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Published on Tuesday, 27 January 2015 10:22
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Rikker it adrée tute’s kokero see an’ kek’ll jin.

Keep it a secret in your own heart, and nobody will know it. the tao of the Roma/ Traveller Rumi Circular on the Fight against the Gypsy Nuisance issued by Heinrich Himmler, December 8, 1938

An Order to the Whole Party! Experience gained in the fight against the Gypsy nuisance, and knowledge derived from race-biological research, have shown that the proper method of attacking the Gypsy problem seems to be to treat it as a matter of race. Experience shows that part- Gypsies play the greatest role in Gypsy criminality. On the other hand, it has been shown that efforts to make the Gypsies settle have been unsuccessful, especially in the case of pure Gypsies, on account of their strong compulsion to wander. It has therefore become necessary to distinguish between pure and part-Gypsies in the final solution of the Gypsy question.

To this end, it is necessary to establish the racial affinity of every Gypsy living in Germany and of every vagrant living a Gypsy-like existence.

I therefore decree that all settled and non-settled Gypsies, and also all vagrants living a Gypsy-like existence, are to be registered with the Reich Criminal Police – Reich Central Office for the Fight against the Gypsy Nuisance.

The police authorities will report (via the responsible Criminal Police offices and local offices) to the Reich Criminal Police Office – Reich Central Office for the Fight against the Gypsy Nuisance all persons who by virtue of their looks and appearances, customs or habits, are to be regarded as Gypsies or part-Gypsies.

Because a person considered to be a Gypsy or part-Gypsy, or a person living like a Gypsy, as a rule confirms the suspicion that marriage (in accordance with clause 6 of the first decree on the implementation of the Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor … or on the basis of stipulations in the law of Fitness to Marry) must not be contracted, in all cases the public registry officials must demand a testimony of fitness to marry from those who make such an application [to be married].

Instructions on how to execute this decree, issued by the Criminal Police on 1 March, 1939, said that the ‘requisite legal basis’ for the prevention of ‘racial miscegenation’ and for the general regulation of the Gypsies’ way of life could only be established through a comprehensive ‘Gypsy Law’. The imminence of such a law was announced on several occasions, but none was ever promulgated.

Treatment of the Gypsy question is part of the National Socialist task of national regeneration. A solution can only be achieved if the philosophical perspectives of National Socialism are observed. Although the principle that the German nation respects the national identity of alien peoples is also assumed in the fight against the Gypsy Nuisance, nonetheless the aim of measures taken by the State to defend the homogeneity of the German nation must be the physical separation of Gypsydom from the German nation, the prevention of miscegenation, and finally the regulation of the way of life of pure and part-Gypsies. The necessary legal foundations can only be created through a Gypsy Law, which prevents further intermingling of blood, and which regulates all the most pressing questions which go together with the existence of Gypsies in the living space of the German nation.

M. Burleigh & W. Wipperman, The Racial State, Germany 1933-1945, Cambridge, 1991, pp.120-121

Copyright © 2015 Yad Vashem The Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority

Thursday, February 23, 2012

Porajmos The Gypsy Holocaust

Pajamos is the Gypsies term for the Holocaust. It means devouring or destruction.


Gypsies are the only other “official” victims of the Holocaust. The Nazis had a plan to exterminate the Roma and Sinti people. About 250,000 Gypsies were killed in the Holocaust. Some estimates are as high as 600,000. As a result of their wandering lifestyle, it is hard to get a precise number. Even Gypsies who were assimilated were not spared, for the most part.

By the laws the Nazis made, Gypsies should be considered Aryan. As a result of their wandering and asocial lifestyle though, they were persecuted and killed. A person was considered a Gypsy if they had a Gypsy grandparent or if 2 or more of their grandparents were part-Gypsy. The most dangerous Gypsies were those of mixed blood. According to the Nazi Dr. Ritter, about 90% of Gypsies were of mixed blood.



The treatment of the Gypsies was fairly consistent in every country. Germany decided to deport her 30,000 Gypsies. About 20,000 of these German Gypsies were gassed. Gypsies married to Germans were exempt but their children over 12 were sterilized.

There was a family camp for Gypsies in Auschwitz but on August 6th, 1944 they were mostly all gassed. A few were sent away as forced laborers but most were gassed. Many gypsies were used for experiments, just like the Jews were also used. The most common was the sterilization of women.


Gypsies were locked in the ghettos too. In the Lodz ghetto, 5007 gypsies were detained. They were kept in a separate section away from the Jews. The conditions were worse then that of the Jews. Half of the gypsies died with in the first month. None of these gypsies survived however. When the Germans ordered deportations to Chelmno to start in the beginning of 1942, the remaining gypsies were among the first victims. At Chelmno, they were gassed on arrival with carbon monoxide gas.






The Gypsy Holocaust: Review of The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies by Guenter Lewy

By Claudia MOSCOVICI on January 26, 2015 - 12:13

The Gypsies also experienced a Holocaust at the hands of the Nazi regime. Initially, Nazi racial ideology expressed some ambivalence towards the Gypsies, by way of contrast to the Jews, whom they perceived as “vermin”. On the one hand, the Nazis regarded the Gypsies as “work-shy”, nomadic beggars and thieves, racially inferior to the Aryan race. On the other hand, some Nazi racial theories traced “racially pure” Gypsies to “Aryan” Indian tribes. In the end, this dual perspective on the Gypsies didn’t alter their mistreatment. Although the Nazis didn’t have a comparable “Final Solution”, or systematic plan to exterminate the Gypsies the way they did the Jews, the Gypsies suffered a similar fate. Like the Jews, they were rounded up for slave labor, interred in ghettoized areas (Gypsy Camps), and subsequently sent to killing centers.

Guenter Lewy’s closely researched book, The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), traces the oppression of the Gypsies in Germany and Nazi controlled territories, starting with the racial laws of the early 1930’s, to their deportation to concentration camps beginning in 1940, to their eventual extermination in Auschwitz in May 1944.

