been the result of a
direct decision from Hitler himself30.� Breitman reproduced the statement issued by Security Police
Commander Bruno Streckenbach following a policy meeting with Hitler and
Heydrich held in Pretsch in June, 1941, viz. that �[t]he F�hrer has ordered
the liquidation of all Jews, Gypsies and communist political functionaries in
the entire area of the Soviet Union�31.� SS Officer Percy Broad, who worked in the political division at
Auschwitz and who participated directly in the murders of several thousand
prisoners there, wrote in his memoirs twenty-five years later that �. . . it
was the will of the all-powerful Reichsf�hrer Adolf Hitler to have the Gypsies
disappear from the face of the earth�32 . At a party meeting on 14
September 1942 with Joseph Goebbels, Reichsminister of Justice Otto Thierack
announced that �with respect to the extermination of antisocial forms of life,
Dr Goebbels is of the opinion that Jews and Gypsies should simply be
exterminated�.�� Former SS General Otto
Ohlendorf said at the postwar military tribunal at Nuremberg that in the
killing campaigns, �there was no difference between Gypsies and Jews.�
On 4 August 1944, some 2,900
Romanies were gassed and cremated in a single action at Auschwitz-Birkenau,
during what is remembered as Zigeunernacht33.
�������������� Determining the percentage or number of Romanies who
died in the Holocaust has not been easy.�
Bernard Streck noted that �any attempts to express Romani casualties in
terms of numbers . . . cannot be verified by means of lists or card-indexes or
camp files; most of the Gypsies died in eastern or southern Europe, shot by
execution troops or fascist gang members�34. Much of the Nazi
documentation still remains to be analyzed and, as Streck intimates, many
murders were not recorded since they took place in the fields and forests where
Romanies were arrested.� There are no
accurate figures either for the pre-war Romani population in Europe, though the
Nazi Party�s official census of 1939 estimated it to be about two million,
certainly an under-representation.�
Regarding numbers, K�nig says:
The count of half a million
Sinti and Roma murdered between 1939 and 1945 is too low to be tenable; for
example in the Soviet Union many of the Romani dead were listed under
non-specific labels such as Liquidierungs�brigen [remainder to be
liquidated], �hangers-on� and �partisans�. . .The final number of the dead
Sinti and Roma may never be determined.�
We do not know precisely how many were brought into the concentration
camps; not every concentration camp produced statistical material; moreover,
Sinti and Roma are often listed under the heading of remainder to be
liquidated, and do not appear in the statistics for Gypsies35.
In the eastern territories,
in Russia especially, Romani deaths were sometimes counted into the records
under the heading of Jewish deaths.� The
Memorial Book also discusses the means of killing Romanies:
Unlike the Jews, the
overwhelming majority of whom were murdered in the gas chambers at Birkenau,
Belzec, Treblinka and all the other mass extermination camps, the Gypsies
outside the Reich were massacred at many places, sometimes only a few at a
time, and sometimes by the hundreds.� In
the Generalgouvernement [the eastern territories] alone, 150 sites of
Gypsy massacres are known.� Research on
the Jewish Holocaust can rely on comparison of pre- and post-war census data to
help determine the numbers of victims in the countries concerned.� However, this is not possible for the
Gypsies, as it was only rarely that they were included in national census
data.� Therefore it is an impossible
task to find the actual number of Gypsy victims in Poland, Yugoslavia, White
Ruthenia and the Ukraine, the lands that probably had the greatest numbers of
victims36.
The 1997 figure reported by Dr Sybil Milton, the then senior historian at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Research Institute in Washington put the number of Romani lives lost by 1945 at �between a half and one and a half million�37.� Significantly, the same figure appeared again in a November 2001 report issued by the International Organization for Migration (the IOM), a body designated to locate and compensate surviving Romani Holocaust victims.� The brief states that �[r]ecent research indicates that up to 1.5 million Roma perished during the Nazi era�38 .� It is certainly a fact that interviews in the past four years by trained Romani personnel who have obtained testimonials at first-hand from claimants throughout central and eastern Europe have already shed startling new light on this issue: the number of Romani survivors is far in excess of anything previously estimated.� By extrapolation, and from the same eyewitness accounts documented in recent years, the numbers of Romanies who perished at the hands of the Nazis has also been grossly underestimated.� Eventually, these revised figures will find their way into the public record.
