PORRAJMOS
A Selection of Essays on the Romani Genocide
Ian Hancock
T
his is a compendium of various papers, published and
unpublished, that I have written over the past few years on the
subject of the Porrajmos—the Romani genocide in Nazi-occupied
Germany. They are predictably repetitive in places, though each was
intended to be new for the different audiences for which they were
intended. Only by repeating our message, will it eventually find its rightful
place in the historical record.
In the past few years, the perspective on the Holocaust has changed
somewhat. Firstly, much more is being learnt about the fate of its Romani
victims specifically, and the fact that they, as well as the Jews, were
singled out as the targets of a Final Solution; eradication as a people. We
know far more now about the Nazis’ policies directed at the Roma than we
did when my first essay was published a quarter century ago; we know
more about numbers of losses; we have located a frightening number of
previously undocumented killing centres; we have recorded the
testimonies of many Romani survivors. Secondly, lessons learnt from the
Holocaust have stimulated a growing focus on genocide generally;
certainly those lessons have not been learnt well.
I have argued strongly that it is this one factor—genocide—that
separates Jews and Romanies from all other groups that were victimized in
the Third Reich. And it is this factor which must remove Romanies from
being classified simply as “others” in future historiographies and school
textbooks teaching our children about the Holocaust.
The first essay, “Gypsies, Jews and the Holocaust,” was the first
that I published, in 1987, but otherwise the essays do not appear in
chronological order.
Ian Hancock
Buda, 2012
1
Contents
1
page 4
“Gypsies, Jews and the Holocaust,” Shmate: A Journal of Progressive
Jewish Thought 17:6-15 (1987).
2
page 21
“The Roots of antigypsyism,” in G.J. Colijn & Macrica Sachs Littell
(eds.), Confronting the Holocaust: A mandate for the 21st Century,
Lanham: University Press of America, 1997, pp. 19-49.
3
page 46
“The Romanies in the Holocaust” in Jonathan C. Friedman, ed., The
Routledge History of the Holocaust, London & New York, 2011, pp. 375384.
4
page 60
“The Final Solution of the Gypsy Question.” Previously unpublished.
5
page 64
Useful quotes for students of the Porrajmos. Originally appended to 9,
below.
6
page 71
“Romanies in Europe: a chronology leading to the Holocaust,” in David
Crowe and John Kolsti (eds.), The Gypsies in Eastern Europe. Armonk:
Sharpe & Co., 1991. Pp. 11-30.
7
page 96
On numbers. Originally appended to 11, below.
8
page 101
Uniqueness of the victims: Gypsies, Jews and the Holocaust,” Without
Prejudice: International Review of Racial Discrimination 1(2):45-67
(1988).
2
9
page 126
“1938,” paper delivered at the Applying the Lessons of the Holocaust:
1938-2008, Kristallnacht Seventy Years LaterInternational Seminar
Organized by l’Association Verbe et Lumière -Vigilance, The Simon
Wiesenthal Centre and UNESCO, Paris, November 18th 2008. Previously
unpublished.
10
page 134
Miriam Novitch, appended to 9, above.
11
page 138
“Responses to the Porrajmos: The Romani Holocaust,” in Alan Rosenbaum,
(ed.), 1995. Is the Holocaust Unique? Boulder: The Westview Press, pp. 39-64.
Also in Roma, 43:27-44, 1995.
12
page 181
“Elie Wiesel, Simon Wiesenthal, Romanies and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial
Council,” The Holocaust in History and Memory, 4:105-123 (2011).
13
page 196
“Romanies and the Holocaust: a reevaluation and an overview,” in Dan
Stone (ed.), The Historiography of the Holocaust, Palgrave-Macmillan,
New York 2004, pp. 383-396
14
page 214
“Downplaying the Porrajmos: the treend to minimize the Romani Holocaust,” the
Journal of Genocide Research, 3(1):79-85 (2001).
15
page 224
“On the interpretation of a word: Porrajmos as Holocaust,” in Acton, Thomas, &
Michael Hayes, eds., Travellers, Gypsies, Roma: The Demonisation of
Difference, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars’ Press, pp. 53-57. 2006.
3
1
GYPSIES, JEWS AND THE HOLOCAUST
One of the most important issues which have faced the Gypsy people
since 1945 is that of obtaining fair recognition for the Romani victims of
the Holocaust. “The Nazis killed between a fourth and a third of all
Gypsies living in Europe, and as many as 70 percent in those areas where
Nazi control had been established longest”1. Heinz Heger2 drew attention
to the similarity in these overall losses to those of the Jewish victims:
How many people in Britain and America today are aware that the
Gypsies of Europe were rounded up by the Nazis and sent to their
death in almost similar proportion to the Jews?
In a letter dated December 14th, 1984. to Elie Wiesel, Director of the U.S.
Holocaust Memorial Center. Simon Wiesenthal also drew attention to the
fact that
the Gypsies had been murdered [in a proportion] similar to the
Jews; about 80% of them in the area of the countries which were
occupied by the Nazi.
Why is it then, that despite these facts, Gypsies have been virtually
excluded from Holocaust-related affairs since the end of the war? None
was called to testify at the Nuremberg Trials, and war crime reparation has
been practically non-existent. Not one Gypsy was invited to be among the
65 members appointed to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, when
President Carter established it in 1979, and despite intensive efforts to gain
representation since then, the Office of Presidential Personnel voted in
Spring, 1986 once again to exclude Gypsies from the Council. There are
several Holocaust Memorial Centers around the country now, but none has
given any space to the Gypsies and, sadly, more than one have expressed
their lack of desire to do so.
The issue is a sensitive one, and in some respects involves the
contemporary relationship between Gypsies and Jews. It is that
relationship that I want to examine here. The fact is that only Jews and
Gypsies were singled out for extermination on racial grounds by the Nazis,
4
only Jews and Gypsies being considered genetically so “manifestly
tainted” as to pose a threat to German racial purity, and to warrant their
attempted complete annihilation. A Nazi Party proclamation in 1938 stated
that the Gypsy problem was mit Bestimmtheit eine Frage der Rasse
(“categorically a matter of race”), and was to be dealt with in that light; in
the following year Johannes Behrendt, speaking for the Party, declared
that Austossung ohne Zogern (“elimination without hesitation”) of the
entire Gypsy population was to be instigated immediately. At the U.S.
Government’s War Crimes Tribunal Ohlendorf, who was responsible for
the murder of thousands of Gypsies and Jews throughout southern Russia
and the Ukraine,
. . . told Musmanno that he did his duty as best he could at all
times. Asked if he killed other than Jews, Ohlendorf admitted he
did: Gypsies. “On what basis did you kill Gypsies?” “It was the
same as for Jews”, he replied. “Racial? Blood?” Ohlendorf
shrugged his shoulders. “There was no difference between Gypsies
and Jews”3
Anti-Gypsyism and anti-Semitism in Germany can be traced back for
centuries, of course, although legislation against Gypsies in the modern
period dates from at least 1899, when the Central Office for Fighting the
Gypsy Nuisance was established in Munich—a bureau not closed down
until 1970. “It is believed the police are continuing to use this bureau’s
records and local Gypsies are still protesting”4 The Weimar Constitution
of 1918, on the other hand, reaffirmed the equality of Jews with other
Germans in that year.5 By the 1920s, first in Bavaria and then in Prussia,
Gypsies were being systematically rounded up, photographed and
fingerprinted by the police6. Gypsies were being methodically incarcerated and sterilized as early as 1933, though “The Jews in Germany were
not arrested as a matter of general policy in the early years of the Nazi
regime”7, and an SS study group at that time recommended that Gypsies
be systematically rounded up and killed by drowning in ships taken out
into mid-ocean and sunk. Also in the same year, camps were being
established by the Nazis to contain Gypsies at Dachau, Dieselstrasse,
Mahrzan, and Vennhausen, though Jewish victims were not to be sent en
masse to any camps until later.
In 1936, anti-Gypsyism became globalized with the cooperation of
Interpol which, at the instigation of the Nazi Party, established its
International Center for the Fight Against the Gypsy Menace. In
Lithuania, the Gestapo locked a thousand Gypsies inside a synagogue until
they died of starvation; everywhere, Jews and Gypsies were being
murdered together. The criteria for classification as a Gypsy were twice as
strict as those later applied to Jews: if two of a person’s great-grandparents
were even part Gypsy, that person had too much Gypsy ancestry to be
allowed to live8. The Nuremberg Decree of 1935, however, defined a Jew
5
as a person having one Jewish grandparent, i.e. someone of one quarter
Jewish descent. If the criteria applied to the Jews had also been applied to
the Gypsies, nearly 20,000 Gypsy victims would have escaped being
murdered by the Nazis.
I have frequently made the point in my writings that the techniques
employed by the Nazis to deal with the Romani population did not end
with the downfall of the Third Reich. Official calls for deportation (by the
Polish government), sterilization (by the Czechoslovakian government)
and even extermination (by a representative of the British Parliament) of
the Romani population have been made in the last two decades alone. The
Czechoslovakian government’s plan for the “compulsory sterilization, as
an act of socialistic humanity” of its Gypsy population in 1976 has
resurfaced this year once more: Jozef Prokop, of the Government
Commission for the Problems of the Gypsy Populace, has published figures indicating that one in five Gypsies in that country is born mentally
defective, and that “regulation of the birthrate”, as well as placement in
“foster homes, special boarding schools and the like” for the others will be
implemented9. Mencius asked “Is there any difference between killing a
man with a knife, and killing him with misrule?”
These details are all documented; fuller references can be found in
Kenrick and Puxon (1972), Tyrnauer (1985), Hancock (1986) and
elsewhere. It is not my intention to provide a checklist of atrocities, or to
get into a comparison of the two situations. For me, it was just one
situation, and one in which we were all victims. I list these things,
lehavdel, simply because in my experience very few people seem to be
aware of them, and I want to get a few pertinent facts before the public;
we have a lot of catching up to do. A student of mine, knowing that I was
a Gypsy came to me not long ago, and said “Dr. Hancock, I never realized
that they tried to exterminate the Gypsies as well, in the Second World
War.” I told her that that certainly was the case. Her response was “I didn’t
know Gypsies were Jewish!” This kind of thing is hurtful to me, and it is
clear that something needs to be done about the lack of information which
underlies such misconceptions about the fate of Gypsies in the Holocaust.
There were many groups targeted in the Holocaust, and all of them
must be rightfully acknowledged, when the whole story is finally written.
Jews and Gypsies, the only two populations in Nazi territories of non-European origin, were seen in particular as a racial threat, and were
singled out for extermination because of this. But justification of the Final
Solution beyond that differed sharply for our two peoples: Jews were outsiders who had become a part of the fabric of the European economy, and
were resented for it. Gypsies, on the other hand, were outsiders who
refused to conform with European society, and even though this nonparticipation was much the result of anti-Gypsy prejudice, they too were to
have no place in the grand plan because of it. It is an irony that the earliest
persecutions of the Roma (the proper designation for the Gypsy people)
6
were socially motivated; since 1945 attempts have been made to revive
these arguments as justification for not paying war crimes reparations.
