Romani Holocaust

• 1. Introduction

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  The Romani Holocaust was a genocide carried out against the Roma and Sinti people of Europe during World War II. Between 250,000 and 500,000 of them were killed by Nazi Germany and its collaborators. Some scholars place the death toll considerably higher. Yet for decades after the war ended, many governments refused to acknowledge that any of it had happened at all.

  The Romani people had lived across Europe for centuries. They worked as craftsmen, musicians, artisans. They were also stigmatized, surveilled, and controlled long before Hitler came to power. The apparatus of persecution that the Nazis built rested on foundations laid by the German Empire and the Weimar Republic. Understanding where those foundations came from, and how they hardened into mass murder, is the story this documentary will follow.

  On the 2nd of August 1944, SS troops moved against the last surviving Roma in the Gypsy family camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Nearly 2,898 people, most of them ill, elderly, women, and children, were murdered in the gas chambers. This single night is now commemorated as Roma Memorial Day. The road to that night was long, and it began far earlier than most people realize.

• 2. Roots of Persecution

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  In 1899, the Imperial Police Headquarters in Munich established a dedicated surveillance body called the Information Services on Romani by the Security Police. Its sole purpose was to compile identification cards, fingerprints, and photographs of Roma across Germany. This was not the action of an extremist fringe. It was a government institution, built in an era when scientific racism and Social Darwinism had given the German public what they believed were biological justifications for prejudice.

  János Bársony, a historian of the Romani civil rights movement in Hungary, noted that industrial development in this period destroyed the traditional livelihoods of Roma craftsmen and artisans, leading to the disintegration of their communities and their social marginalization. As their economic footing collapsed, the state moved to fill the void with restriction and surveillance rather than support.

  By 1904, Prussia had adopted a formal resolution calling for regulation of Romani movement. By 1911, the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior organized a conference in Munich explicitly to coordinate action against what it called the "Gypsy problem". The 1926 Law for the Fight Against Gypsies, Vagrants and the Workshy in Bavaria stipulated that Romani groups avoid the region entirely, and required those already living there to remain under such strict control that, in the law's own language, there would be "no longer anything to fear from them."

  Herbet Heuss noted that this Bavarian law became the model for other German states and even for neighboring countries. In 1927, Prussia required all Roma to carry identity cards. Eight thousand people were processed under that law, subjected to mandatory fingerprinting and photography. By 1929, the state of Hessen had proposed a "Law for the Fight Against the Gypsy Menace", and the Centre for the Fight Against Gypsies in Germany opened the same year, empowered to arrest Romani people on an arbitrary basis as a crime prevention measure. Every mechanism the Nazis would later use at scale was already in place before they came to power.

• 3. Race as Weapon

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  On the 15th of September 1935, the Nuremberg Laws stripped Jews of their German citizenship and banned marriage between Jews and Germans. Less than three months later, on the 26th of November 1935, Nazi Germany extended those laws to the Roma. Romani people lost their right to vote on the 7th of March 1936, in lockstep with the Jews.

  The mechanism driving this expansion was not improvised hatred. It was bureaucratic science. In 1936, the Nazis established the Racial Hygiene and Demographic Biology Research Unit, headed by Robert Ritter and his assistant Eva Justin. Their mandate was to study the "Gypsy question" and provide data for a future Reich Gypsy Law. After fieldwork in the spring of 1936, including interviews and medical examinations, their unit concluded that most Romani posed a danger to German racial purity and should be deported or eliminated.

  Reichsfuhrer-SS Heinrich Himmler had a peculiar fascination with what he called the Aryan origins of the Roma. He drew a sharp line between "settled" assimilated Roma and "unsettled" nomadic Roma. He proposed deporting a small number of those he considered "pure-blooded" Gypsies to a reservation, as the United States had done to Native Americans, where they could live according to their nomadic tradition undisturbed. Himmler's own written position was that the aim of state policy must be "the physical separation of Gypsydom from the German nation, the prevention of miscegenation."

  By 1938, Himmler issued an order making it law to register all Roma including those of mixed descent, and anyone who "traveled around in a Gypsy fashion" over the age of six. Although the Nazis claimed to believe that Roma had originally been Aryan, their official position was that over time the Roma had become mixed-race, placing them in the category of "non-Aryan" and of an "alien race". The contradiction was irrelevant to the outcome. Classification as alien was sufficient grounds for murder.

• 4. The Machinery of Murder

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  In December 1942, Himmler signed the order to deport all Sinti and Roma from the Greater Germanic Reich to Auschwitz-Birkenau. A specially established compound there was designated the "Gypsy family camp". Sybil Milton, a scholar of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, has speculated that Hitler himself was involved in the decision to deport all Romani to Auschwitz, because Himmler issued the order just six days after meeting with Hitler. For that meeting, Himmler had prepared a report titled "Fuhrer: Aufstellung wer sind Zigeuner."

  Some 23,000 Roma, Sinti, and Lalleri were deported to Auschwitz altogether. In the camp they wore brown or black triangular patches, the symbol for "asocials", or green patches, the symbol for professional criminals. Less frequently they wore the letter "Z", from Zigeuner, the German word for gypsy. At least 19,000 of those 23,000 were murdered there.

  During Operation Reinhard, which ran from 1941 to 1943, an undetermined number of Roma were also killed in extermination camps including Treblinka. In France, between 3,000 and 6,000 Roma were deported to camps including Dachau, Ravensbrucke, and Buchenwald. In the Soviet Union, the Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing squads, swept from village to village. Timothy Snyder notes that there were 8,000 documented cases of Roma murdered by the Einsatzgruppen in the Soviet Union alone, and that number likely represents only a fraction of the actual total.