�������������� Since the end of
the Second World War, Germany�s record regarding the Romani people has been
less than exemplary.� Nobody was called
to testify in behalf of the Romani victims at the Nuremberg Trials, and no war
crimes reparations have ever been paid to Romanies as a people. Today, neo-Nazi
activity in many parts of central and Eastern Europe makes the Romanies its
prime target of racial violence.�
Kenrick summarized the situation after 1945 very well:
In the first years following
the end of the Nazi domination of Europe, the Gypsy community was in
disarray.� The small [Romani]
educational and cultural organizations that had existed before 1939 had been
destroyed. �The family structure was
broken with the death of the older people�the guardians of the traditions.� While in the camps, the Gypsies had been
unable to keep up their customs�the Roman�a�concerning the preparation of food
and the washing of clothes.� They solved
the psychological problems by not speaking about the time in the camps.� Only a small number of Gypsies could read or
write, so they could not tell their own story.�
But also they were unwilling to tell their own stories to others, and
few others were interested anyway.� In
the many books written describing the Nazi period and the persecution of the
Jews, Gypsies usually appear as a footnote or small section39.
We still have a long way to go both with our understanding of the Porrajmos and with achieving its proper acknowledgment in the classroom; including a section on the Porrajmos must be viewed as essential to any Romani Studies�and Holocaust Studies�curriculum. One such workbook, the Facing History and Ourselves organization�s Holocaust Resource Book40 lists just five pages in the index for �Sinti and Roma,� but eighteen under �Armenians�� who weren�t victims of the Holocaust, while the question following the section on the Romanies, which consists solely of a quote from Ina Friedman�s Other Victims41, asks what the �striking differences� were between the treatment of Romanies and the treatment of Jews. Our history must be presented in its own context, and not as a corollary to that of another people.
�������������� An argument which is sometimes made is that the Romanies simply didn�t preoccupy the Nazis; we have been called an �afterthought� in Nazi policy, even merely a �minor irritant.�42.� This is neither fair nor true, and statements have been made in print about Romanies which, had they been made about Jews, would have been immediately condemned as anti-Semitic.� Some of them can probably be accounted for by the fact that our people were far fewer in number, were much more easily identified and disposed of, and had already been the target of discriminatory policy even before Hitler came to power.� It required no massive effort on the part of the Nazis to locate and destroy a population that had no one to take its part.� Haberer adds to this:
[Regarding] the persecution of Gypsies, it should be noted that their plight equaled that of the Jews.� Their liquidation was part and parcel of the Nazis� agenda to eradicate �worthless life�.� Wrapped up in the Holocaust per se, the genocide of the Roma in the East is still very much an untold story.� In some ways, their victimization was practiced even more ruthlessly because they held no �economic value� and were traditionally considered a particular asocial and criminally inclined people [and] more alien in appearance, culture and language43.
To this, and returning to the issue of race-based motives
for eradication, we can add the conclusion of Austrian Holocaust historian
Erika Thurner, who wrote
Jews and Gypsies were equally affected by the racial
theories and measures of the Nazi rulers.�
The persecution of the two groups was carried out with the same radical
intensity and cruelty.� The Jewish
genocide received top priority in planning and execution�this because of the
different social status of the Jews and also their larger numbers.� Due to their smaller numbers, the Roma and
Sinti were for the Nazis a �secondary� problem44.
�������������� The
United Nations too, did nothing to assist Romanies during or following the
Holocaust nor, sadly, were Romanies mentioned anywhere in the documentation of
the U. S. War Refugee Board. ��This is
all the more puzzling since the situation was known to the War Crimes Tribunal
in Washington as early as 1946, whose files contain the text of the meeting
between Justice Minister Otto Thierack and Josef Goebbels on 14 September 1942,
which stated plainly that
With regard to the destruction of asocial life, Dr.