When the Nazis consolidated power in 1936, Heinrich Himmler, who became the SS Chief and the Chief of German police, instituted the Reich Central Office for the Suppression of the Gypsies Nuisance. This organization took progressive steps to contain and persecute the Gypsies. As early as 1938, Lewy recounts, the Gypsies were rounded up and confined to Gypsy camps (Zigeunerlager). Many men were also forced into slave labor, under the program “Operation Work-Shy”. Himmler took charge of this step-by-step process of isolation and discrimination, in a characteristically systematic—and insidious--fashion. In a decree entitled “Combatting the Gypsy Plague,” he set out to determine the “inner characteristics of that race” (36). Dr. Robert Ritter, a Nazi child psychologist, became the head of The Research Institute for Racial Hygiene and Population Biology. He classified the Gypsies according to their racial profile, as pure-bred or mixed. (43) Ironically, Gypsies of “pure blood” received some special consideration and were deemed to be more integrated into German society. By way of contrast, “mixed blood” Gypsies were declared “racially inferior” and subjected to far worse treatment: in a kind of inversion of the racial laws applied to the Jews.

Only a small number of Gypsies benefitted from the racial exemptions applicable to “pure Gypsies”: somewhere between 5,000 to 15,000 individuals. The rest—about 90 percent of the Gypsies—were considered by Ritter’s pseudoscientific classification as being of “mixed” or “degenerate” blood. The vast majority of them were rounded up and deported from all the Reich and Nazi-occupied territories. In 1938, Gypsy men from Marzahn were sent to Sachsanhausen. However, large-scale, mass deportations of the Gypsies to the East began in 1940. By 1942, Himmler ordered that all the Gypsies (Roma people) in the Reich be deported to concentration and extermination camps. (75)

At Auschwitz, Gypsies were some of the few inmates, along with a group of Czech inmates from the Theresienstadt concentration camp (known as “the Family Camp”), who were allowed to keep their clothes, not shave their hair off, and stay together in clans that comprised men, women and children. Despite this somewhat better treatment, their conditions were miserable. They lacked sufficient food, lived in squalor and were plagued by lice and disease. The children often suffered from noma, a disease stemming from malnutrition that caused a form of gangrene on their faces, which often looked like holes in their cheeks. The notorious Josef Mengele also enjoyed experimenting on Gypsy children, particularly on twins, his specialty.

Lewy doesn’t call the Nazi persecution of the Gypsies a “Holocaust” because it was, in some respects, less systematic than the genocide of the Jews. Gypsies were not explicitly selected for total extermination, as were the Jewish people. This distinction makes sense. However, in the end, the result was the same, since approximately 250,000 Gypsies were killed by the Nazi regime.

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Porajmos

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The Romani genocide or Romani Holocaust, also known as the Porajmos (Romani pronunciation: IPA: [pʰoˈɽajmos]), or Samudaripen ("Mass killing"), was the effort during World War II by the government of Nazi Germany and its allies to exterminate the Romani people of Europe. Under Adolf Hitler's rule, both Roma and Jews were defined by the Nuremberg laws as "enemies of the race-based state." These two groups (and others) were targeted by similar policies and persecution, culminating in the near annihilation of both populations within Nazi-occupied countries.[1]

Estimates of the death toll of Romani in World War II range from 220,000 to 1,500,000.[2]West Germany in 1982 formally recognized that genocide had been committed against the Romani; Poland agreed with this recognition in 2011.[3]

Contents

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Etymology[edit]

The term porajmos (also Porrajmos or Pharrajimos—literally, "devouring" or "destruction" in some dialects of the Romani language[4]) was introduced by Ian Hancock, in the early 1990s.[5] Hancock chose the term, coined by a Kalderash Rom, from a number of suggestions in an "informal conversation in 1993".[6]

The term is used mostly by activists and is unknown to most Roma, including relatives of victims and survivors.[5] Some Russian and Balkan Romani activists protest against using the word porajmos.[7] In various dialects, "porajmos" is synonymous with poravipe which means "violation" and "rape", a term which some Roma consider to be offensive.

Balkan Romani activists prefer the term samudaripen ("mass killing"),[8] first introduced by linguist Marcel Courthiade. Hancock dismisses this word, arguing that it does not conform to Romani language morphology.[6] Some Ruska Roma activists offer the term Kali Traš ("Black Fear").[9] Another alternative that has been used is Berša Bibahtale ("The Unhappy Years").[6] Lastly, adapted borrowings such as Holokosto, Holokausto, etc. are also occasionally used in the Romani language.

Linguistically, the term porajmos is composed of the verb root porrav- and the abstract-forming nominal ending -imos. This ending is of the Vlax Romani dialect, whereas other varieties generally use -ibe(n) or -ipe(n).[10] For the verb itself, the most commonly given meaning is "to open/stretch wide" or "to rip open", whereas the meaning "to open up the mouth, devour" occurs in fewer varieties.[11]

History[edit]

Romani discrimination before 1933[edit]

The emergence of racism[edit]

In the late 19th century, the emergence of scientific racism and Social Darwinism, linking social differences to racial differences, provided the public justifications for prejudices against Jews and Romani. During this time, “the concept of race was systematically employed to explain social phenomena.” This approach validated the idea that races were not variations of a single species of man and instead were of distinctly different biological origin. It established a scientifically backed racial hierarchy, which defined certain minority groups as other on the basis of biology.[12]

In addition to racial pseudo-science, the end of the 19th century was a period of state-sponsored modernization in Germany. Industrial development altered many aspects of society. Most notably, the period shifted social norms of work and life. For Roma, this meant a denial of their traditional way of life as craftsmen and artisans. János Bársony notes that "industrial development devalued their services as craftsmen, resulting in the disintegration of their communities and social marginalization."[13]

Persecution under the German Empire and Weimar Republic[edit]

The developments of racial pseudo-science and modernization resulted in anti-Romani state interventions, carried out by the German Empire and Weimar Republic. In 1899, the Imperial Police Headquarters in Munich established the Information Services on Romani by the Security Police. Its purpose was to keep records (identification cards, fingerprints, photographs, etc.) and continuous surveillance on the Roma community. Roma in the Weimar Republic were forbidden from entering public swimming pools, parks, and other recreational areas, and depicted throughout Germany and Europe as criminals and spies.[14] By 1926, this ‘racial panic’ was transmitted into law.