I am concerned with getting the details of the Romani Holocaust
before the public, and especially with trying to understand why there has
been such indifference to it, and with determining what can be done to
improve the situation. It should be clear that we have a bitterness and a
sorrow for our dead equal to that of the Jews, coupled with an anger at
being ignored for so long. The German government spokesman Gerold
Tandler, as recently as the 1970s, called our demands for war crimes
reparations “unreasonable” and “slander[ous]”10, while in in 1985 the
Mayor of the city of Darmstadt, Gunther Metzger, told the Central Council
of the German Sinti and Roma that they had “insulted the honor” of the
memory of the Holocaust by wishing to be associated with it!11. An article
in Time magazine indicated that “West Germany paid nearly $715 million
to Israel and various Jewish organizations, [although] Gypsies, as a group,
received nothing”12, and more recently, while “industrial concerns have
paid more than 58 million marks ($29 million) to Jewish forced laborers
and their families ... ‘absolutely none of the Gypsies have been paid so far
... Just like for the members of the Jewish minority, the program of
Extermination Through Work applied to the Sinti and Roma” also13”. The
article goes on to state that 700 German Gypsies have made notification of
claims for slave labor, to such companies as Daimler-Benz and Blaupunkt.
But Gypsies in Germany have learned that the conscience of guilt is
selective, and are adopting Jewish surnames in order to obtain work. The
example is given of a musician, who changed his Romani name, Kroner,
to Rosenburg: with a Gypsy name he had been out of work for months, but
with a new Jewish name he was highly employable14.
In May, 1984, the then director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial
Council, Professor Seymour Siegel told the Washington Post that our
attempts to obtain representation in that organization were
“cockamamie”15. He wondered too whether we really did constitute a
distinct ethnic people. When it was “a matter of race” that led to the
genocide of over half a million Rom, including some of my own relatives,
such remarks seem particularly callous—the moreso, coming from the
chairman of an institution created specifically to honor the memory of the
victims of Hitler’s madness. But the focus of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial
Council has been primarily Jewish since its inception. In his report, upon
which the Council was founded, Elie Wiesel defined the Holocaust as “the
systematic, bureaucratic extermination of six million Jews by the Nazis
and their collaborators”16, and stated that Jews were “certainly the first”
victims of the Holocaust, and that the Holocaust was “essentially a Jewish
event ... the Jewish people alone were destined to be totally annihilated,
they alone were totally alone” (loc. cit.). I felt very much alone reading
that. and had the sense of impotent invisibility that I have heard other
Gypsies express as well in similar circumstances. The Council has come
some way since then, however; its former acting director, Micah Naftalin,
7
has gone on record as stating that “the only other ethnic group [besides
Jews] marked also as a genocidal target was the Gypsies”17, and the fact of
the Gypsies being Hitler’s actual first victims has now become better
known. Yet Nobel Peace Prize winner Wiesel still felt it necessarv in his
address at the Romani Day Remembrance ceremony in Washington in
September, 1986, to emphasize to us that Jews were, nevertheless, “the
supreme victims” of the Holocaust. The question of who was or wasn’t
first, or who was or wasn’t supremely victimized, seems irrelevant. There
is no one-upmanship for suffering. As Margot Strom has said, “questions
about who the Holocaust belongs to—whether it’s only a Jewish
concern—are superficial”18.
The director of one Holocaust Memorial Center to whom I spoke
on the telephone assured me, evidently with no intent to offend, that she
believed Jews did not want to be associated with Gypsies in the Holocaust,
because they would “detract from its solemnity”. In that statement lies a
clue to our problem. In the eyes of the public, we are not a “solemn”
people. We are Gypsies—the stuff of Hallowe’en and fantasy, and Jewish
Americans are a part of that public too. New York sociologist Richard
Spears has suggested further19 that since Gypsies are perceived of in so
negative a way, there could exist for some people the notion that Nazi attempts to dispose of the population might have been justified, and by
demonstrating too much solidarity with them, other victimized groups
would be jeopardizing their own situation.
In Europe, the situation is different. There we have vigorous
Jewish support for our struggle. The Jugoslav Association of Jewish
Organizations has petitioned the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council to
appoint Gypsy representatives, and Vienna-based Simon Wiesenthal, for
example, has been an outspoken champion for the Gypsies. Miriam
Novitch, who directs the Beit Lohamei Haghetaot (Ghetto Fighters’
House) in Israel, and who has compiled one of the most extensive
collections of photographs and other materials documenting the Gypsy
Holocaust, has been similarly vocal. Helen Davis20 recounts with great
compassion Mengele’s experiments on a set of Gypsy twins in Auschwitz,
and of their mother finally killing them to put them out of their agony;
Shoshana Kalisch21 remembers lying huddled in silent terror in the same
camp as she listened to the Gypsies being taken away. “Feeling only my
sister’s and my heartbeats, I made up my mind not to scream when they
came for us. The Gypsies, I thought, had been screaming for me too”.
An increasing number of such accounts are coming to light; the
difference is that these people were there. Jewish survivors here in
America tend to be similarly sympathetic, because Gypsies were a part of
their real experience. The indifference comes, in the main, from younger
people in this country, who have no first-hand understanding of the
Holocaust and whose prejudices against Gypsies are those shared by the
general population, what has been called in recent Jewish writing “the
arrogance of the first-born” generation or survivors’ children in the United
8
States. American Jews have almost certainly not been as responsive as a
result of the far less conspicuous cultural presence of Gypsies in the
United States, and the consequent reliance on the stereotype. Gypsies are
also less in evidence in a country which is made up of ethnic and racial
minorities; in addition they tend to disguise their ethnicity here. While this
invites less harassment of the Romani population, it also serves to prolong
some of the negative aspects of our situation: the poor awareness of our
fate in the Holocaust, for example.
Only four Jewish Holocaust-related organizations in the United
States, out of some forty-eight approached by representatives of the World
Romani Union, including an organization of survivors’ children, have
bothered to respond to us, even after repeated attempts to open a dialogue
with several of them. The gentile population (“gentile” has also been
traditionally used in the Romani context to mean “non-Gypsy”) which, by
and large, is responsible for the popular image of our people, must
drastically revise its perceptions of Gypsies. Small as it has been up until
now, most of the outside interest in the Romani Holocaust has been
Jewish, not gentile; after all. Jews don’t need educating about the
Holocaust as well as about Gypsies, unlike the rest of the population,
which has two stories to learn. This essay is a plea for continued Jewish
involvement in getting our story before the public, at least as far as the
Holocaust is concerned. The rest we must do ourselves. Motivation by individuals to exclude Gypsies from the Holocaust has very often been
rooted in prejudice, and in their prejudice such individuals reveal
themselves to be victims of the media and the written word.
Thanks to the fictional stereotype, everyone knows about Gypsies.
They travel from place to place in wagons, stealing babies or chickens, if
they’re not playing violins around the campfire. They wear earrings and
bandanas, and hedgehogs are their staple food. What, then, about the head
of a psychiatric clinic in one New England town, or the banker in the same
city, or the minister in Chicago, who are Gypsies? What about the mayor
of a city in Washington State or the professor of education at a university
in New Mexico, or the director of one of Minneapolis’ largest music
publishing companies, all of whom are Gypsies too?22 The public has been
weaned for so long on the popular image of the Gypsy, that it finds it hard
to equate these professional people with the same ethnic group.
This conditioning starts early. From grade school onwards,
prejudices are instilled. Shel Silverstein’s poem “The Gypsies are
Coming”, complete with a witch- like sketch, warns naughty children that
they will be taken away by the Gypsies if they aren’t well-behaved.
Barbara Young’s “Being a Gypsy” talks of wearing “rough shoes” to
“ramble and roam” the world, and suggests that one can “become” a
Gypsy just as one might become a baker or a soldier. Another tells of a
child getting into trouble at home, if he “talks to the Gypsies in the wood”,
while Susan Sussman’s “Casey the Nomad” contains the line “Gypsies lie.
If they don’t lie, they’re not Gypsy”. All of these are in books in my
9
seven-year-old daughter’s school library. I went and spoke recently with
the principal of that school after my daughter’s teacher told a boy in her
class that if he didn’t stop talking, she would “sell him to fifty Gypsies”.
Without a doubt, all of the other seven-year-olds in the same class now
have a basis for their adult attitudes about how Gypsies are to be
perceived, and my daughter needs no reminding from me to keep the fact
of her ethnic background from her classmates. The Romani AntiDefamation League has been trying for over a year to get The Kellogg
Company to remove a children-oriented breakfast cereal commercial
unfairly depicting a Gypsy character removed from the air.
Even many scholars who make the study of Gypsies their primary
academic concern have trouble dealing with the apparent anomaly of the
“educated” Gypsy. Despite the fact that Gypsies are ethnic peoples, these
experts persist in making their overriding criteria for definition social or
behavioral—something they would do for no other ethnic population:
“Group identity is maintained on the basis of cultural, not genetic, information”, writes one such specialist who, in the same essay, refers to nonGypsies “becoming” Gypsies by doing fieldwork among them23. At their
conferences, presentations are sometimes included which deal with
nomadic people totally unrelated to Gypsies. There is a danger implicit in
their rigidly defining Gypsies as an occupational group or as “nomads”,
since they are denying us an identity in any other area and, by extension,
denying us an existence as professional people in charge of our own
destinies in the larger context. Journalists and novelists, whose research
for their own work rests upon scholarly treatments of the Gypsy by these
“experts,” as well as upon other works of fiction, are largely to blame for
the widespread image the public has. Charles de Lint’s Mulengro and
Stephen King’s Thinner are two highly inaccurate, and to my mind
defamatory, novels about Gypsies, which have appeared in just the past
couple of years.
Many such specialists—I would venture to say most of them—
ought to know better; theirs is a great responsibility, yet one suspects an
ulterior motive in persisting in defining a Gypsy as, e.g. “a member of a
wandering race . . . a cunning rogue”, which is what one finds in the
Oxford Dictionary. “The problem . . . is that they’re not well-schooled.
They’re quite naive and, to some extent, distrustful”, a Holocaust
Memorial Council spokesman told the Washington Post in March this
year24. A number of these statements have some basis in fact, and no one
is better aware of that than those of us in the international movement; it
has a direct bearing upon our civil and political effort. Such
generalizations must not be applied to all Gypsies, however. Those
individuals who are physicians (like Jan Cibula) or engineers (like Sait
Balic) or poets (like Rajko Djuric) or novelists (like Mateo Maximoff) or
linguists (like Jan Kochanowski) or ethnomusicologists (like William
Duna) or political activists (like Romani Rose) or government officials
(like Juan de Dios Ramirez Heredia)—I could go on—belie this, and it is a
10
pity that to earn respect, it is necessary to list examples of Gypsies who
have succeeded in the culture of the dominant population and not in their
own. For a very long time, Gypsy-related scholarship and the media have
continued to impose the view that education and the Gypsy seem to be
mutually exclusive concepts. A century ago Richard Pischel, a leading
German student of Romani studies, wrote that “The Gypsy ceases to be a
Gypsy as soon as he is domiciled and follows some trade25. Those who
can talk back and who have a voice in the technological and administrative
world make the modern guardians of this lore uncomfortable and threaten
their manageable definitions. For them one obvious way to deal with such
individuals is to deny them their identity as Gypsies. The arrogance
implicit in this kind of manipulation is shameful at best, but the harm they
do in other ways presents a far greater obstacle to the Gypsy struggle for
human rights. Western scholarship has been built upon taking information
away from subject groups, and academics have acquired their professional
reputation by doing so; but taking away people’s very identities in order to
keep the imposed definition intact is reprehensible. Such scholars have a
moral obligation to give something back, if only to redress this imbalance.
