Roma and Sinti

The Roma and Sinti, the European peoples often grouped under the older and now-disparaged term Gypsies, were targeted by the Nazi regime as a racial-biological enemy and murdered in numbers that the historiography continues to refine. The most-cited figure for the European Roma and Sinti murdered between 1939 and 1945 is around 250,000 to 500,000, with the most rigorous national totals giving a figure at the higher end. The Romani name for the destruction is the Porajmos, the devouring; the Sinti use Samudaripen, the murder of all. The persecution was state-directed, ideologically grounded in Nazi racial theory, and culminated in mass shootings, deportations to extermination camps, and the dedicated Gypsy Family Camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The post-war recognition of the Porajmos took longer than that of any other Nazi-era genocide.

Roma and Sinti before 1933

The Roma had migrated into Europe from the Indian subcontinent in waves between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries. By the early twentieth century they were dispersed across the continent, with the largest populations in central, south-eastern and eastern Europe (Romania, Hungary, the Soviet Union, the Balkans, Czechoslovakia, Poland) and smaller populations in western Europe. The Sinti, the German and central European branch of the Roma, had been settled in German lands for several centuries by 1933 and were largely sedentary, often working as artisans, musicians, traders, agricultural labourers or small-scale livestock dealers. The total European Roma and Sinti population in 1939 was approximately 1 to 1.5 million, with the largest national populations in Romania (around 250,000), the Soviet Union (around 200,000), Hungary (around 100,000), Yugoslavia (around 100,000), Czechoslovakia (around 100,000) and Germany (around 25,000 Sinti and 5,000 Roma).

Anti-Romani prejudice was not a Nazi invention. Discrimination, periodic expulsions and police harassment had been features of Romani life in much of Europe for centuries. The Bavarian state had operated a Central Office for the Combating of the Gypsy Nuisance since 1899; the German Reich Criminal Police Office had its own Gypsy Office from the 1920s. The 1926 Bavarian “Law for the Combating of Gypsies, Travellers and the Work-Shy” required Roma to register with the police, prohibited their movement without permits, and authorised their internment if they were unable to prove regular employment. Other German Länder had similar legislation. The infrastructure of pre-Nazi anti-Romani policing was substantial.

1933 to 1939: from policing to racial classification

The Nazi regime built on this existing infrastructure. The Nuremberg Laws of September 1935 were applied to Roma and Sinti from 1936 alongside Jews, classifying both groups as racial enemies of the Reich. The Reich Central Office for the Combating of the Gypsy Nuisance (RZB) was established in 1936 under Robert Ritter, a psychiatrist whose Racial Hygiene and Demographic Biology Research Unit (RHF) at the Reich Health Office became the principal site of pseudo-scientific Nazi research on Roma and Sinti. Ritter’s office produced racial classification cards on around 24,000 individuals between 1936 and 1944, classifying them as Z (Zigeuner, full Gypsy), ZM (Zigeunermischling, mixed Gypsy), or NZ (non-Gypsy). The classifications were the operational basis for subsequent deportation decisions.

Sinti and Roma were excluded from the German Wehrmacht in 1937, although individual Sinti who had been serving were retained until 1941. They were excluded from German schools in 1938. They were sent to concentration camps from 1937 in increasing numbers, particularly to Sachsenhausen, Dachau and Buchenwald. The internal “Gypsy camps” established in many German cities, including the Marzahn camp on the outskirts of Berlin (originally established for the 1936 Olympics to remove Roma from public view) became staging points for later deportations.

1939 to 1945: deportation and murder

The systematic murder of European Roma and Sinti was directed in three principal forms.

The first was mass shooting by Einsatzgruppen and police units during the war in the Soviet Union. The Einsatzgruppen reports document mass shootings of Romani populations alongside Jewish ones from August 1941 onwards. The total Soviet Romani death toll has been estimated at around 30,000, although the figure is among the most contested in the historiography because the Einsatzgruppen reports often grouped Roma with Jews under the heading Asoziale or Volksfremde, and the underlying numbers are not always recoverable.