The "Law for the Fight Against Gypsies, Vagrants and the Workshy" was enforced in Bavaria. It stipulated that groups identified as ‘Gypsies’ avoid all travel to the region. Those already living in the area were to “be kept under control so that there [was] no longer anything to fear from them with regard to safety in the land.”[15] Herbet Heuss notes that "[t]his Bavarian law became the model for other German states and even for neighbouring countries."[16]

The demand for Roma to give up their nomadic ways and settle in a specific region was often the focus of anti-Romani policy both of the German Empire and Weimar Republic. Once settled, communities were concentrated and isolated in one area within a town or city.[17] This process facilitated state-run surveillance practices and ‘crime prevention.’

Following passage of the Law for the Fight Against Gypsies, Vagrants and the Workshy, public policy increasingly targeted the Roma on the explicit basis of race. In 1927, Prussia passed a law that required all Roma to carry identity cards. Eight thousand Roma were processed this way and subjected to mandatory fingerprinting and photographing.[18] Two years later, the focus became more explicit. In 1929, the German state of Hussen proposed the 'Law for the Fight Against the Gypsy Menace.' The same year the Centre for the Fight Against Gypsies in Germany was opened. This body enforced restrictions on travel for undocumented Roma and "allowed for the arbitrary arrest and detention of gypsies as a means of crime prevention.”[19]

Before Hitler’s rise to power, legislation against the Romani was based on a rhetoric of racism. Policy based on the premise of “fighting crime” was redirected to “fighting a people.”[16] Targeted groups were no longer determined by juridical grounds. Instead, they were victims of racialized policy.[16]

Aryan racial purity[edit]

Main article: Racial policy of Nazi Germany

For centuries, Romani tribes were subject to antiziganist persecution and humiliation in Europe.[20] They were stigmatized as habitual criminals, social misfits, and vagabonds.[20]

Given the Nazi emphasis on Aryan “racial purity”, they identified the Roma as a minority group to control and restrict. But Hitler’s racial ideologues knew that the Romani language is one of the Indo-Aryan languages, originating in northern India. Nazi anthropologists realized that Romani had migrated into Europe from India and were descendants of the Aryan occupants of the subcontinent. At the time, they believed the Aryans had invaded from Europe. In any event, the Romani spoke an Aryan language and in most systems would be considered Aryan.

Huttenbach argues that the Nazis planned to eliminate the Romani, one way or another, from as early as 1933; they announced on July 14, 1933, the goal of preventing lebensunwertes Leben (see Life unworthy of life) from reproducing.[21] The Department of Racial Hygiene and Population Biology began to experiment on Romani to determine criteria for their racial classification.[22]

Nazi racialist Hans F. K. Günther added a socioeconomic component to the theory of racial purity. While he conceded that the Romani were descended from Aryans, he noted that they were of poorer classes and had mingled with the various “inferior” races they encountered during their wanderings. He believed that this influence accounted for their extreme poverty and nomadic lifestyle. While he conceded that there were some groups that were "purely Aryan", he contended that most Romani posed a threat to Aryan homogeneity because of their historic racial mingling.

Romani woman with German police officer and Nazi psychologist Dr. Robert Ritter

The Nazis established the Racial Hygiene and Demographic Biology Research Unit (Rassenhygienische und Bevölkerungsbiologische Forschungsstelle, Department L3 of the Reich Department of Health) in 1936. Headed by Dr. Robert Ritter and his assistant Eva Justin, this Unit was mandated to conduct an in-depth study of the "Gypsy question (Zigeunerfrage)" and to provide data required for formulating a new Reich "Gypsy law". After extensive fieldwork in the spring of 1936, consisting of interviews and medical examinations to investigate genealogical and genetic data, the Unit determined that most Romani posed a danger to German racial purity and should be eliminated. No decision was made regarding the remainder (about 10 percent of the total Romani population of Europe), primarily Sinti and Lalleri tribes living in Germany. Several suggestions were made. Heinrich Himmler suggested deporting the Romani to a remote reservation, as had been done by the United States for its Native Americans, where "pure Gypsies" could continue their nomadic lifestyle unhindered. According to him:

...The aim of measures taken by the State to defend the homogeneity of the German nation must be the physical separation of Gypsydom from the German nation, the prevention of miscegenation, and finally, the regulation of the way of life of pure and part-Gypsies.

[citation needed]

Nine representatives of the Romani community in Germany were asked to compile lists of pure-blooded Romanis to be saved from extermination. The Germans often ignored these lists and some individuals identified on them were still sent to concentration camps.[23]

Loss of citizenship[edit]

On November 14, 1935, Germany passed the law for the "Protection of Blood and Honour", a supplementary extension to the Nuremberg Laws. This law forbade Aryans from marrying non-Aryans. Criteria defining Romani individuals were twice as strict as those defining any other group. The second Nuremberg law, "The Reich Citizenship Law," stripped "non-Aryans" of their citizenship. Romani, like Jews and Blacks, lost their right to vote on March 7, 1936.[24]

Extermination[edit]

The Brown Triangle. Romani prisoners in German concentration camps such as Auschwitz were forced to wear the brown inverted triangle on their prison uniforms to distinguish them from other inmates.[25]