Their support in our effort to achieve just acknowledgement and accurate
representation would be wholeheartedly welcomed.
There are two aspects to the situation being dealt with here: the
non-Gypsy—specifically the Jewish—and the Gypsy. In the former, we
are dealing with a widespread misconception of Gypsies resulting from
media and literary portrayals which do not allow members of the public to
perceive of Gypsies as a people to be taken seriously, or indeed as a “real”
people at all. Jewish Americans have no privy information in this regard,
being equally susceptible to the inaccurate, but popular, general
stereotype. In Frederic Raphael’s novel The Glittering Prizes, which is an
account of a young Jewish man’s college days at Cambridge, one such
attitude is cleverly addressed. Adam, the student, is arguing for the
Romani case with members of a Jewish historical society. The arguments
they make are, sadly, not uncommon:26
‘You talked about Auschwitz. My name is Gustav Wexler. I know
about Auschwitz.’
‘Mr. Morris, my name is Mrs. Hersh. May I say something? Israel
was bought and paid for with the blood of six million martyrs.’
‘Maybe,’ Adam said, ‘that wasn’t what the Arabs wanted for it.’
‘Why do you think the Jews should be the only people without a
homeland?’
‘Do I think that? On the other hand, Mrs. Hersh. where is the
homeland of the Gypsies? What did their blood buy and pay for?’
‘Gypsies?’ Wexler said. ‘What’s Gypsies got to do with it?’
‘Half a million Gypsies also died in the concentration camps,’
Adam said. ‘Doesn’t that even earn them a couple of fields? One
11
caravan site with running water? A day trip to a Stately Home?
Nothing?’
‘The Gypsies,’ Wexler said, ‘have no historic homeland.’
‘Ah, that must be where they made their big mistake.’
‘The Gypsies,’ Mrs. Hersh said, ‘what culture have the Gypsies
got?’
‘No culture?’ Adam said. “To hell with them.’ ‘Mr. Speaker,’
Wexler said. ‘may I ask you something? Because can you give me
the names of ten famous Gypsies?’
There is a further factor to be considered, though in my
observation it is not nearly so widespread. This is the belief held by some
that the Holocaust was, in Wiesel’s words, an “essentially Jewish event”.
Some of those who espouse this idea put the fact of the Holocaust to
theological use and even rationalized it upon theological grounds in the
context of the “chosenness” of the Jewish people: Emil Fackenheim
(1978) is, perhaps, the best known advocate of this. By its nature, this
view must make the Holocaust a different event for its non-Jewish victims.
One member of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council suggested that
while “genocide” would be permissible to describe the fate of the Gypsies
in Nazi Germany, “Holocaust”, arguably, was not, since it has specific
Jewish connotations—although according to the Oxford Dictionary it has
meant the “complete consumation by fire . . . of a large number of
persons” in English since 1671. Jewish chroniclers such as Rubenstein
(1966), however, have argued against this exclusiveness as something
ultimately not supportive of the Jewish case; certainly Gypsies and other
Holocaust victims are receiving more attention in the more recent
Holocaust related publications (Abzug, 1985, for example), and there are
now a number of works of fiction, which deal with the Gypsy Holocaust in
particular (e.g. Ramati, 1985, and Florence, 1985). The 1983 film The
Keep, which dealt with Nazi-occupied Romania, also included more than
passing references to the Gypsy victims.
I have been guilty of a selfish, or ethnocentric, view of the
Holocaust myself. One editor asked me some time ago what I thought
about his including Gypsies with homosexuals as Holocaust victims in one
special issue of his journal, and my instant, gut reaction was “no! it’s not
the same!”—and I immediately felt ashamed, because of course it is the
same, if we are talking about people’s inhumanity to people, and the value
of human life, and the lesson we all must learn.
This leads me finally to the Gypsy perspective. The response,
when I have raised these issues with colleagues, has usually been to
question why, if the “misleading stereotype” is really a major factor, have
Gypsies allowed it to be perpetuated, and why haven’t Gypsies been as
vocal as the Jews in letting the rest of the world know about the injustices
they have suffered?
12
An examination of the archives of any major newspaper in this
country will reveal that media coverage of things Gypsy has concentrated
itself almost exclusively with crime or, to a much lesser extent, with this
or that Gypsy “king” being buried. There is an association between
Gypsies and crime; this is no doubt one of the factors leading non-Gypsies
to wish to disassociate themselves from Gypsies, when the two are linked.
Jews in particular have been associated with Gypsies since the Middle
Ages: Gypsies were at one time thought to be Jews themselves, and
Black’s Bibliography (listing nothing later than 1914) lists seventeen
published works comparing our two peoples. There is also the very
pervasive association of Gypsies with kings and queens and romance, kept
alive particularly in works of popular fiction. As long as journalists and
novelists need a source of fantasy to draw upon, they are not likely to let
their Gypsy image go.
In order to understand why this should be, we must look to history
and be aware, also, that many of the individuals reported as being
“Gypsies” in the press, are often not Romani people at all, although their
activities may bolster the existing Gypsy stereotype. This is a result, once
again, of the inaccurate idea non-Gypsies have of our people; any itinerant
group is likely to be referred to as “gypsy”—usually with a lower case
“g”—whether they merit the label or not. A troupe of non-Gypsy traveling
actors was headlined as such, for example. in the Palo Alto Times Tribune
last year27, and KVUE-TV in Austin, Texas, ran a police report called
“Gypsy Crime” at about the same time, which involved housebreaking by
a gang identified on that report as Spanish-speaking and Hispanic. The
“gypsy” factor was that these people moved from town to town
perpetrating their crimes. The anti-Gypsy laws which exist in many states
are frequently vague in their definition of whom they actually refer to, and
many of them were probably worded with any kind of itinerant in mind,
though this has not prevented their being used specifically against ethnic
Gypsies today, since the word “Gypsy” occurs in them. English usage
specialist William Safire has now put his seal of approval on the use of the
word gyp, “to cheat, swindle” because, despite its origin, which he
acknowledges, it is “deeply ingrained in the language” and it would be
“hypersensitive to take it as a slur”28. Only a Gypsy rights activist, he
says, would be likely to object.
Gypsies cannot be judged on the basis of their contemporary
situation without an examination of the historical background which has
led to it. There are Gypsy criminals; there is widespread illiteracy; the life
expectancy rate is lower than the national average, and many Gypsies do,
in the main, shy away from the establishment and its institutions.
Individuals and families fitting these descriptions certainly exist, but it
must be remembered that there are others, like those referred to earlier,
who have none of these characteristics, and they are no less Gypsies for
that.
13
Gypsies have been subject to oppressive laws since their very
arrival in Europe in the early mediaeval period. In the Balkans, they
endured enslavement, and were not liberated until the latter half of the last
century. Most of the Gypsies in America descend from this population.
When the Rom were freed from slavery, nothing was done to help
integrate them into society; in fact it was their ex-owners who were
compensated instead, to the tune of 96 francs per slave29. There were no
reorientation programs, no government-sponsored attempts to provide
housing or schooling for this huge, illiterate and socially stigmatized and
damaged population. Instead there were anti-Gypsy laws in abundance,
which ensured that the population would keep on the move and out of
one’s own district, where they were likely to prove a burden and a threat
to the establishment. Even today, the same laws in many places in Europe
keep Gypsies moving on, unable to attend school, or vote, or even do
business with local merchants, who put “No Gypsies Served” signs
outside their shops. The roots of this prejudice go back centuries, and are
discussed in detail in Hancock (1986). It is a mistake to blame Gypsies out
of hand for their situation, although it is frequently done. The most recent
example of blaming the victim for the crime appeared in an article in
Newseek last January, which reported that Gypsy children were being sold
into “virtual slavery to be trained as criminals”30.
An examination of the countless books on the Holocaust turns up
very little directly concerned with Gypsies. Kogon31 makes it clear that
Gypsies were being dealt with by the Office of Racial Policy, like the
Jews, and yet does not mention their treatment in either his “Reprisals
against other inferior races” or his “Liquidation of other undesirables”
chapters. Lifton may as well have not dealt with Gypsies at all in his new
book on Nazi medical experiments, for the scant acknowledgement he
makes there. In her book devoted wholly to the Holocaust and its
historians, Lucy Dawidowicz devotes only half a page to the Gypsies, saying that the Nazi policy was to “treat them like Jews”, who were the
“Special Case . . . the fate of the Jews under National Socialism was
unique”32. This cannot be seen as a preoccupation on that (or most other)
author’s part with the Jewish situation alone; there were very few Gypsy
survivors willing to tell the tale—so far [NB 1987] we have found only
one in the United States and only one in Canada—and while Jewish
survivors have documented their own plight, Gypsy survivors have usually
lacked the educational or social wherewithal to do so (an exception is
Braun, 1986). Neither have they been systematically sought out and
interviewed by others. This has resulted in a huge lacuna in Holocaust
studies, though one not addressed in Feingold’s 167 –page Report on the
Status of Holocaust Education in the United States, commissioned by the
U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council in 1985. The more recently distributed
bibliography Books on the Holocaust (Goldstein, 1985) similarly lacks any
Gypsy-related listings. I sat through nearly ten hours of Claude
Lanzmann’s magnificent film Shoah hoping to collect some Gypsy
14
references, but to no avail. Even its many reviews fail to comment on this
omission—the single time the word occurs is with reference to the packet
of Gitanes that Lanzmann is smoking during an interview with him33.
Another review tells how “the Jews were killed in absolute loneliness. The
world was silent”34. The world was silent for Gypsies, too, as they died in
absolute loneliness; even the Jewish camp inmates “paid little heed to the
presence and fate of these Gypsies. Strictly quarantined and isolated from
the rest of the ghetto, the Gypsies were easily ignored or forgotten”35.
Today we are still being forgotten; we, too, need a documentary like
Shoah.
The closed nature of Gypsy life, reinforced by a suspicion of the
invariably hostile non-Gypsy population, rooted in centuries of negative
experience, has left most of the world’s Gypsies ill-equipped to fight back,
or to speak up effectively in their own defense. This is what is at the heart
of the situation we face today. One result has been that the non-Gypsy’s
romantic image has been allowed to flourish unchecked, to the point
where the fact and the fiction are now miles apart. People looking for the
Gypsy of the Victorian novel in urban North America will never find him.
There are Gypsies, too, who have made use of this misconception as a
kind of shield; if this is what the non-Gypsy is seeking, he’ll leave the real
thing alone. Some Gypsies will, themselves, exploit this image if it is
advantageous to do so, although one wonders at the wisdom which
motivated one non-Gypsy expert to claim that “More traditional Gypsy
power brokers . . . may prefer being portrayed by the media as hustlers,
and even predators, than as the pathetic prey of Nazis and other racists”36.
In this connection it could be added that over the past couple of years a
real or imagined association with the Holocaust Memorial Council (and by
extension with “Washington”) has itself become a badge of status and
power for some individuals in the Romani community.
Gypsies from other parts of Europe were sent here as part of this or
that government’s plan to avoid having to deal with them at home; many
indentured plantation laborers were Gypsies in colonial America. After the
Second World War not the slightest effort was made by any national or
international body to help reorient the survivors. As was the case after the
abolition of slavery eighty years earlier. Gypsies were simply left to
manage as best they could in a hostile, rather than a helpful, environment.