Goebbels is of the opinion that the following groups should be exterminated:
Jews and Gypsies unconditionally, Poles who have served 3 to 4 years of
penal servitude, and Czechs and Germans who are sentenced to death . . . The
idea of exterminating them by labor is best45.
�������������� Nevertheless, the situation is gradually improving.� In Germany itself, the handbook and CD Rom on Holocaust education prepared for teachers and which was issued by the Press and Information Office of the Federal government in 2000 makes clear that
recent historical research
in the United States and Germany does not support the conventional argument
that the Jews were the only victims of Nazi genocide.� True, the murder of Jews by the Nazis differed from the Nazis�
killing of political prisoners and foreign opponents because it was based on
the genetic origin of the victims and not on their behaviour.� The Nazi regime applied a consistent and
inclusive policy of extermination based on heredity only against three groups
of human beings: the handicapped, Jews, and Sinti and Roma (�Gypsies�).� The Nazis killed multitudes, including
political and religious opponents, members of the resistance, elites of
conquered nations, and homosexuals, but always based these murders on the
belief, actions and status of those victims.�
Different criteria applied only to the murder of the handicapped, Jews,
and �Gypsies�.� Members of these groups
could not escape their fate by changing their behavior or belief.� They were selected because they existed46.�������
1
Percy Broad.� �KZ
Auschwitz: Erinnerungen eines SS Mannes�. Hefte
von Auschwitz, 9:7-48 (1966), p. 41.
2
Miriam
Novitch, Le Genocide des Tziganes Sous le RJgime Nazi.� Paris: AMIF and the Ghetto Fighters� House, Israel (1968:3).
3
Christian
Bernadec, 1979.� L�Holocauste Oubi�.� Paris: Editions France-Empire, p. 44.
4
Guenther Lewy, 2000.� The
Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies.�
Cambridge: The University Press.
5
Gilad Margalit, 2002.� Germany�s Gypsies.� Cambridge: The University Press. This �competitive� aspect is
particularly explicit in an earlier monograph by Gilad Margalit, where he
states that �Antigypsyism and antisemitism are two very different phenomena of
ethnic hatred, distinct in their content, dimensions and appearance (p.
3) . . . antigypsyism . . . is only a marginal preoccupation of the German
extreme Right, compared to the constant and latent and exposed preoccupation
with Jews and Judaism (1996: 26).�
6
At West Chester University.�
7
Jonathan Ledgard, �Europe�s spectral
nation�, The Economist, May 12th (2001:29-31).
8
Ian Hancock, �Responses to
the Porrajmos (the Romani Holocaust),� in Alan S. Rosenbaum & Israel
Charney, eds., Is the Holocaust Unique?�
New York: Westview Press (1996), pp. 39-72.� Some of the arguments I�ve received include: the respective
overall numbers of losses cannot be compared; some Romanies were spared death;
there were family camps for Romanies; the Holocaust was a divine punishment specifically
intended for Jews; �generalizing� the Holocaust diminishes its gravity;
�generalizing� the Holocaust weakens justification for Israel�s existence; Nazi
methods of dealing with Romanies were more humane; Romanies were responsible
for their own mistreatment.
In the Romani language, the
Holocaust is referred to as the Baro
Porrajmos, or �great devouring� of human life.
9
Reichsfuhrer-SS-Dokument
S-Kr. 1 Nr. 557/38.� The words �the
final solution of the Gypsy question� actually first appeared on page one of
the very first issue of The Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society in 1888,
that question being what are the origins of the Romani people, and its
resolution the intended aim of that new organization.
10
�Gypsies, Jews and the
Holocaust,� Shmate: A Journal of Progressive Jewish Thought,
17:6-15:(1987);�Uniqueness of the victims: Gypsies, Jews and the Holocaust,� Without
Prejudice: International Review of Racial Discrimination, 1(2):45-67
(1988); �Gypsy history in Germany and neighboring lands: a chronology,� in
David Crowe & John Kolsti, eds., The Gypsies of Eastern Europe.� Armonk: E.C. Sharpe (1989:11-30); �The roots
of antigypsyism: to the Holocaust and after,� in Jan Colijn & Marcia
Sachs Littell, eds., Confronting the Holocaust: A Mandate for the 21st
Century.� Lanham: University Press
of America (1997:19-49), �Downplaying the Porrajmos: the trend to minimize the
Romani Holocaust,� Journal of Genocide Research, 3(1):56-63 (2000) and op.
cit. (note 8).