The Third Reich government began persecution of the Romani as early as 1936 when they began to transfer the people to municipal internment camps on the outskirts of cities, a prelude to their deportation to concentration camps. Notable internment and concentration camps include Dachau, Dieselstrasse, Marzahn (which evolved from a municipal internment camp) and Vennhausen. The Society for Threatened Peoples estimates the Romani deaths at 277,100.[26]Martin Gilbert estimates that a total of more than 220,000 of the 700,000 Romani in Europe were killed, including 15,000 (mainly from the Soviet Union) in Mauthausen in January–May 1945.[27] The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum cites scholars who estimate the number of Sinti and Roma killed as between 220,000 and 500,000.[28] Dr. Sybil Milton, a historian at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Research Institute, estimated the number of lives lost as "something between a half-million and a million-and-a-half".[2][29]

Initially the Romani were herded into ghettos, including the Warsaw Ghetto (April–June 1942), where they formed a distinct subclass in relation to the Jews.[citation needed] Ghetto diarist Emmanuel Ringelblum speculated that Romani were sent to the Warsaw Ghetto because the Germans wanted:

...to toss into the Ghetto everything that is characteristically dirty, shabby, bizarre, of which one ought to be frightened, and which anyway has to be destroyed.[30]

Initially there was disagreement within the Nazi circles about how to solve the "Gypsy Question". In late 1939 and early 1940, Hans Frank, the General Governor of occupied Poland, refused to accept the 30,000 German and Austrian Roma which were to be deported to his territory. Heinrich Himmler "lobbied to save a handful of pure-blooded Roma" for his "ethnic reservation", but was opposed by Martin Bormann, who favored deportation for all Roma.[14] The debate ended in 1942 when Himmler signed the order to begin the mass deportations of Roma to Auschwitz. During Operation Reinhard (1941–43), an undetermined number of Roma were killed in the extermination camps, such as Treblinka.[31]

The Nazi persecution of Roma varied from country to country and region to region. In France, between 3,000 and 6,000 Roma were deported to Dachau, Ravensbrück, Buchenwald, and other camps.[14] Further east, in the Balkan states and the Soviet Union, the Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing squads, travelled from village to village massacring the inhabitants where they lived and typically leaving few to no records of the number of Roma killed in this way. In a few cases, significant documentary evidence of mass murder was generated.[32] Timothy Snyder notes that in the Soviet Union alone there were 8,000 documented cases of Roma murdered by the Einsatzgruppen in their sweep east.[33]

In return for immunity from prosecution for war crimes, Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski stated at the Einsatzgruppen Trial that "the principal task of the Einsatzgruppen of the S.D. was the annihilation of the Jews, Gypsies and Political Commissars".[34] Roma in Slovakia were killed by the local collaborating auxiliaries.[14] Notably, in Denmark and Greece, local populations did not participate in the hunt for Roma as they did in the Baltics.[35][36] Bulgaria and Finland, although allies of Germany, did not cooperate with the Porajmos, just as they did not cooperate with the Shoah.

On December 16, 1942, Himmler ordered that the Romani candidates for extermination should be deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. For the Romani people of Europe, this order was equivalent to the January 20 decision of that same year, made at the Wannsee Conference, at which Nazi bureaucrats decided on the "Final Solution" to the "Jewish problem". On November 15, 1943, Himmler ordered that Romani and "part-Romanies" were to be put "on the same level as Jews and placed in concentration camps".[37]

Sybil Milton has speculated that Hitler was involved in the decision to deport all Romani to Auschwitz, as Himmler gave the order six days after meeting with Hitler. For that meeting, Himmler had prepared a report on the subject Führer: Aufstellung wer sind Zigeuner.[38] Organized Jewish resistance occurred in nearly every large ghetto and concentration camp (Auschwitz, Sobibor, Treblinka, Ravensbrück, and Buchenwald, among many others), and the Roma similarly attempted to resist the Nazis' extermination. In May 1944 at Auschwitz, SS guards tried to liquidate the Gypsy Family Camp and were "met with unexpected resistance—the Roma fought back with crude weapons—and retreated". A few months later the SS succeeded in liquidating the camp, and ultimately murdered 20,000 Roma there.[14]

Persecution in other Axis countries[edit]

Romani were also persecuted by the puppet regimes that cooperated with the Third Reich during the war, especially the notorious Ustaše regime in Croatia. Tens of thousands of Romani were killed in Jasenovac concentration camp, along with Serbs and Jews. Yad Vashem estimates that the Porajmos was most intense in Yugoslavia, where around 90,000 Romani were killed.[35] The Ustaše government also deported around 26,000.[39] Serbian Romani are parties to the pending class action suit against the Vatican Bank and others in U.S. federal court seeking return of wartime loot.[40]

The governments of some Nazi German allies, namely Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria, also contributed to the Nazi plan of Romani extermination, but most Romani in these countries survived, unlike those in Ustaše Croatia or in areas directly ruled by Nazi Germany (such as Poland). The Hungarian Arrow Cross government deported between 28,000 and 33,000 Romani out of a population estimated between 70,000 and 100,000.[41]

The Romanian government of Ion Antonescu did not systematically exterminate Roma on its territory. Instead, resident Roma were deported to Romanian-run concentration camps in occupied Transnistria.[42] Of the estimated 25,000 Romani inmates of these camps, 11,000 (44%, or almost half) died.[43]

According to eyewitness Mrs. de Wiek, Anne Frank, a notable Jewish Holocaust victim, is recorded as having witnessed the prelude to the murder of Romani children at Auschwitz: "I can still see her standing at the door and looking down the camp street as a herd of naked gypsy girls were driven by, to the crematory, and Anne watched them going and cried."[44]

In the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, Romani internees were sent to the Lety and Hodonín concentration camps before being transferred to Auschwitz-Birkenau for gassing. What makes the Lety camp unique is that it was staffed by Czech guards, who could be even more brutal than the Germans, as testified in Paul Polansky’s book Black Silence. The genocide was so thorough that the vast majority of Romani in the Czech Republic today are actually descended from migrants from Slovakia who moved there during the post-war years in Czechoslovakia. In Nazi-occupied France, between 16,000 and 18,000 were killed.[35]