It is for me a magnificent achievement on the part of my people that we
have now managed to obtain permanent representation in the United
Nations Organization and the Council of Europe. Nothing changes
overnight, and we have a tremendous way to go still: we have no central
power base, no Israel, not even one standardized dialect of our language to
communicate with internationally. A spokesman for the Office of
Presidential Personnel, Linas Kojelis, whose job it was to tell me that the
White House had chosen to exclude Gypsies from the Holocaust Memorial
Council once again, made it clear that without more financial and political
strength our achievements would be hard won. Others I spoke to seemed
15
to have the impression that we were not trying hard enough. We are
learning how to operate within the establishment, how to engage lawyers
to fight for us, how to write letters of protest, how to lobby for equal
rights, and we are learning to train our own people to do these things for
us. Romani survival has, after all, rested upon the Gypsy’s ability to maximize his surroundings, and integration does not have to mean assimilation.
But these changes are coming very slowly, and at times like this
we find ourselves caught in a dilemma. Our situation today rests on a
chain of events which goes back for centuries; in a very real sense we are
the victims of our own past, even though the circumstances of the past
were not of our making. Other European nations have begun to understand
our predicament; in Yugoslavia we have now achieved national minority
status, representation in parliament and have education and media in the
mother tongue. Perhaps a congressional committee should be established
to see how Romani Americans can be accommodated and to bring an end
to the legislation in many states, which makes our people the only ethnic
minority left in America with laws still in existence against it.
Our first Day of Remembrance was held in Washington on
September 16th, 1986, organized by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial
Council. There, Elie Wiesel made the following statement37:
I confess that I feel somewhat guilty towards our Romani friends.
We have not done enough to listen to your voice of anguish. We
have not done enough to make other people listen to your voice of
sadness. I can promise you we shall do whatever we can from now
on to listen better.
Such assurances can only be encouraging. California Democratic
Congressman Tom Lantos, present at the same ceremony, said he would
initiate a letter, signed by members of Congress and of the Senate, to be
sent to Chancellor Helmut Kohl of West Germany, Opposition Leader
Johannes Rau, and East German Premier Erich Honecker, asking that war
crimes reparations be made to Romani survivors.
I have already indicated that we have benefited greatly from the
involvement of our Jewish colleagues. The means by which we have
pushed to have the Gypsy genocide properly acknowledged have been
largely stimulated by Jewish activism for their own situation in the same
area. Almost all of the documentation we have to date which deals with
the Romani Holocaust is the result of Jewish research; I have been critical
in this essay because Jewish friends have urged me to be. I am asking now
for an improved dialogue between our peoples, for the common cause, and
for a better common understanding. I want to go on believing that the
March, 1986, decision to continue to deny Gypsies a voice on the
Holocaust Memorial Council was not motivated by either prejudice or by
financial considerations, but by an ignorance, still, of who and what
Gypsies are and what really happened in Hitler’s camps. I have to believe
16
this; the alternatives are too awful and too condemning. Some of my
colleagues call me idealistic. Surely knowledge of this situation must
move some people to become involved, to cooperate with us and help us
document and publicize the details of the Romani Holocaust. Lincoln said
that a well-informed public is the best hedge against inequality. We are
certainly having to deal with inequality here; and the public certainly
needs informing. We were not just “others” in the Holocaust, and our story
cannot be allowed to fall through the cracks of history, dismissed and
untold. It is time for it to be shared.
Notes
1Strom
& Parsons, 1978:220
1980:15.
3Infield, 1982:61.
4Marre & Charlton, 1958:19
5Gilbert, 1947:493.
6Noakes, 1985:17
7Kogon, 1984:175.
8Hilberg, 1961.
9Anon., 1986a:40.
10Pond, 1980:B17.
11Wiesenthal, 1986:6.
12Anon ., 1979:67.
13Costelloe, 1986:4A.
14Marre & Charlton, 1985:19
15Grove, 1984:C4.
16Wiesel, 1979:3.
17Naftalin,1986:185.
18Henderson, 1986:5C
19In personal communication.
20Davis, 1985:23.
21Kalisch, 1985:88.
22Dean, 1986:4
23DiGiacomo, 1983:337.
24Hirshberg, 1986:A 16.
25Pischel, 1883:358.
26Raphael, 1976:253-254.
27Rowlands, 1985.
28Safire, 1986:7. Safire also called the inclusion of Gypsies in the
Holocaust a “mistaken notion” (1983: 12).
29Blaramberg, 1885:822.
30Cullen, 1986:18-19.
31Kogon, 1894:167.
32Dawidowicz,1981:11
33Carr, 1985.
2Heger,
17
34Jerome,
1985.
1985:87.
36Nemeth, 1986:117
37Anon ., 1986b:A23
35Kalisch,
Works cited
Abzug, Robert, 1985. Inside the vicious heart: America and the Liberation of the Nazi Concentration Camps. Oxford: The University Press.
Anon ., 1979. “The Nazis’ forgotten victims”, Time Magazine. 3(12), 67.
Anon ., 1986a. “Prague against Gypsies”, Insight, September 15th. p. 40.
Anon., 1986b. “Gypsy survivors of Nazis hear pledge on aid”, The New
York Times, Wednesday. September 17th, p. A23.
Black, George F., 1914. A Gypsy bibliography. Edinburgh. Reissued by
Gryphon Books, Ann Arbor. 1971.
Blaramberg, Nicolas, 1885. Essai comparé sur les institutions et les lois
de la Rumanie. Bucarest: Imprimerie du Peuple Roumain, pp. 536551.802, “Sur les Cigains, ou esclaves en Moldo-Valachie”.
Braun, Hans, 1986. “A Sinto survivor speaks”, in J. Grumet (ed.),
1986:165-171.
Carr, Jay, 1985. “A monument against forgetting the Holocaust”. The
Boston Globe, November 3rd.
Costelloe, Kevin, 1986. “Gypsies want reparation for slave labor under
Nazis”, The Minneapolis Star and Tribune, Tuesday, March 25th, p.4A
Cullen, Robert B., 1986. “For sale: young Gypsies”, Newsweek International, January 20th, pp. 18-19.
Davis, Helen, 1985. “Angels of life”, Hadassah Magazine, November, pp.
21-25.
Dawidowicz, Lucy, 1981. The Holocaust and the Historians. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press.
Dean, Paul, 1986. “California’s Gypsies”. The Los Angeles Times,
Sunday, October 5th, pp. 4-7.
De Lint, Charles, 1985. Mulengro: A Romany Novel. New York: Ace
Books.
DiGiacomo, Susan, 1983. “Luck on the road: problems of fieldwork
among the Gypsies”. Human Organization, 42(4):337-340.
Fackenheim, Emil L., 1978. Jewish Return Into History: Reflections in
the age of Auschwitz and a New Jerusalem. Syracuse: The University
Press.
Feingold, Marilyn B., 1985. “Report on the status of Holocaust education
in the United States.” Washington: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council
special report.
Florence, Ronald, 1985. The Gypsy Man. New York: Villard Books.
Gilbert, William H., 1947. “Marginal minorities of the world.” Silver
Spring: privately-circulated ms.
18
Goldstein, Marianne, 1985. Books on the Holocaust: Non-Fiction Titles
Held by Selected Libraries in Western New York. Buffalo: SUNY.
Grove, Lloyd, 1984. “Lament of the Gypsies: 40 years after Auschwitz,
petitioning for a place”, The Washington Post, Saturday, July 21st, p. C4.
Grumet, Joanne, (ed.), 1986. Papers from the Sixth and Seventh Meetings
of the Gypsy Lore Society, North American Chapter. New York: GLSNAC Publications, No.3
Hancock, Ian, 1986. The Pariah Syndrome: An Account of Gypsy Slavery
and Persecution. Ann Arbor: Karoma, Inc.
Heger, Heinz, 1980. The Men with The Pink Triangle. Boston: Alyson
Publications, Inc.
Henderson, Keith, 1986. “College students learn the meaning of the
Holocaust”, The Baltimore Sun, Sunday, July 27th, 1986. p. 5C.
Hilberg, R., 1961. The Destruction of the European Jews. Chicago: The
Quadrangle Press.
Hirshberg, Charles, 1986. “Gypsies lobby for representation on Holocaust Memorial Council”, The Washington Post, Sunday, March 9th, page
A 16.
Infield, Glenn B., 1952. Secrets of the S.S. New York.
Jerome, Deborah, 1985. “Resurrecting horror: the man behind ‘Shoah’”.
The Record, October 25th.
Kalisch, Shoshana, 1985. Yes, We Sang! New York: Harper and Row.
Kenrick, Donald, & Grattan Puxon, 1972. The Destiny of Europe’s
Gypsies. London & New York: Heinemann.
King, Stephen, 1985. Thinner. New York: Signet Books.
Kogon, Eugen, 1984. The Theory and Practice of Hell. New York: Berkeley Books. Originally published 1949.
Lifton, Robert Jay. 1986. The Nazi Doctors: Medical killing and the
Psychology of Genocide. New York: Basic Books.
Marre, Jeremy, & Hanna Charlton, 1985. Beats of the Heart. New York:
Random House.
Naftalin, Micah, 1986. “The planning of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial
Museum”, in J. Grumet, (ed.) 1986:185-186.
Nemeth, David, 1986. “The Gypsy motif”, in Grumet (ed.). 1986:115122.
Noakes, Jeremy,1985. “Life in the Third Reich: Social outcasts in Nazi
Germany”, History Today, 35:15-19.
Pischel, Richard, 1883. “Die Heimat der Zigeuner”, Deutsche Rundschau,
36:353-375.
Pond, Elizabeth, 1980. “Romanies: Hitler’s other victims”, The Christian
Science Monitor, 3(7): B-17.
Raphael, Frederic, 1976. The Glittering Prizes. New York: St. Martin’s
Press. Also a six part television series.
Rubenstein, Richard L., 1966. After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and
Contemporary Judaism. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill.
19
Safire, William. “On language: Long time no see.” The New York Times
Magazine, September 20th 1983, p. 12.
Safire, William, 1986. “Gypping the Pharisaic Tribe”. The New York
Times Magazine, February 23rd, pages 6-7.
Strom, Margot, & William Parsons, 1978. Facing History and Ourselves:
Holocaust and Human Behavior. Brookline. Facing History and
Ourselves.
Tyrnauer, Gabrielle, 1985. The Fate of the Gypsies during the Holocaust.
Washington: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council Special Report. Pp. 115.
Wiesel, Elie, 1979. Report to the President: President’s Commission on
the Holocaust. Washington: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council.
Wiesenthal, Simon, 1986. “Tragedy of the Gypsies”. Dokumentationszentrum des Bundes Jüdischer Vervolgter des Naziregimes. Bulletin
of Information No. 26, item 12, page 6.
20
2
THE ROOTS OF ANTIGYPSYISM:
TO THE HOLOCAUST AND AFTER1
“Di zelbike zun vos farvayst di layvnt, farshvartst
oykh’m Tsigayner.” (“The same sun that whitens the
linen also turns the Gypsy black.”)
Yiddish proverb
“One exhibit [at the Holocaust Museum at
Buchenwald] quotes SS chief Heinrich Himmler on
December 8th, 1938, as calling for the ‘final solution
of the Gypsy question,’ and cites his order of
December 16th, 1942, to have all Gypsies remaining in
Europe deported to Auschwitz.”