11
In �The roots of antigypsyism:
to the Holocaust and after,� in Jan Colijn & Marcia Sachs Littell,
eds., Confronting the Holocaust: A Mandate for the 21st Century.� Lanham: University Press of America
(1997:19-49).
12
This phrase, used by
Tetzner, is documented in Rainer Hehemann, Die �Bek�mpfung des
Zigeunerunwesens� im Wilhelminischen Deutschland und in der Weimarer Republik,
1871-1922. Frankfurt: Haag & Herschen (1987: 99,116,127), and in
Wolfgang Wippermann, Das Leben in Frankfurt zur NS-Zeit: Die
Nationalsozialistische Zigeunerfervolgung.�
Frankfurt: Kramer (1986: 57-8).�
Note that in Germany the traditional Romani population calls itself Sinti,
and that the word Zigeuner is the
German equivalent of �Gypsy� and should be avoided.
13
In his Die Abstammung des
Menschen und die Geschlichtliche Zuchwahl.�
Stuttgart: Scheitzerbartsche Verlag (1871: 63).
14
Christian Wilhelm Dohm, On
the Civic Improvement of the Jews.�
Stuttgart (1781); Hartwig von Hundt-Radowsky, Der Judenspiegel. Munich
(1819); Robert Knox, The Races of
Men.� London (1850); Arthur
Gobineau, L�In�galit� des Races Humaines.� Paris (1855).� Alfred Ploetz, Grundlinie einer Rassenhygiene: Die Thchtigkeit unsrerRasse und
der Schutz der Schwachen.� Berlin (1895). Wilhelm
Schallmeyer, in his �Einfhhrungen in die Rassenhygiene,� in Wilhelm
Weichardt, ed., Ergebnisse der Hygiene, Berlin (1917), argued for the
regulated pairing of German men and women of�
�suitable genetic quality� and the euthanizing of those of inferior
heredity (vol. 2, p. 455).
15
Houston S. Chamberlain.� Die Grundlagen des
Neunzehnten Jahrhunderts.� Leipzig
(1899).
16
Alfred
Dillmann.� Zigeuner-Buch.� Munich: Wildsche (1905).
17
Karl
Binding &
Alfred Hoche.� Die
Freigabe der Vernichtung Lebensunwerten Lebens.� Leipzig: Felix Meiner (1920).
18
Richard
Liebich, Die Zigeuner in ihrem Wesen und ihre Sprache.�
Leipzig: Brockhaus (1863).
19
Rudolf
Kulemann, �Die
Zigeuner�, Unserer Zeit, 5(1):843-871
(1869).
20
An excellent overview of
this is found in Daniel Stone�s Breeding Superman: Nietsche, Race and
Eugenics in Interwar Britain.�
Liverpool: The University Press (2002).
21
Erik
Bartels &
Gudrun Brun.� The
Gipsies in Denmark.�
Copenhagen:� Munksgaard (1943:5).
22
Issue for August 28th.
23
SMAB
(State Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau). Memorial
Book: the Gypsies at Auschwitz-Birkenau.� Munich: K.G. Saur.
(1993:xiv, emphasis added).
24
Donald
Kenrick.� Historical Dictionary of the Gypsies
(Romanies).� Lanham: The Scarecrow
Press. (1998:74-5).
25
Johannes
Behrendt, �Die
Wahrheit �ber die Zigeuner�, NS-Partei�
Korrespondenz, 10 (1939), No. 3.
26
Proester, Emil, Vra�dň� čs. Cik�nů v Buchenwaldu.� Document No. �V
ČSPB-K-135 of the
Archives of the Fighters Against Fascism, Prague (1940).