The small Romani population in Denmark was not subjected to mass killings by the Nazi occupiers, but classified as simply "asocial". Angus Fraser attributes this to "doubts over ethnic demarcations within the travelling population".[45] The Romanis of Greece were taken hostage and prepared for deportation to Auschwitz, but were saved by appeals from the Archbishop of Athens and the Greek Prime Minister.[46]

Estimated number of victims[edit]

According to Ian Hancock, director of the Romani Archives and Documentation Center at the University of Texas at Austin,[47] there also existed a trend to downplay the actual figures. He surmised that almost the entire Romani population was killed in Croatia, Estonia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands.[48]Rudolph Rummel, a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Hawaii who spent his career assembling data on collective violence by governments towards their people (for which he coined the term democide), estimated that 258,000 must have been killed in Nazi Germany,[49] 36,000 in Romania under Ion Antonescu[50] and 27,000 in Ustaše-controlled Croatia.[51]

The following figures are from The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust.[52]

CountryPre War Roma populationVictims Low EstimateVictims High Estimate Austria 11,200 6,800 8,250 Belgium 600 350 500 Czech Republic (Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia) 13,000 5,000 6,500 Estonia 1,000 500 1,000 France 40,000 15,150 15,150 Germany 20,000 15,000 15,000 Greece ? 50 50 Hungary 100,000 1,000 28,000 Italy 25,000 1,000 1,000 Latvia 5,000 1,500 2,500 Lithuania 1,000 500 1,000 Luxembourg 200 100 200 Netherlands 500 215 500 Poland 50,000 8,000 35,000 Romania 300,000 19,000 36,000 Slovakia 80,000 400 10,000 Soviet Union (1939 borders) 200,000 30,000 35,000 Yugoslavia 100,000 26,000 90,000 Total947,500130,565285,650
  • In a 2010 publication, Ian Hancock stated that he agrees with the view that the number of Romanies killed has been underestimated as a result of being grouped with others in Nazi records under headings such as "remainder to be liquidated", "hangers-on", and "partisans".[53] He notes recent evidence such as the previously obscure Lety concentration camp in the Czech Republic and Ackovic's revised estimates[54] of Romani killed by the Ustaše as high as 80,000–100,000. These numbers suggest that previous estimates have been grossly underrepresented.[55]
  • Zbigniew Brzezinski has estimated that 800,000 Romanies died as a result of Nazi actions.[56]

Medical experiments[edit]

Further information: Nazi human experimentation

Another distinctive feature of the Porajmos and the Holocaust was the extensive use of human subjects in medical experiments.[57] The most notorious of these physicians was Dr. Josef Mengele, who worked in the Auschwitz concentration camp. His experiments included placing subjects in pressure chambers, testing drugs on them, freezing them, attempting to change eye color by injecting chemicals into children's eyes and various amputations and other brutal surgeries.[57] The full extent of his work will never be known because the truckload of records he sent to Dr. Otmar von Verschuer at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute were destroyed by von Verschuer.[58] Mengele's own journals, consisting of some 3,300 pages, are likely never to be published, and they are suspected to contain denials of the Holocaust.[59] Subjects who survived Mengele's experiments were almost always killed and dissected shortly afterwards.

He seemed particularly keen on working with Romani children. He would bring them sweets and toys, and would personally take them to the gas chamber. They would call him "Onkel Mengele".[60] Vera Alexander was a Jewish inmate at Auschwitz who looked after 50 sets of Romani twins:

I remember one set of twins in particular: Guido and Ina, aged about four. One day, Mengele took them away. When they returned, they were in a terrible state: they had been sewn together, back to back, like Siamese twins. Their wounds were infected and oozing pus. They screamed day and night. Then their parents—I remember the mother's name was Stella—managed to get some morphine and they killed the children in order to end their suffering.[60]

Recognition and remembrance[edit]

Sinti and Roma about to be deported from the German town of Asperg, 22 May 1940

The German government paid war reparations to Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, but not to the Romani. There were "never any consultations at Nuremberg or any other international conference as to whether the Sinti and Roma were entitled like the Jews to reparations.”[61] The Interior Ministry of Wuerttemberg argued that "Gypsies [were] persecuted under the Nazis not for any racial reason but because of an asocial and criminal record."[62] When on trial for his leadership of Einsatzgruppen in the USSR, Otto Ohlendorf cited the massacres of Romanis during the Thirty Years War as a historical precedent.[63]

West Germany recognised the genocide of the Roma in 1982,[64] and since then the Porajmos has been increasingly recognized as a genocide committed simultaneously with the Shoah.[65] The American historian Sybil Milton wrote several articles arguing that the Porajmos deserved recognition as part of the Holocaust.[66] In Switzerland, a committee of experts investigated the policy of the Swiss government during the Porajmos.[67]

Formal recognition and commemoration of the Roma persecution by the Nazis has been difficult in practical terms due to the lack of significant collective memory and documentation of the Porajmos among the Roma. This is a result both of their tradition of oral history and illiteracy, heightened by widespread poverty and continuing discrimination that has forced some Roma out of state schools. One UNESCO report put the illiteracy rate among the Roma in Romania at 30 percent, as opposed to the near universal literacy of the Romanian public as a whole. In a 2011 investigation of the state of the Roma in Europe today, Ben Judah, a Policy Fellow with the European Council on Foreign Relations, traveled to Romania.

Nico Fortuna, a sociologist and Roma activist, explained the distinction between Jewish collective memory of the Shoah and the Roma experience:

There is a difference between the Jewish and Roma deportees...The Jews were shocked and can remember the year, date and time it happened. The Roma shrugged it off. They said, "Of course I was deported. I'm Roma; these things happen to a Roma." The Roma mentality is different from the Jewish mentality. For example, a Roma came to me and asked, "Why do you care so much about these deportations? Your family was not deported." I went, "I care as a Roma" and the guy said back, "I do not care because my family were brave, proud Roma that were not deported."