Sheldon Rantz (1995:11)
While Holocaust scholars are rapidly adding to their knowledge of the details
of the fate of the Romani people in Hitler’s Germany, and while it is now
generally acknowledged that together with Jews, the Romani victims were the
only ethnic/racial population selected for total annihilation according to the
genocidal policy of the Final Solution2 (Friedlander, 19953; Hancock, 1996), far
less has been written about the reasons for the Nazi policy of ethnic cleansing as
it was directed at that population. Tenenbaum, who forty years ago defined the
Final Solution as the “physical extermination of Jews and Gypsies in the great
death camps” (1956:373) nevertheless called the German persecution of Gypsies
“one of the major mysteries of Nazi racialism” (1956: 399).
Earlier discussions of the Third Reich have usually assumed that the socalled Zigeuner were merely regarded as asocials, misfits in the Nazi’s new
spartan order, and were targeted on those grounds alone (see e.g. Bauer,
1980:45; 1994:441); but an examination of the historical roots of antigypsyism
in Germany (what Tenenbaum refers to as Hitler’s “gypsomania”) demonstrates
very clearly that the notion that Romanies were a racial threat to national
stability extends to the time of their initial entry into that country in the early
1400s. Elsewhere I have provided a chronology of the Holocaust as it relates to
21
Sinti and Romanies4 (Hancock, 1989), where a list of some of the events in
Germany’s history which preceded it is also included. In the present essay the
focus is on the pre-1933 period in more detail, and also to examine the reasons
for anti-gypsyism, since it is here that we can find the origins of Hitler’s policy
of extermination as it affected Romanies and Sinti; but I will also demonstrate
that it is for exactly the same reasons that the Romani people in Europe are
today the most vilified and discriminated against of all ethnic or national
populations, and the most victimized by racist violence and discriminatory
governmental policies.
The Historical Roots of Antigypsyism
Reasons for the institutionalized prejudice against the Romani people may be
traced to a number of factors:
a) The association of the first Romanies in Europe with the encroachment of
the Asiatic invaders and of Islam, reflected in a number of contemporary
exonyms applied to Romani populations, such as Saracens, Tatars, Gypsies
(from “Egyptians”), Turks, Heathens, &c. Romanies, who entered Europe
following the holy wars which resulted from the occupation of the Byzantine
Empire by the Muslims, were everywhere regarded as being a part of the
western infringement of Islam, and were persecuted as a result. The
Ottomans not only posed a threat to the Christian establishment and had
occupied the Holy Land, but they had also blocked off routes to the East,
thereby also affecting trade and the European economy.
b) The association in mediaeval Christian doctrine of light with purity and
darkness with sin. The earliest church records documenting the arrival of
Romanies alluded to the darkness of their complexion C moreso the case
seven hundred years ago than today C and the inherent evil which that
supposedly demonstrated. “The conviction that blackness denotes inferiority
and evil [was] well rooted in the western mind. The nearly black skins of
many Gypsies marked them out to be victims of this prejudice” (Kenrick &
Puxon, 1972:19). Hobson expands upon this (1965:338): “association with
darkness and dirt is a convenient hook on which to hang certain projections,
especially if [the target] is a relatively unknown visitor from a far-off country
with a strange culture, or if he threatens important economic and other social,
vested interests. He is also clearly ‘not me.’ While the association between
darkness and evil is a purely metaphorical one, its effects have been
devastating.” Philip Mason (1968:61) has emphasized that “hardly any white
man has overcome the confusion between biological accident and symbolic
metaphor.”
The persona of the Romani as non-white, non-Christian outsider
became incorporated into Christian European folklore, which served to
justify and encourage the prejudice against him. Like Asahuerus, the Jew
doomed to wander through eternity because he refused to allow Jesus to rest
22
on his way to Calvary, Romanies were accused of forging the nails with
which Christ was crucified. And while Jews were accused of drinking the
blood of Christian babies in hidden rites to which no outsider was privy,
Romanies were likewise charged with stealing and even eating those babies.
Parallelling even more closely the Asahuerus myth is the belief that the
original sin of the Romanies was their refusal to give Mary and the baby
Jesus shelter during their flight from King Herod into Egypt (Scheier, 1925,
vol. II, p. 77).
c) Romani culture, called Rromanìja or Rromanipe, does not encourage close
social relationships with non-Romani populations5, who are referred to as
gadje in Romani and sometimes gentiles in English. Such an exclusivist
society can create an assumption on the part of those who are excluded that it
is furtive, and must therefore be hiding something. A common accusation in
mediaeval Germany, for instance, was that Romanies were spies, a charge
which was also repeated by the Nazis many times. The maintenance of
cultural and/or religious restrictions which keep outsiders at a distance must
certainly be seen as a factor, historically, in both antigypsyism and
antisemitism.
d) Because of laws forbidding Romanies to settle anywhere, various means of
livelihood had to be relied upon which could be easily and quickly gathered up
when it became necessary to move out of an area. One such was fortunetelling, but this only helped reinforce the image of mystery and exoticism
which was growing in the European mind. Romanies in turn exploited this
image as a means of protection, since one is less likely to show hostility
towards a person whom one believes to have some measure of control over, or
knowledge of, one’s destiny. The fact that Romanies are, fundamentally, an
Asian population in Europe, speaking an Asian language which serves as the
vehicle of a culture and world-view rooted in Asia, has also created conflict.
Fortune-telling is a highly regarded profession in India, but drew no such
respect in Europe; begging is likewise viewed very differently in Hindu and
Islamic society, but has no such special status in Europe.
e) The fact that as Okely has pointed out, “outsiders have projected onto
Gypsies their own repressed fantasies and longings for disorder” (1983:232;
see also Sibley, 1981:195-196), and have at the same time used those imagined
characteristics of the “gypsy” as a yardstick by which to measure the
boundaries of their own identities. Thus an individual’s occasional urge to
challenge the system, or to perpetrate some anti-social act, or even his
subconscious fascination with anarchy, as psychologists know are not likely
ever to be realized by that individual, but which can be experienced vicariously
or subliminally by being projected onto the “outlaw” Romani population. This
phenomenon is reflected repeatedly in the media as well as in works of fiction.
Use of the word “Gypsy” for an image rather than for an individual occurred
recently in an article concerning a case of alleged poisoning in California: the
23
detective involved was quoted as saying “this guy is definitely a Gypsy . . . the
Gypsy was Angela Tene” (Nicoll, 1995:25). It is highly unlikely that he would
have said “this guy is definitely a Jew . . . the Jew was Angela Tene,” since the
ethnicity or race of a suspect is immaterial to the details of a case. It can only
have been included, therefore, if it were believed that some link existed
between criminality and genetic identity. In press coverage, the race of a
suspected criminal who is a person of color is often provided, though as a rule
omitted where the suspect is white; in the European papers, such information
may even appear in the articles’ headlines as well (cf. Hancock, 1978:145162).
While racially-based arguments were codified and used by the Nazis as
justification for the extermination of Jews and Romanies, an added factor
condemned the Jews of Europe as well: their supposed economic strength,
which was used as an anti-Semitic argument long before Hitler came to power.
The Holocaust forever altered the structure of society in much of the
area, and particularly in Poland, the Czech lands, and Hungary, where
the Jews had played an important cultural as well as an economic role.
At the other end of society the Gypsies were equally savaged by the
Nazi death machine (Walters, 1988:271).
f) The fact that Romanies have no military, political, economic and particularly
territorial strength, and no nation state to speak for them, ensures that they are
an ideal target for scapegoatism. Beck (1985:103) has made this point
succinctly in referring to the situation of Romanies in Romania:
Romania’s German-speaking populations have received support from
the West German state. Magyars are supported by the Hungarian state,
and Jews by Israel. Groups such as the [Romanies] do not have such an
advantage. Lacking a protective state, they have no one to turn to when
discrimination is inflicted upon them as a group. Unlike ethnic groups
represented by states, [Romanies] are not recognized as having a
history that could legitimize them.
Non-territoriality is having its most extreme repercussions in postcommunist Europe, where Romanies now find themselves outsiders in
everybody’s ethnic territory. While the American press does not acknowledge
it, the Romani minority in Bosnia and Serbia is being systematically
eradicated, while in Slovakia, France, Germany and elsewhere, programs of
deportation and banishment are routinely in effect. Further to Beck’s
observation on scapegoatism, it has been argued, by e.g. Kenedi, that there is a
need in all societies to select groups to blame its ills upon, and those least able
to defend themselves, such as Romanies, provide the most likely candidates.
24
g) The fact that, since the 19th Century, a literary “gypsy,” (always written
with a lower-case “g”) has emerged, which is presented as the epitome of
freedom: freedom from responsibility, freedom from moral constraints,
freedom from the requirements of hygiene, freedom from nine-to-five routine.
This has remained unchallenged by the Romani community because of the
traditional lack of access to the means necessary to combat stereotyping, and
thus there has grown in the popular mind an image which combines fascination
with resentment, even with repulsion. As Janos Kenedi has noted (1986:14),
because of their reliance in large measure upon literary and poorly-researched
sources for their background information on Romanies, “the mass media, in a
veiled and often less-veiled form, goad opinion in an anti-Gypsy direction.”
This fictionalized image originates in the idealizing of the western European
Romani populations during the period of the industrial revolution, when they
came to symbolize in literature an earlier idyllic, rural way of life. This
coincided with European concepts of the “noble savage,” and the realization
that there were heathen populations in the heart of civilization in desperate
need of Christian salvation. The early Victorian period saw the appearance of
several works on missionary activity amongst Romanies (Mayall, 1988).
h) The need to keep the non-Romani population at arm’s length has also
prevented investigators from gaining too intimate an acquaintance with the
Romani world, which has led to highly embellished and stereotyped published
accounts. These in turn have kept alive the “otherness” and distance of
Romanies, both of which factors have helped sustain a literary or fantasy
image, and which have worked very effectively against Romani issues being
taken seriously. Most recently a review article dealing with an outsider’s
introduction to the Romani community described how two investigators, one
of whom was “terrified” and the other armed with “a deck of cards and a
packet of cigarettes” steeled themselves and intrepidly “went in” (Smith,
1995:18, in a review of Fonseca, 1995). The second chapter of Barry
Cockroft’s (1979) book on British Romanies is entitled “First Sighting.” The
first chapter is “Above All, Freedom.”
In sum, then, we can seek the historical basis of anti-Romani prejudice in
a number of areas, in particular racism, religious intolerance, outsider status and
the fact that Romanies maintain an exclusivist or separatist culture. In large part
too, the literary image of the “gypsy” blurs the distinction between the real and
the imagined population, so that even factual reports of antigypsyism seldom
receive the concern they deserve. How many historical treatments of the 20th
Century Armenian genocide, for example, have mentioned, even as a footnote, the
fact that nearly all of the Armenian Gypsies (the Lom) were destroyed by the
Turks and the Kurds? All of these factors underlie the problems which face the
Romani population throughout the world today.
25
Anti-Romani Attitudes in pre-20th Century Germany
Romanies were first documented in German-speaking Europe in 1407; the first
anti-Gypsy law was issued in 1416, the beginning of centuries of legal
discrimination. Bischoff (1827:3) wrote that “in Germany, the greatest number of
decrees of banishment were published against them . . . this unhappy people was
persecuted, strung up without exception as thieves and robbers when caught and,
guilty or innocent, destroyed by the thousands.” By 1417 commentaries on their
frightening physical appearance were beginning to be recorded; Hermann
Cornerus wrote of the Romanies’ “very ugly” and “black” faces, and likened them
to the Tatars (in Eccard, 1723), while in 1435 the Roman Catholic monk Rufus of
Lübeck wrote disparagingly of their dark skin and black hair (Grautoff, 1872).