  At the Einsatzgruppen Trial after the war, Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski stated, in return for immunity from prosecution, that the principal task of the Einsatzgruppen had been "the annihilation of the Jews, Gypsies, and political commissars." In Serbia, Harald Turner reported to his superiors in August 1942 that Serbia was the only country in which "the Jewish question and the Gypsy question have been solved."

• 5. Resistance and Survival

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  In May 1944, SS guards at Auschwitz-Birkenau attempted to liquidate the Gypsy family camp and met what one account describes as "unexpected resistance". When ordered to come out, the Roma inside refused. They had been warned in advance and had armed themselves with iron pipes, shovels, and other tools. The SS did not confront them directly and withdrew for several months.

  The delay bought time but not survival. After transferring as many as 3,000 Roma who were capable of forced labor to other camps, the SS moved against the remaining 2,898 inmates on the 2nd of August 1944. Nearly all of them, most of them sick, elderly, women, and children, were murdered in the gas chambers of Birkenau.

  Resistance also took other forms and operated in different registers depending on location. In Greece, the Romani population had been taken hostage and prepared for deportation to Auschwitz; they were saved by appeals from the Archbishop of Athens and the Greek Prime Minister. In Crimea, Muslim Roma were protected by the Crimean Tatars, though they later suffered a different fate when Stalin deported them to Siberia. In Norway in 1934-68 Romani, most of them Norwegian citizens, were denied entry into the country. By the winter of 1943-1944-66 members of the Josef, Karoli, and Modis families had been interned in Belgium and deported to Auschwitz. Only four members of that group survived.

  In the Independent State of Croatia, the Ustase regime virtually annihilated the country's Romani population, killing an estimated 25,000 and deporting around 26,000 more. Tens of thousands were killed in the Jasenovac concentration camp. On the 24th of April 1945, Ustase soldiers murdered between 43 and 47 Sinti and Roma members of a traveling circus named "Braca Winter" as they camped in Kraj Donji. The event is known as the Hrastina Massacre and is considered perhaps the last mass murder of Sinti and Roma in Europe during the war. In 1977, a statue was erected in the local cemetery at Marija Gorica to honor the victims.

• 6. The Long Fight for Recognition

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  After the war ended, the German government paid reparations to Jewish survivors. It paid nothing to the Romani. The Interior Ministry of Wuerttemberg argued that Romani people had been persecuted not for racial reasons but because of what it described as an "asocial and criminal record."

  Restitution became possible only in small amounts beginning in 1979, when the West German Federal Parliament declared that the Nazi persecution of Roma had in fact been based on racial grounds. West Germany formally recognized the genocide only in 1982, when Chancellor Helmut Schmidt made that acknowledgment in a speech. The European Roma Rights Centre later noted that in East Germany, the persecution of Sinti and Roma under National Socialism had been largely taboo throughout the entire history of the GDR. At official commemorations of the liberation of Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, and Ravensbrucke, Sinti and Roma were not mentioned as concentration camp prisoners, alongside homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, and those classified as asocial.

  In August 2016, Germany and the Czech Republic reached an agreement under which each of the handful of surviving Porajmos victims in the Czech Republic would receive 2,500 euros. The agreement was described as a symbolic acknowledgment, but was also criticized for its delay and for the low sum involved. That agreement, the European Roma Rights Centre noted, had already prompted renewed claims from Romani victims from the former Yugoslavia and other regions.

  Sociologist and Roma activist Nico Fortuna offered an explanation for why recognition came so slowly, one rooted not just in institutional denial but in the nature of the trauma itself. He described how, for many Roma, deportation was experienced as something almost expected: "Of course I was deported. I'm Roma; these things happen to a Roma." Ian Hancock, director of the Romani Archives and Documentation Center at the University of Texas at Austin, has observed a reluctance among Roma to acknowledge their victimization, noting that Roma are "traditionally not disposed to keeping alive the terrible memories from their history" and that for them, "nostalgia is a luxury for others."

• 7. Naming the Genocide

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  Ian Hancock introduced the term porajmos, meaning "devouring" or "destruction" in some dialects of the Romani language, in the early 1990s. He had chosen the term, coined by a Kalderash Rom, from suggestions made during an informal conversation in 1993. The word is derived from the verb root porrav-, with the abstract-forming nominal ending -imos from the Vlax Romani dialect.

  The term has never gained universal acceptance within the Roma community itself. In various dialects, porajmos overlaps with the word poravipe, which means "violation" and "rape", a meaning some Roma consider offensive and deeply inappropriate for naming the genocide. Janos Barsony and Agnes Daroczi, pioneering organizers of the Romani civil rights movement in Hungary, prefer the term Pharrajimos, meaning "cutting up", "fragmentation", or "destruction". They argue that porrajmos is "unclean" and "unpronounceable in the Roma community."

  Balkan Romani activists have put forward a different word entirely: samudaripen, meaning "mass killing" or "murder of all". It was first introduced by linguist Marcel Courthiade in the 1970s in Yugoslavia in the context of Auschwitz and Jasenovac. It is a neologism of sa, the Romani word for "all", and mudaripen, meaning murder. The International Romani Union now uses this term, though Hancock has dismissed it on the grounds that it does not conform to Romani language morphology.

  The dispute over terminology is not merely academic. What a community calls its own catastrophe shapes how that catastrophe is remembered, taught, and mourned. The argument over the name continues to this day, as does the broader project of commemoration. On the 27th of January 2011, Zoni Weisz became the first Roma guest of honour at Germany's official Holocaust Memorial Day ceremony. He was Dutch-born and had escaped a Nazi round-up as a child when a policeman allowed him to flee. The day's program also recalled the Nazi persecution of the Sinto boxer Johann Trollmann, whose story stands as a reminder that the Roma the Nazis targeted were not abstractions but named individuals with lives, skills, and faces.