For the Jews it was a total and everyone knew this—from bankers to pawnbrokers. For the Roma it was selective and not comprehensive. The Roma were only exterminated in a few parts of Europe such as Poland, the Netherlands, Germany and France. In Romania and much of the Balkans, only nomadic Roma and social outcast Roma were deported. This matters and has an impact on the Roma mentality.[68]

Ian Hancock has also observed a reluctance among Roma to acknowledge their victimization by the Third Reich. The Roma "are traditionally not disposed to keeping alive the terrible memories from their history—nostalgia is a luxury for others".[14] The effects of the illiteracy, the lack of social institutions, and the rampant discrimination faced by Roma in Europe today have produced a people who, according to Fortuna, lack a "national consciousness...and historical memory of the Holocaust because there is no Roma elite."[68]

Acts of commemoration[edit]

Plaque in Rome (Italy) in memory of Romani people who died in extermination camps Monument in memory of Romani people who were murdered by German Nazis in forest in the Polish village of Borzęcin.

The first memorial commemorating victims of the Romani Holocaust was erected on May 8, 1956, in the Polish village of Szczurowa commemorating the Szczurowa massacre. Since 1996, a Gypsy Caravan Memorial has been traveling among the main remembrance sites in Poland, from Tarnów via Auschwitz, Szczurowa and Borzęcin Dolny, gathering the Romani and well-wishers in the remembrance of the Porajmos.[69] Several museums dedicate a part of their permanent exhibition to documenting that history, such as the Museum of Romani Culture in Czech Republic and the Ethnographic Museum in Tarnów. Some political organisations have tried to block the installation of Romani memorials near former concentration camps, as shown by the debate around Lety and Hodonin in the Czech Republic.

On October 23, 2007, Romanian President Traian Băsescu publicly apologized for his nation's role in the Porajmos, the first time a Romanian leader has done so. He called for the Porajmos to be taught in schools, stating that, "We must tell our children that six decades ago children like them were sent by the Romanian state to die of hunger and cold". Part of his apology was expressed in the Romani language. Băsescu awarded three Porajmos survivors with an Order for Faithful Services.[70] Before recognizing Romania's role in the Porajmos, Traian Băsescu was widely quoted after an incident on May 19, 2007, in which he insulted a journalist by calling her a "stinky gypsy". The president subsequently apologized.[71]

On January 27, 2011, Zoni Weisz became the first Roma guest of honour at Germany's official Holocaust Memorial Day ceremony. Dutch-born Weiz escaped death during a Nazi round-up when a policeman allowed him to escape. Nazi injustices against the Roma were recalled at the ceremony, including that directed at Sinto boxer Johann Trollmann.[72][73]

On May 3, 2012 the world premiere of the Requiem for Auschwitz, by composer Roger Moreno Rathgeb, was performed at the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam by the The Roma and Sinti Philharmoniker directed by Riccardo M Sahiti. The Philharmoniker is a pan-European orchestra of Roma and Sinto musicians generally employed by other classical orchestras; it is focused on the contribution of Roma culture to classical music. Dutch-Swiss Sinto Moreno Rathgeb wrote his requiem for all victims of Auschwitz and Nazi terror. The occasion of the premiere was coupled to a conference, Roma between Past and Future. The requiem has since been performed in Tilburg, Prague, Budapest, Frankfurt, Cracow, and Berlin.

On 24 October 2012 the Memorial to the Sinti and Roma victims of National Socialism was unveiled in Berlin. [74] since 2010, ternYpe - International Roma Youth Network, organizes a commemoration week called "Dikh he na bister" (look and don't forget) about August 2 in Kraków and Auschwitz-Birkenau. In 2014 they organised the largest Youth Commemoration Ceremony in history, attracting more than 1000 young Roma and non-Roma from 25 countries. This initiative of ternYpe Network was held under the European Parliament's High Patronage granted by President Martin Schulz.[75]

Depiction in films[edit]

  • In 2009, Tony Gatlif, a French Romani film director, directed the film Korkoro, which portrays the Romani Taloche's escape from the Nazis, with help from a French notary, Justes, and his difficulty in trying to lead a sedentary life.[76] The film's other main character, Mademoiselle Lise Lundi, is inspired by Yvette Lundy, a teacher who worked in Gionges, La Marne and was active in the French Resistance.[77]
  • The 1988 Polish film, And the Violins Stopped Playing, also has Porajmos as its subject. It was criticized for showing the killing of Roma as a method of removing witnesses to the killing of Jews.[78]

See also[edit]

References[edit]