The first accusations of their being spies, carriers of the plague and traitors to
Christendom were made in 1496 and again in 1497, and yet again in 1498. In
1500, All Romanies were banished from Germany on pain of death by
Maximilian I, while German citizens were told that killing Romanies was not a
punishable offense. In 1543, in a diatribe directed at both Jews and Romanies,
Martin Luther recommended that Jews be rounded up and put into stables “like
Gypsies,” in order to be reminded of their lowly status in German society
(Gilbert, 1985:19) and in a sermon he gave in 1543 he said Romanies charged
high prices, gave away information and were traitors, that they poisoned the
wells, started fires, kidnapped children and cheated the public in all sorts of ways
intended to cause harm (Luther, 1883:19-24). While the Lutheran Church has
officially apologized to the Jewish people for Luther’s anti-Semitic remarks, they
have yet publicly to acknowledge his racism directed at Romanies.
In 1566, King Ferdinand reaffirmed the expulsion order of Maximilian;
two years later, Pope Pius the Fifth banished all Romanies from the realm of the
Holy Roman Church. In 1659, the mass murder of Romanies was reported in a
pogrom near Neudorf, outside of Dresden; in 1709, a German law was passed for
the arrest of Romanies simply because of what they were, to be deported to the
American colonies, or to be used as galley slaves. In the following year, King
Frederick I condemned all males to forced labor, and began a program of
removing Romani children from their families in order to separate them
permanently from their ethnic identity.
In 1721, Emperor Karl VI ordered the extermination of all Romanies
everywhere, 220 years before the same directive was issued by Hitler. In 1725,
King Frederick William I condemned all Romanies of eighteen years and over to
be hanged. At the end of that century, Heinrich Grellmann published his
groundbreaking treatise which established the Indian origin of the Romani people
but claimed that, in doing his research among them, he felt “a clear repugnancy,
like a biologist dissecting some nauseating, crawling thing in the interest of
science.” Ten years after that, in 1793, anti-Romani racism received further
establishment sanction, this time from the Church, when the Lutheran minister
Martinus Zippel declared that “Gypsies in a well-ordered state in the present day,
are like vermin on an animal’s body” (Biester, 1793:110). Acknowledgement of
26
the physical and social differences of the Romanies were gradually being
incorporated into German scholarly and ecclesiastical attitudes.
In his Addresses to the German Nation (1808), Johann Fichte wrote that
the German “race” had been selected by God himself for preeminence among the
world’s peoples; two years later, the German nationalist Jahn wrote that “a state
without Volk is a soulless artifice, while a Volk without a state is nothing, a
bodiless, airless phantom, like the Gypsies and the Jews”. Once again, the fact of
non-territoriality marked both Romanies and Jews as asocials, populations who
didn’t fit in. In 1819, Hartwig von Hundt-Radowsky compared Romanies and
Jews, and wrote about their shared propensity for stealing babies (Wippermann,
1986:57). Like the charge of cannibalism which was sometimes made, the
accusation of child-stealing is psychologically a very powerful one, human beings
instinctively reacting with fear or loathing. In 1830, using the same techniques
employed in the previous century, the Nordhausen city council attempted to bring
about the eventual eradication of the Romani population by taking children away
from their parents for permanent placement with non-Gypsies. One must ask who
were the real child-stealers, given the prevalence of the stereotype of the Gypsy in
this role.
In 1835, Theodor Tetzner referred in print to Romanies as “the excrement
of humanity” (Hehemann, 1987: 99, 116, 127, and Wippermann, 1986:57-58). In
1848, Colin de Plancy wrote that Romanies were in fact Jews “intermarried with
Christian vagrants,” while in 1850, Robert Knox, in his Races of Men described
Romanies as the “refuse of the human race.” Five years after that, in 1855,
Gobineau (who also wrote about Gypsies) published his book Essai sur l’inégalité
des races humaines, which argued that human beings could be ranked into higher
and lower races, with the white “Aryans”, and particularly the Nordic people
within them, placed at the very top: “Aryans were the cream of mankind,”
Gobineau believed, “and the Germans, the cream of the cream C a race of
princes” (Tenenbaum, 1956:9). This had particular impact upon the development
of German philosophical and political thinking. A decree issued in the Duchy of
Baden in that same year warned the citizens that “in recent times, Gypsies,
especially those from Alsace, have frequently been re-entering and travelling
about with their families, purportedly to engage in trade but mostly for the
purposes of begging or other illegal activities.” In 1863, Richard Liebich wrote
about the “criminal practices” of the Romanies, and described them as worthless
life, a phrase which was repeated by R. Kulemann six years later, and which was
to have ominous significance in the 20th Century (Hehemann, 1987:127). The
opinions of these scholars started to have repercussions at the highest
administrative levels, for just one year later, on November 18th, 1870, Imperial
Chancellor Otto von Bismarck circulated a brief demanding the “complete
prohibition of foreign Gypsies crossing the German border,” and which stated
further that when arrested, they were to be “transported by the closest route to
their country of origin.” He also demanded in the same circular that Romanies in
Germany be asked to show documentary proof of citizenship, and that if this were
not forthcoming, they be denied travelling passes (Mihalik & Kreutzkamp,
27
1990:123). When Alsace and Lorraine were annexed by the German Empire in
1871, each was made responsible for the control of Romanies at the borders into
other areas of the new Reich (Fings, 1990:250). Charles Darwin, also writing in
1871, “employed unmistakably racial terms when he noted ‘the uniform
appearance in various parts of the world of Gypsies and Jews . . . which
contrast[ed] sharply with all the virtues represented by the territorially settled and
‘culturally advanced’ Nordic Aryan race” (Fox, 1995:7). Basing his ideas on
Darwin, Cesare Lombroso published his influential work L’uomo deliquente in
1876, which contained a lengthy chapter on the genetically criminal character of
the Romanies, whom he described as “a living example of a whole race of
criminals.” This was translated into German, French and English (in 1918), and
had a profound effect upon western legal attitudes. At the same time, a decree
was issued in Bavaria which called for the strictest examination of documentation
held by Romanies, both at the borders and inland, and the confiscation of their
work-permits whenever the slightest reason warranted. Their horses were also to
be examined and confiscated if they were deemed unhealthy. The movements of
those who were allowed to remain were still to be carefully monitored (Strauß,
1989).
In 1883, Richard Pischel published his essay on the non-Aryan, and
specifically Dravidian, origin of the Romani people, findings which are being
substantiated by scholarship being undertaken in India today (Pischel, 1883; see
also Hancock, 1995:17-28). This was also discussed in Martin Block’s 1936
study, a profoundly racist document which had far-reaching influence upon Nazi
policy regarding Romanies. Thus his chapter entitled “Gypsy race and racial
preservation” begins (on page 58) “[t]heir ethnological type, like their language,
indicates relationship with the original inhabitants of India, either Dravidians or
even the still earlier Mon-Khmer peoples.”
In 1886, Chancellor von Bismarck issued a directive to the governments of
all the regions of Germany alerting them to “complaints about the mischief caused
by families of Gypsies travelling in the Reich, and their increasing molestation of
the population,” and stated that foreign Romanies were to be dealt with
particularly severely. This led to the creation of many regional policies designed
to deport non-German-born Romanies (Hehemann 1987:246-50). In 1889 a
survey was held by the Imperial Chancery which summarized the progress of the
regional reports on Gypsy activity called for by Bismarck in 1886 (Hehemann,
loc. cit.).
In the early 1890s, the Swabian parliament organized a conference on the
“Gypsy Scum” (Das Zigeunergeschmeiß), and suggested means by which the
presence of Romanies could be signalled from village to village by ringing church
bells. The military was empowered to apprehend and move them on. In 1893 a
dossier was published in Cologne demanding that Romanies and Jews be grouped
together as criminals and charged equally for the same types of crime (Hehemann,
1987:114, 119-120, 126-127). An idea of the popular Gypsy stereotype held by
the general public is found in Gustavus Miller’s 1901 Traumlexikon (“Dictionary
of Dreams”), where under “Gypsies” the following observations are found: “For a
28
man to hold any conversation with a gypsy, he will be likely to lose valuable
property; to dream of trading with a gypsy, you will lose money in speculation.”
Similarly under “Jew,” the reader is told “[t]o dream of being in company with a
Jew, signifies untiring ambition and an irrepressible longing after wealth; for a
young woman to dream of a Jew, omens that she will mistake flattery for truth.”
An especially significant year in Romani Holocaust chronology was 1899,
when Houston S. Chamberlain, whose father-in-law was the composer Richard
Wagner, published his two-volume work Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten
Jahrhunderts (“The foundations of the 19th Century”) which credited the German
people with the greatest scientific and cultural accomplishments, and which
supported their philosophy of racial superiority. In it, he yearned for a “newlyshaped” and “especially deserving Aryan race” (1899:I:266). This was regarded
as complete academic justification for actions directed at the Romani minority
and others throughout the German-speaking territories. On March 23rd, an
information agency (Nachrichtendienst in Bezug auf die Zigeuner) was
established in Munich under the direction of Alfred Dillmann to consolidate
reports on the movement of Romanies throughout German lands, and a register of
all Gypsies over the age of six began to be compiled. This included obtaining
photographs, fingerprints and other genealogical data, and in particular all
information relating to “criminality.” None of these measures affected the Jews.
This led in turn to two initiatives: Dillmann’s Zigeuner-Buch (1905), and the
policy conference of December 1911.
The Twentieth Century
In 1904, the Prussian Landtag unanimously adopted a proposition regulating the
movement of Romanies and their means of livelihood. The following year, the
groundwork was laid for what was to come a quarter of a century later, with the
appearance of Alfred Dillmann’s Zigeuner-Buch (the “Gypsy Book”). This
consisted of three parts; an introduction which presented the arguments for
controlling Romanies, a register, 310 pages long, of over 5,000 individuals,
including name, date and place of birth, genealogy and kinship, criminal record
and so on, and lastly a collection of photographs of Romanies from various police
files. The introduction maintained that the German people were “suffering” from
a “plague” of Gypsies, who were “a pest against which society must unflaggingly
defend itself,” and who were to be “controlled by the police most severely,” being
“ruthlessly punished” whenever necessary. The notion of the particular dangers
of a mixed Romani and white gene pool, which Dillmann considered to
characterize almost the entire Gypsy population, resurfaced in the Nuremburg
Laws in 1935. Such racially-motivated statements also supported the ZigeunerBuch’s emphasis on the Gypsies’ genetic tendency toward criminal behavior
(Vaux de Foletier, 1978, and Cortiade, 1992). In 1943, the fear of race-mixing
and a solution in sterilization was discussed in a book on the Danish Romani
population, in which it was maintained that “mixed gipsies cause considerably
greater difficulties [than “pure” Gypsies]; nothing good has come from a crossing
29
between a gipsy and a white person” (Bartels & Brun, 1943:52). On February
17th 1906, the Prussian Minister of the Interior issued a directive entitled Die
Bekämpfung des Zigeunerunwesens (“Combatting the Gypsy Nuisance”) which
listed bilateral agreements guaranteeing the expulsion of Romanies from those
countries, with The Austro-Hungarian Empire, Bel-gium, Denmark, France, Italy,
Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Russia and Switzerland (Hehemann, loc. cit.).