The second was deportation to extermination camps. The largest single operation was the Auschwitz Gypsy Family Camp (BIIe), established in February 1943. Approximately 23,000 Roma and Sinti were deported to BIIe between February 1943 and August 1944, mostly from Germany, Austria, Bohemia, Moravia and the occupied Polish territories. Conditions in the family camp were severe; around 4,000 prisoners died of disease, starvation and the medical experiments carried out by Josef Mengele on Romani children. On 16 May 1944 the SS attempted to liquidate the camp; the prisoners, alerted to the plan, refused to leave their barracks and fought back with improvised weapons. The SS withdrew that night. Most of the work-capable prisoners were transferred to other camps over the following weeks. The remaining 4,300 prisoners, mostly women, children and the elderly, were gassed on the night of 2 to 3 August 1944. The date is now commemorated as Roma Holocaust Memorial Day.

The third was murder by client and allied regimes. The Croatian Ustasha killed an estimated 25,000 to 50,000 Roma in concentration camps including Jasenovac. The Romanian regime under Ion Antonescu deported around 25,000 Roma to Transnistria, of whom around 11,000 died of starvation, disease and exposure. Smaller-scale persecutions occurred in Hungary (mostly under Arrow Cross rule from October 1944), Slovakia, and Bulgaria.

Afterwards

The post-war recognition of the Porajmos was the slowest of any Nazi-era genocide. The West German federal government did not formally recognise the Roma and Sinti as a victim group eligible for compensation under Wiedergutmachung until 1982. The Holocaust historiography, dominated through the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s by accounts of the Jewish destruction, treated the Romani persecution as a marginal subject. The original RHF racial classification archive, retained by the West German police after the war, was used into the 1970s to deny compensation claims from Roma survivors on the grounds that their pre-war detentions had been “asocial” rather than racial.

The change came in the 1980s. The German federal government’s recognition of 1982 followed sustained advocacy by Romani organisations including the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma, founded in 1982 under the leadership of Romani Rose. The Memorial to the Sinti and Roma of Europe Murdered under National Socialism was unveiled in Berlin in October 2012 (designed by Dani Karavan, opposite the Reichstag). The Documentation and Cultural Centre of German Sinti and Roma in Heidelberg, opened in 1997, is the principal institution for the study of the persecution. The 2 August Roma Holocaust Memorial Day was officially recognised by the European Parliament in 2015.

The figure of European Roma and Sinti murdered remains under continuing revision as national archives are studied. The estimate of 250,000 has been the conservative figure for several decades; figures of 500,000 or higher are now standard in the academic literature, with a smaller number of historians arguing for figures up to one million. The uncertainty reflects the fragmentary nature of the records, the dispersal of the deaths across multiple operations and jurisdictions, and the systematic post-war indifference that left many of the records uncollected for decades.

See also

Sources

  • Guenter Lewy, The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies, Oxford University Press, 2000
  • Donald Kenrick and Grattan Puxon, The Destiny of Europe’s Gypsies, Heinemann, 1972 (revised editions through 2009)
  • Sybil Milton, “Gypsies and the Holocaust”, in The History Teacher, vol 24 no 4, 1991
  • Michael Zimmermann, Rassenutopie und Genozid: Die nationalsozialistische “Lösung der Zigeunerfrage”, Hamburger Edition, 1996
  • Ian Hancock, We Are the Romani People, University of Hertfordshire Press, 2002
  • Romani Rose (ed), The National Socialist Genocide of the Sinti and Roma, Documentation and Cultural Centre of German Sinti and Roma, 1995 (catalogue of the permanent exhibition in Heidelberg)
  • Anton Weiss-Wendt (ed), The Nazi Genocide of the Roma: Reassessment and Commemoration, Berghahn Books, 2013
  • USHMM, “Genocide of European Roma (Gypsies) 1939-1945”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org
  • Documentation and Cultural Centre of German Sinti and Roma, https://www.sintiundroma.org
  • Memorial to the Sinti and Roma of Europe Murdered under National Socialism, Berlin, https://www.stiftung-denkmal.de