27
Benno
M�ller-Hill.� Murderous
Science: Elimination by Scientific Selection of Jews, Gypsies and Others,
1933-1945.� Oxford: The University
Press (1988:58-9).
28
Michael
Burleigh &
Wolfgang Wippermann.� The Racial State: Germany, 1933-Cambridge:
The University Press. (1991:121-25)
29
State Museum, op. cit.
(note 23), p. 3.
30
Sybil Milton, �Nazi policies towards Roma and Sinti 1933-1945�, Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, 5th
series, 2(1):1-18. (1992:10).
31
Richard
Breitman, The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the
Final Solution.� Hanover and London:
University Press of New England. (1991:164)
32
Broad, loc. cit.,
note 2.
33
Danuta Czech & Walter
Laqueur, Auschwitz Chronicle, 1939-1945.� New York: Holt (1979).� A
Jewish Auschwitz survivor now living in Los Angeles Remembered Zigeunernacht,
and revealed recently that the Nazis told the Romani men that if they would
agree to fight for Germany on the Russian front their lives, and the lives of
their families, would be spared.� The
men agreed and were separated from the women and children, and shot.� Nearly all of those who were subsequently
gassed were Romani women and children.�
The purpose in doing this was that, as Ulrich K�nig makes clear in his Sinti und Roma unter dem
Nationalsozialismus, Bochum: Brockmeyer Verlag (1989:129-133), Romani
families being eradicated together became completely unmanageable for the
guards.� See also Hancock 1996:50 (at
note 8 above) for further discussion.
34
Quoted in G.A. Rakelmann, ed, Loseblattsammlung f�r Unterrich und
Bildungsarbeit.� Freiburg im Breisgau (1979).
35
Ulrich
K�nig, op.
cit., note 33, pp. 87-9.
�36
State Museum, op. cit.,
p. 2
37
Latham, Judith, First US Conference on Gypsies in the
Holocaust.�
Current Affairs Bulletin No. 3-23928.� Washington: Voice of America
(1995).
38
Marie-Agnes Heine, Roma Victims of the Nazi Regime May Be Entitled to Compensation.� Geneva: International Organization for
Migration, Office of Public Information (2001:1).�
39
Donald
Kenrick, Historical Dictionary of the Gypsies (Romanies).� Lanham: The Scarecrow Press (1998:4).
40
Resource Book: Holocaust and Human
Behavior. The Facing History and Ourselves National Foundation,
Brookline, 1994.
41
�Ina Friedman, The Other Victims: First-Person Stories of
Non-Jews Persecuted by the Nazis, Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1990.
42
Yehuda
Bauer,
�Gypsies�, in Israel Gutman and Michael Berenbaum, eds.� Anatomy
of the Auschwitz Death Camp.�
Bloomington: Indiana University Press (1994:441-455).
43
Eric
Haberer, �The
second sweep: Gendarmerie killings of Jews and Gypsies on January 29th,
1942�, Journal of Genocide Research,
3(2):207-18, p. 212.
44
Erika
Thurner, National Socialism and Gypsies in Austria.� Chicago: The University Press (1998), p. xvi.
45
Emphasis
added. USGPO,
War Crimes Tribunal File No. 682-PS, Volume 3: Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression
Washington, The U.S. Government Printing Office, 1946, p. 496 (emphasis added).
The Tribunal�s then Chief Prosecutor Benjamin B. Ferencz, founder of Pace
University�s Peace Center in New York, did not recommend that the U.S. War
Refugee Board include Romanies in their compensation payments to survivors,
which amounted to several hundred million dollars.� �Gypsies� are not mentioned anywhere in their documentation, and
to date Mr. Ferencz has not replied to several requests for clarification.
46
Uwe-Karsten
Heye, Joachim Sartorius and Ulrich Bopp, eds, Learning from History: The Nazi Era and the Holocaust in German
Education.� Berlin: Press and
Information Office of the Federal Government. (2000:14).
Dr.
Ian F. Hancock, Director
The
Romani Archives and Documentation Center
Calhoun
Hall, The University of Texas, Austin TX 78712 USA
August
2003