Police were authorized to prosecute Romanies for breaking the law, which
offenses included “lighting fires in the woods, illegal fishing, illegal camping”
and so on. Temporary school attendance was forbidden for children whose
families were travelling through an area. Prussia introduced “Gypsy licenses,”
required by all Romanies wanting to stay in that region. These were issued only if
the applicant had a fixed domicile, no serious criminal convictions, educational
provision for their children, and proper tax accounts. Those qualifying were
nevertheless still not allowed to settle locally (Günther, 1985:13-14). In 1907
Hugo Herz wrote that Romanies, because of their “purely parasitical” existence,
threatened normal society and the very State, concluding that “Gypsies represent
an unhealthy social form within the organism of cultured people” (Hehemann,
1967: 114,119-20, 126-7). This was followed a year later a by sharp increase in
anti-Gypsy terrorism throughout Germany, which led to an influx of Romanies
into western Europe, including Britain. In 1909, Switzerland petitioned Germany,
Italy, France and Austria to exchange information on the movements of Romanies
across their shared borders, and while this was unsuccessful, the Swiss
Department of Justice began a national register of Gypsies, based upon the
Munich model. Recommendations coming from a “Gypsy policy conference” in
Hungary included the confiscation of their animals and wagons, and permanent
branding for purposes of identification. In December, 1911, a conference was
organized at which the Munich Register was used as the basis for a larger file by
incorporating data from the registers of six other German states. A year later,
France introduced the carnet anthropométrique, a document containing personal
data, including photograph and fingerprints, which all Romanies were required to
carry. This requirement remained in effect until 1970. Despite the terms of
Article 108 of the National Constitution of the Weimar Republic, reaffirmed in
1919, and again in 1921, which guaranteed Romanies full and equal citizenship
rights, antigypsyism throughout the German-speaking lands was steadily
escalating.
Another significant year in the pre-Holocaust chronology was 1920, which
saw the publication of psychiatrist Karl Binding and magistrate Alfred Hoche’s
book, which argued for the killing of those who were “Ballastexistenzen,” i.e.
whose lives were seen merely as ballast, or dead weight, within humanity
(discussed in detail in Burleigh, 1994:15ff.). The title of that study included the
phrase “lebensunwerten Lebens,” the concept of “lives unworthy (or undeserving)
of life” which was first introduced by Liebich 57 years earlier and which became
central to Nazi race policy in 1933, when a law incorporating this same phrase
was issued by Hitler on July 14th that year. It singled out three groups which
warranted this “euthanasia:” the terminally ill who specifically requested it, the
30
incurably mentally ill, and people in comas grossly disfigured through accident or
battle. The Romani population was seen as belonging to the second category, a
belief which eventually crystallized in Hitler’s 1933 law against them, and a later
law issued on December 14th, 1937 which allowed imprisonment for “genetically
inherited criminality” as well as for actual criminal activity. On July 27th, 1920,
the Minister of Public Welfare in Düsseldorf forbade Gypsies from entering any
public washing or recreational facilities, including swimming pools, public baths,
spas and parks. In 1922 Viktor Lebzelter wrote about 41 Romanies from Serbia
imprisoned in Krákow, Poland, in language one would use “to describe a different
species” (Hohmann, 1981:33). In Baden, requirements were introduced that all
Gypsies be photographed and fingerprinted, and have documents completed on
them.
In 1925, a conference was held on the Gypsy question, at which Bavaria
proposed a law compulsorily to settle Gypsies, and to incarcerate those not
regularly employed (referred to as arbeitscheu or “work shy”) to work camps for
up to two years, for reasons of “public security.” This applied equally to settled
and non-settled Romanies. On July 16th, 1926, the Bavarian “Law for
Combatting Gypsies, Vagabonds and Idlers” proposed at the 1925 conference,
was passed. It was justified in the legislative assembly thus: “[Gypsies] are by
nature opposed to all work, and find it especially difficult to tolerate any
restriction of their nomadic life; nothing, therefore, hits them harder than loss of
liberty, combined with forced labor.” The law required the registration of all
Gypsies, settled or not, with the police, registry office and unemployment agency
in each district. Bavarian State Counselor Hermann Reich praised “the enactment
of the Gypsy law. . . This law gives the police the legal hold it needs for thoroughgoing action against this constant danger to the security of the nation.” The Swiss
Pro Juventute Foundation began, “in keeping with the theories of eugenics and
progress” (Fraser, 1992:254), to take children away from Romani families without
their consent, to change their names, and to put them into foster homes. Those
pre-Nazi ideas of ethnic cleansing continued until 1973, and were not brought to
public attention until the 1980s. Switzerland has apologized to the Romanies, but
still adamantly refuses to allow access to the records which will help parents
locate the children stolen from them. Again we must reexamine the accusation of
the Gypsy as child-stealer.
On November 3rd, 1927, a Prussian ministerial decree was issued which
required all Romanies to be registered by means of documentation “in the same
manner as individuals being sought using wanted posters, witnesses, photographs
and fingerprints.” Even infants were fingerprinted, and those over the age of six
required to carry identity cards bearing their photograph as well. Between
November 23rd and 26th, armed raids were carried out by the police on Romani
communities throughout Prussia to enforce the decree of November 3rd. Eight
thousand men, women and children were processed as a result. Bavaria instituted
a law forbidding Romanies to travel in family groups, or to own firearms. Those
over sixteen found themselves liable for imprisonment in work camps, while
others without proof of local birth began to be expelled from Bavaria. A group of
31
Romanies in Slovakia was tried for cannibalism, which Friedman (1950:3)
interpreted as part of the growing campaign to increase negative public sentiment
against the Romani population. After April 12th, 1928, Romanies in Germany
were placed under permanent police surveillance; the same directive was reissued
and reaffirmed the following month, even though it was in direct violation of the
provisions of the Weimar Constitution. Professor Hans F. Günther wrote in that
year that “it was the Gypsies who introduced foreign blood into Europe.” On
April 3rd, 1929, resulting from the 1926 law, the jurisdiction of the Munich office
was extended to include the whole of Germany; the German Criminal Police
Commission renamed it The Central Office for the Fight Against the Gypsies in
Germany. On April 16th and 17th, police departments everywhere were ordered
to send fingerprints and other data on Romanies both to that office and to the
International Criminology Bureau headquarters in Vienna C Interpol. Working
closely together, they enforced restrictions on travel for Romanies without
documents, and imposed up to two years’ detention in “rehabilitation camps” on
those sixteen years and older.
In 1930, the Norwegian journalist Scharfenberg recommended that all
Gypsies be sterilized, and on January 20th, 1933, just ten days before Hitler came
to power, officials in Burgenland called for the withdrawal of all civil rights for
Romanies, and the introduction of clubbing as a punishment.
The Nazi Period, 1933-1945
It was stated earlier that a fuller chronology has been published elsewhere, and it
does not need to be reproduced here; reference is made, however, to a number of
the more significant events during this period, while the earlier chronology (and
also Hancock 1989 and 1996) may be referred to for further details and
references.
On January 30th, Hitler was elected Chancellor of The Third Reich.
March 18th saw the renewal of the cooperative agreement of German States for
Combatting the Gypsy Menace, which was based on the Bavarian decree of 1926.
It allowed any German state to issue additional regulations restricting licenses to
Gypsies for itinerant work, the supervision of school-age Romani children by the
welfare authorities, and restricting travel. On May 26th, the Law to Legalize
Eugenic Sterilization was introduced. On July 14th, Hitler’s cabinet passed the
law against “lives not deserving of life” (Lebensunwertesleben), called The Law
for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring.” It ordered sterilization for
certain categories of people, “specifically Gypsies and most of the Germans of
black color” (the so-called “Rhineland Bastards”). It also affected the Jews, as
well as the disabled, and others seen as “asocial” (i.e. social misfits). The Law for
the Revocation of German Citizenship was implemented against Romanies unable
to show proof of German birth, as well as against the “Eastern Jews,” who
constituted nearly 20% of all Jews in Germany in 1933. In the week of September
18th-25th, the Reichsminister for the Interior and Propaganda called for the
apprehension and arrest of Romanies, under the terms of the “Law Against
32
Habitual Criminals.” Many were sent to concentration camps as a result of this,
and made to undertake penal labor. From January 1934 onwards, Romanies were
being selected for transfer to camps for processing, which included sterilization
by injection or castration. Over the next three years, such centers were
established at Dachau, Dieselstrasse, Sachsenhausen, Marzahn and Vennhausen.
On March 23rd The Law for the Revocation of German Citizenship was
reinstituted, and again directed at Romanies, Eastern Jews, stateless persons and
other “undesirable foreigners;” on April 11th, the municipal housing policy in
Düsseldorf withheld residence permits from Romanies wanting to live within city
limits. In July, two laws issued in Nuremburg forbade Germans from marrying
“Jews, Negroes and Gypsies.”
In May, 1935, some five hundred Romanies were arrested simply because
they were Romanies, and incarcerated in a camp on Venloerstraße in Cologne.
This was surrounded by barbed wire and patrolled by armed police. On
September 15th, Romanies became subject to the restrictions of the National
Citizenship Law (the Reichsbürgergesetz) and the Nuremberg Law for the
Protection of German Blood and German Honor, which forbade intermarriage or
sexual relationships between Aryan and non-Aryan peoples. It stated: “A
marriage cannot be concluded when the expected result will put the purity of
German blood of future generations in danger.” A policy statement issued by the
Nazi Party read “[i]n Europe generally, only Jews and Gypsies come under
consideration as members of an alien people.” Gypsies, Jews and AfroEuropeans were considered “racially distinctive” minorities with “alien blood.”
On September 17th, The National Citizenship Law relegated Jews and
Romanies to the status of second class citizens, and deprived them of their civil
rights. On November 26th, the Central Reich Bureau and the Prussian Ministry of
the Interior circulated an order to local vital statistics registration offices
throughout Germany, prohibiting mixed marriages, specifically between Germans
and “Gypsies, Black people, and their bastard offspring.” In December, all
Romanies in the town of Gelsenkirchen were incarcerated in camps on
Crangerstraße and Reginenstraße, which were patrolled by the police, armed
soldiers and dogs.
On March 4th, 1936, a memorandum to the State Secretary of the Interior,
Hans Pfundtner, addressed the creation of a national Gypsy law
(Reichzigeunergesetz), the purpose of which was to deal with the complete
registration of the Romani population, their sterilization, the restriction on their
movement and means of livelihood, and the expulsion of all foreign-born and
stateless Romanies. On March 20th, “action against the Gypsies” was instituted
in Frankfurt am Main, when the City Council voted to move the entire local
population to an internment camp. The camp, on Dieselstrasse, was designated
on September 22nd that year, and the arrests and internment began a year later. In
June, the main Nazi institution to deal with Romanies, the Racial Hygiene and
Criminal Biology and Research Unit (which was Department 13 of the National
Ministry of Health) was established under the directorship of Dr. Robert Ritter at
Berlin-Dahlem. The National Interior Ministry supervised this entire project,
33
partially funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (the German Research
Foundation). Its expressed purpose was to determine whether the Romani people
and the Afro-Europeans were Aryans or sub-humans (“Untermenschen”). By
early 1942, Ritter had documented the genealogy of almost the entire Romani
population of Germany.