Notes
  1. Jump up ^ Bársony 2008, p. 1.
  2. ^ Jump up to: a b Hancock, Ian (2005), "True Romanies and the Holocaust: A Re-evaluation and an overview", The Historiography of the Holocaust, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 383–396, ISBN 1-4039-9927-9
  3. Jump up ^ Recognition for Justice, International Roma Youth Network
  4. Jump up ^ Hancock 1997, p. 339: "PORRAJMOS: The Romani Holocaust (1933–1945), also BARO PORRAJMOS, lit. 'great devouring.'"
  5. ^ Jump up to: a b Matras 2004, p. 195.
  6. ^ Jump up to: a b c On the interpretation of a word: Porrajmos as Holocaust – Ian Hancock
  7. Jump up ^ [1]
  8. Jump up ^ http://dosta.org/?q=node/37
  9. Jump up ^ [2]
  10. Jump up ^ Norbert Boretzky and Birgit Igla. Kommentierter Dialektatlas des Romani. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag 2004. Teil 1: Vergleich der Dialekte.
  11. Jump up ^ See e.g. http://romani.uni-graz.at/romlex/lex.xml
  12. Jump up ^ Heuss 1997, p. 19.
  13. Jump up ^ Bársony 2008, p. 7.
  14. ^ Jump up to: a b c d e f Symi Rom-Rymer (July–August 2011). "Roma in the Holocaust". Moment Magazine. Retrieved June 30, 2011.
  15. Jump up ^ Report on the Bavarian Landtag 1925/6, III Tagung; Gesetz- und Verordnungsblatt fur den Freistaat Bayern, Nr. 17, 22.7.1926. as cited in Heuss 1997, p. 24.
  16. ^ Jump up to: a b c Heuss 1997, p. 24.
  17. Jump up ^ Sparing 1997, pp. 39–40.
  18. Jump up ^ Ian Hancock, “Gypsy History in Germany and Neighbouring Lands: A Chronology Leading to the Holocaust and Beyond,” in The Gypsies of Eastern Europe, ed by David Crowe and John Kolsti (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1991), pg. 14.
  19. Jump up ^ Erin Jessee, "Nazi Atrocities: The Genocide of the Roma/Sinti" (lecture, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, February 3, 2010).
  20. ^ Jump up to: a b Ian Hancock, We are the Romani People. Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2002, (ISBN 1 902806 19 0)
  21. Jump up ^ Gisela Bock, Racism and Sexism in Nazi Germany, p.408 in The Gypsies of Eastern Europe, ME Sharpe Inc, London, p.46
  22. Jump up ^ Gabrielle Tyrnauer, "The Fate of the Gypsies During the Holocaust", p.19, in The Gypsies of Eastern Europe, ME Sharpe Inc, London, p.47
  23. Jump up ^ Helen Fein, Accounting for Genocide, Free Press, 1979, pp. 140-1
  24. Jump up ^ US Holocaust Memorial Museum. "Nuremberg Laws: Nazi Racial Policy 1935".
  25. Jump up ^ The Holocaust History Museum
  26. Jump up ^ [3]
  27. Jump up ^ Gilbert, Martin (2002). The Routledge Atlas of the Holocaust. Routledge, London & New York. ISBN 0-415-28145-8. (ref Map 182 p 141 with deaths by country & Map 301 p 232)
  28. Jump up ^ Sinti and Roma, US Holocaust Memorial Museum
  29. Jump up ^ Ian Hancock, We Are the Romani People, 2002, University of Hertfordshire Press, p. 48
  30. Jump up ^ "Ringelblum’s Diary", Yad Vashem
  31. Jump up ^ Arad, Yitzhak (1999). Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps. Indiana University Press. pp. 152–153. ISBN 978-0-2532-1305-1.
  32. Jump up ^ Headland, Ronald (1992). Messages of Murder: A Study of the Reports of the Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and the Security Service, 1941-1943. Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press. p. 63. ISBN 978-0-8386-3418-9. Retrieved 2010-02-17.
  33. Jump up ^ Snyder, Timothy (2010). Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. Basic Books. p. 276. ISBN 978-0-465-00239-9. Retrieved 2011-06-30.
  34. Jump up ^ "The Trial of German Major War Criminals Sitting at Nuremberg, Germany 7th January to 19th January, 1946". The Nizkor Project. 2009. Retrieved 17 February 2010.
  35. ^ Jump up to: a b c http://www1.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/microsoft%20word%20-%206324.pdf
  36. Jump up ^ Ian Hancock said there was no record of any Roma killed in Denmark or Greece, The History of the Holocaust: A Handbook and Dictionary, Edelheit & Edelheit, Westview, 1995 p.458
  37. Jump up ^ Gilbert, Martin (2004). The Second World War: A Complete History. Clearwater, Fla: Owl Books. p. 474. ISBN 0-8050-7623-9.
  38. Jump up ^ Sybil Milton, "The Holocaust: The Gypsies", p.172 in Century of Genocide, 3rd edition, ed. Samuel Totten & William S. Parsons, Routledge, Oxford, 2009.
  39. Jump up ^ Jasenovac, at the Jewish Virtual Library.
  40. Jump up ^ Vatican Bank Claims
  41. Jump up ^ Crowe, David M. (2000). The Roma Holocaust in Schwartz, Bernard; DeCoste, Frederick Charles (Eds.) The Holocaust's ghost: writings on art, politics, law and education. Edmonton, Alberta, Canada: University of Alberta Press. pp. 178–210. ISBN 0-88864-337-3.
  42. Jump up ^ United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. "Genocide of European Roma (Gypsies), 1939-1945". Holocaust Encyclopedia. Retrieved August 9, 2011.
  43. Jump up ^ The report of the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania (PDF), from Yad Vashem
  44. Jump up ^ "Anne as a child"—see part about Mrs. de Wiek and "gypsy girls"
  45. Jump up ^ Angus Fraser, The Gypsies, page 267, Blackwell, Oxford, 1992
  46. Jump up ^ Angus Fraser, The Gypsies, page 268, Blackwell, Oxford, 1992
  47. Jump up ^ "Faculty Profile". The University of Texas at Austin. Retrieved 24 April 2013.
  48. Jump up ^ Hancock, Ian (2000). "Downplaying the Porrajmos: The Trend to Minimize the Romani Holocaust". Patrin (Sept 23). Retrieved July 15, 2011.
  49. Jump up ^ http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NAZIS.TAB1.1.GIF, Statistics of Democide, RJ Rummel, LIT Verlag Berlin-Hamburg-Münster, 1998
  50. Jump up ^ Line 1881, http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB14.1D.GIF, Statistics of Democide, RJ Rummel, LIT Verlag Berlin-Hamburg-Münster, 1998
  51. Jump up ^ See the estimates listed at lines 195-201 in Table 9.1, Statistics of Democide, RJ Rummel, LIT Verlag Berlin-Hamburg-Münster, 1998
  52. Jump up ^ Niewyk, Donald L. The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust, Columbia University Press, 2000, ISBN 0-231-11200-9 Page 422
  53. Jump up ^ Danger! Educated Gypsy, page 243, University of Hertfordshire Press, 2010
  54. Jump up ^ Essay "The Suffering of the Roma in Jasenovac", 2006 in Lituchy, Jasenovac and the Holocaust in Yugoslavia, Jasenovac Research Institute
  55. Jump up ^ Danger! Educated Gypsy, pages 244–5, University of Hertfordshire Press, 2010
  56. Jump up ^ Brzezinski, Zbigniew (2010). Out of Control: Global Turmoil on the Eve of the 21st Century. Simon and Schuster. p. 10. ISBN 9781439143803.
  57. ^ Jump up to: a b Harran, Marilyn J. (2000). The Holocaust Chronicles: A History in Words and Pictures. Lincolnwood, IL: Publications International. p. 384. ISBN 0-7853-2963-3. Full text
  58. Jump up ^ Müller-Hill, Benno (1998). Murderous science: elimination by scientific selection of Jews, Gypsies, and others in Germany, 1933-1945. Plainview, N.Y: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press. p. 22. ISBN 0-87969-531-5.
  59. Jump up ^ "Auschwitz 'Angel of Death' Josef Mengele's Unknown Writings to be Auctioned" June 30, 2011 /PRNewswire: http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/auschwitz-angel-of-death-josef-mengeles-unknown-writings-to-be-auctioned-124801054.html
  60. ^ Jump up to: a b Berenbaum, Michael (1993). The world must know: The history of the Holocaust as told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Boston: Little, Brown. pp. 194–5. ISBN 0-316-09134-0.
  61. Jump up ^ Wolfgang Wippermann, “Compensation withheld: The denial of reparations to the Sinti and Roma,” in The Gypsies during the Second World War: The Final Chapter, ed. Donald Kenrick (Hertfordshire: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2006), 171.
  62. Jump up ^ Martin Gilbert, Second World War, page 734, Guild Publishing, London, 1989
  63. Jump up ^ Martin Gilbert, Second World War, page 735, Guild Publishing, London, 1989
  64. Jump up ^ Zoltan D., Barany (2002). The East European gypsies: regime change, marginality, and ethnopolitics. Cambridge University Press. p. 265. ISBN 978-0-521-00910-2.
  65. Jump up ^ William A. Duna (University of Minnesota): Gypsies: A Persecuted Race. Gypsies in Nazi Germany
  66. Jump up ^ e.g. Nazi Policies Toward Roma and Sinti, 1933-1945, Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, 1992; Chapter 5, "The Holocaust: the Gypsies" in Century of genocide: critical essays and eyewitness accounts By Samuel Totten, William S. Parsons, Israel W. Charny, Routledge, Oxford, 2004
  67. Jump up ^ Roma, Sinti und Jenische. Schweizerische Zigeunerpolitik zur Zeit des Nationalsozialismus. (English: "Roma, Sinti and Jenische. Swiss Gypsy-politics at the time of National Socialism") (PDF).
  68. ^ Jump up to: a b Ben Judah (July–August 2011). "Invisible Roma". Moment Magazine. Retrieved June 30, 2011.
  69. Jump up ^ The Porajmos in Roma Memory in Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, Geschichtswerkstatt-europa.
  70. Jump up ^ "Romanian Leader Apologizes to Gypsies", USA Today, 23 October 2007
  71. Jump up ^ "Violence against Roma: Romania", Human Rights First
  72. Jump up ^ Evans, Stephen (2011-01-27). "Roma appeal against discrimination on Holocaust Day". BBC News. Retrieved 27 January 2011.
  73. Jump up ^ "Roma Holocaust survivor tells German parliament of 'forgotten' victims". Deutsche Welle. 2011-01-27. Retrieved 27 January 2011.
  74. Jump up ^ http://2august.eu/
  75. Jump up ^ [4]
  76. Jump up ^ Nyiri, Mary (2010). "It's Only a Movie: Film Review of Kokoro (Freedom)". KinoCritics.
  77. Jump up ^ LG (Feb 23, 2010). "Yvette Lundy, inspire un film à Tony Gatlif". France 3.
  78. Jump up ^ Ian Hancock & Dileep Karanth, Danger! Educated Gypsy, Univ of Hertfordshire Press, 2010, p.256
Bibliography
  • Bársony, János (2008). "Facts and Debates: The Roma Holocaust". In János Bársony and Ágnes Daróczi , eds., Pharrajimos: The Fate of the Roma During the Holocaust (pp. 1–12). New York, NY: International Debate Education Association. ISBN 978-1-932-71630-6.
  • Hancock, Ian (1991). "In David Crowe and John Kolsti, eds., The Gypsies of Eastern Europe (pp. 11–30)". Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. ISBN 978-0-873-32671-1. |chapter= ignored (help)
  • ——— (1997). "A Glossary of Romani Terms". American Journal of Comparative Law 45 (2): 329–344. JSTOR 840853.
  • Heuss, Herbert (1997). "German policies of Gypsy persecution (1870–1945)". In Karola Fings, Herbert Heuss and Frank Sparing, From "Race Science" to the Camps: The Gypsies during the Second World War, Vol. 1 (pp. 15–37). Hertfordshire: University of Hertfordshire Press. ISBN 978-0-900-45878-1.
  • Jessee, Erin. "Nazi Atrocities: The Genocide of the Roma/Sinti." Lecture at Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, February 3, 2010.
  • Matras, Yaron (2004). "A conflict of paradigms: review article". Romani Studies 14 (2): 193–219. doi:10.3828/rs.2004.7.
  • Sparing, Frank (1997). "The Gypsy Camps: The creation, character and meaning of an instrument for the persecution of Sinti and Romanies under National Socialism". In Karola Fings, Herbert Heuss and Frank Sparing, From "Race Science" to the Camps: The Gypsies during the Second World War, Vol. 1 (pp. 40–70). Hertfordshire: University of Hertfordshire Press. ISBN 978-0-900-45878-1.
  • Wolfgang Wippermann. “Compensation withheld: The denial of reparations to the Sinti and Roma.” In The Gypsies during the Second World War: The Final Chapter, ed. Donald Kenrick, 171-177. Hertfordshire: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2006.

Further reading[edit]

External links[edit]

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