On June 5th, a circular issued by the National and the Prussian Ministries
of the Interior instructed the police to renew their efforts to “fight against the
Gypsy plague.” Information about Romanies was no longer to be sent to Vienna,
but to the Munich Center for the Fight Against the Gypsy Nuisance. On June 6th,
1936, the same ministries released a second circular, signed by Himmler which
stated that “Gypsies live by theft, lying and begging, and are a plague. . . It will be
difficult for Gypsies to get used to an orderly, civilized way of life.” Also on this
day, a decree issued by the National and Prussian Ministry of the Interior brought
into existence the Central Office to Combat the Gypsy Menace. This office in
Munich became the headquarters of a national data bank on Romanies, and
represented all German police agencies together with the Interpol International
Center in Vienna, where it was located in the police headquarters on
Roßauerlände. In June and July, several hundred Romanies were transported to
Dachau by order of the Minister of the Interior as “dependents of the Munich
Centre for the Fight Against the Gypsy Nuisance.” Attempts to escape were
punishable by death.
In this year, Dr. Hans Globke, Head of Service for the Ministry of the
Interior for the Third Reich, who served on the panel on racial legislation,
declared that “in Europe, only Jews and Gypsies are of foreign blood,” while race
hygienist Dr. Robert Körber wrote in his paper Volk und Staat that “The Jews and
the Gypsies are today wide apart from us because their Asiatic progenitors were
totally different from our Nordic forebears” (quoted in Tenenbaum, 1956:400), a
sentiment reiterated by Dr. E. Brandis, who wrote that “only the Gypsies are to be
considered as an alien people in Europe (beside the Jews).” Dr. Claus Eichen
published his book Raßenwahn: Briefe über die Raßenfrage (“Delusions of race:
Notes on the race question”) in which he justified sterilization of “asocial” and
“criminal” elements in German society, i.e. Gypsies. German anti-Gypsyism
became trans-national in Europe when Interpol in Vienna established the Centre
for Combatting the Gypsy Menace, which had grown out of the earlier Bureau of
Gypsy Affairs. In Leipzig, Martin Block published his general study of
Romanies, and justified Nazi racist attitudes, echoing Grellmann when he wrote
of the “nauseating Gypsy smell,” and the “involuntary feeling of mistrust or
repulsion one feels in their presence.” In Berlin, Romanies were cleared off the
streets away from public view because of the upcoming Olympic games, so that
visitors could be “spared the sight of the Gypsy disgrace” (Zimmermann,
1990:91).
In 1937, an editorial in the Hamburger Tagblatt for August by Georg
Nawrocki, took the Weimar Republic to task for its lenient attitude towards
Gypsies: “It was in keeping with the inner weakness and mendacity of the
Weimar Republic that it showed no instinct for tackling the Gypsy question. For
34
it, the Sinti were a criminal concern at best C we, on the other hand, see the
Gypsy question above all as a racial problem, which must be solved, and which is
being solved” (Vossen, 1983:70). On August 18th, Romanies in Frankfurt were
arrested and incarcerated in the Dieselstraße camp. In the same year, 1937,
Heinrich Himmler issued a decree entitled Bekämpfung der Zigeunerplage (“The
Struggle Against the Gypsy Plague”) which stated, like Dillmann’s ZigeunerBuch 27 years before it, that Gypsies of mixed blood were the most predisposed
to criminality, and that police departments should systematically send data on
Romanies in their areas to the Reich Central Office (Döring, 1964:58-60).
Between June 12th and June 18th, 1938, Zigeuneraufräumungswoche,
“Gypsy clean-up week,” took place, and hundreds of Romanies throughout
Germany and Austria were rounded up, beaten and imprisoned (Novitch, 1968:7).
This was the third such public action by the German state, earlier attacks having
taken place on November 23rd-26th, 1927 and September 18th-25th, 1933. Like
Kristallnacht, it was a public sanctioning and approval of the official attitude
towards members of an “inferior race.” After March 16th, Romanies were no
longer allowed to vote, a directive shortly thereafter also applied to Jews. The
second mention of the Endlösung der Zigeunerfrage (“Final Solution of the
Gypsy Question”) appeared in a document calling for its implementation signed
by Himmler on December 8th, 1938 (Ranz, 1995:11).
At the beginning of 1940, the first mass genocidal action of the Holocaust
took place when 250 Romani children from Czechoslovakia were murdered
during tests with the new Zyklon-B gas in the camp at Buchenwald (Proester,
1940; Novitch, 1968) . Robert Ritter published a report in which he stated that
“we have been able to establish that more than 90% of the so-called ‘native’ [i.e.
German-born] Gypsies are of mixed blood . . . Furthermore, the results of our
investigations have allowed us to characterize the Gypsies as being a people of
entirely primitive ethnological origins, whose mental backwardness makes them
incapable of real social adaptation. . . The Gypsy question can only be solved
when the main body of asocial and worthless Gypsy individuals of mixed blood is
collected together in large labor camps and kept working there, and when the
further breeding of this population of mixed blood is permanently stopped.”
(Müller-Hill, 1989:57).
In August, 1941, Himmler issued a decree listing the criteria for racial and
biological evaluation. An individual’s family background had to be investigated
over three generations (compared to two generations for one’s Jewish genealogy).
He implemented a system of classification based on the degree of Romani
ancestry in one’s genetic descent: <Z> meant “pure Gypsy,” <ZM+> meant more
than half Gypsy, <ZM> meant half Gypsy, <ZM-> meant less than half Gypsy
and <NZ> meant non-Gypsy. Having two great-grandparents who were even
only part-Gypsy (i.e. if one were of 25% or less Gypsy ancestry) counted as <ZM>. On July 31st, Heydrich, chief architect of the details of the Final Solution,
issued his directive to the Einsatzkommandos to “kill all Jews, Gypsies and
mental patients” (Müller-Hill, 1989:56; see also Friedlander, 1995). In September
35
that year, Minister of Justice Dr. Otto Thierack wrote in a memo to Hermann
Goebbels that
With regard to the destruction of asocial life, Dr. Goebbels is of opinion
that the following should be exterminated: (1) All Jews and Gypsies (2)
Poles in prison for three or four year terms, and (3) Czechs and Germans
who have been sentences either to death or to life imprisonment. The idea
of exterminating them through work is best (International Military
Tribunal, Vol. VI, p. 279).
On December 16th, 1942, Himmler issued the order to have all Romanies
remaining in Germany deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau for extermination,
and so the end began for the second “major group which National
Socialists proposed to exterminate in its entirety: the Gypsies” (Peukert,
1987:210).
The Post-War Period
The question is frequently asked regarding the number of Romanies murdered in
the Holocaust. Estimates from as low as 20,000 to as high as four million have
appeared, with half a million having somehow become the default figure. This
must be considered an underestimation for a number of reasons, expressed most
clearly by König (1989:87-89):
[T]he 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 “remainder to
be liquidated,” “hangers-on,” “partisans,” [&c. . .] 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 . . . Sinti and Roma often.
. . do not appear in the statistics.
Also, as the Auschwitz Memorial Book points out, Romanies were
murdered unrecorded, sometimes by the hundreds, outside the camps, in the most
numbers in the eastern territories, for which only scant records exist. As research
continues, for example that being undertaken for Czechoslovakia by Polansky
, the figures rise steadily
higher. In order to estimate the percentage of total losses, we would have to
know, in addition to the number of dead, the number of Romanies throughout
Europe before 1933, and this we will never be able to determine accurately,
although both Colliers Encyclopedia and the Encyclopedia Americana list the prewar European Romani population as 700,000. A guess as good as any is that
there were perhaps three million Romanies throughout the German-controlled
territories at the period of their maximum extent, between one and one and a half
36
a million of whom were murdered, i.e. between a third and a half of the
population. The world population at the same time was probably ca. five million.
Only a few thousand survived in the Nazi-controlled territories, and none
was asked to testify in behalf of the Romani victims at the war crimes trials.
Reparations to Romanies as a people have yet to be made by the German
government, which has only in recent years even admitted the racial motivation of
the Nazi genocidal campaign against the Romani people.
The massive increase in neo-Nazi activity since the reunification of
Germany and the collapse of Communism need not be elaborated upon here; it
has been documented in a series of book-length treatments published by Helsinki
Watch, and in a 50-page report by the Geneva-based U.N. Human Rights
Commission. And in poll after poll, the Romani population in Europe stands as
the prime target of both sanctioned and unsanctioned discrimination. In 1995
alone, in the Czech Republic alone, there were over 450 documented attacks
against Romanies, several resulting in death; those were only the reported
incidents. There have been rapes and house-burnings in Romania and Bulgaria;
letter bombs and booby-trap explosives have killed four Romanies and blinded
and maimed many more. At the October, 1995 OSCE meeting in Warsaw, one of
our delegates was hit and robbed by four youths on the street shouting racial
epithets; another was turned back at the Polish border simply because he was a
Romani, and as a result was not able to attend the meeting. The previous year, in
the same city, a group of nine of us, all Romanies, were refused service in a
restaurant.
One of the issues at the 1995 conference in Warsaw was the official
protest of Romania’s resolution to replace the words Rom and Romani with
in all official documents. The word, which was a synonym for “slave” during the
five and a half centuries of Gypsy slavery in that country, is as offensive for
Romanies as the word “nigger” is for African Americans. The Romanian
government’s reason for this is that Romani sounds too much like Romanian, and
outsiders might think that Romanians were Gypsies. In November, 1995,
Amnesty International released a 62-page document on human rights abuses in
Romania which referred in part to “reports about torture and ill-treatment by
police officials [and their] violent abuse of power . . . Massive arbitrary measures
against the Romani minority and the lack of protection of this group against racist
attacks have continuously posed a problem since March, 1990.” The Romanian
government has responded by declaring that “hereafter, slandering of the state and
the nation will be prosecuted by imprisonment of up to five years” (Romnews, No.
46, November 19th, 1995, p. 1.).
Echoes of the Holocaust
Attention is drawn to Romania deliberately here, because a frightening link with
the Third Reich is having repercussions in the present day, though it has so far
gone unheeded. In the pages of the newsletter of the Virginia-based Romanian
Children’s Connection, attention has been brought to the appalling conditions of
37
the orphans in Romania’s state institutions, where in some places they constitute
as many as 80% of the children, although Romanies make up only between 10%
and 20% of the national population. The Romanian government is struggling to
genetic manipulation. His fascination with Hitler’s race policies was no secret;
Pacepa (1988:281) describes this as follows:
In the early 1970s, when Ceauşescu learned that Romania had over
600,000 emigrés abroad, he became very interested in Hitler’s Fifth
Column. This was not too surprising, as Ceauşescu had always studied
Hitler’s ‘charisma,’ and had repeatedly analyzed the original Nazi films of
Hitler’s speeches . . . In almost every speech, he recalls the Romanian
people’s origins in proud Roman and Dacian warriors, just as Hitler
harped on the Aryans.
Because he took pains to conceal his actions, however, and because little
documentation has yet come to light, much of it having been destroyed, the means
by which Ceauşescu tried to accomplish his aims are only now being pieced
together.
The establishment of his “death camp” orphanages apparently pre-dated
his fascination with Hitler by some years. On July 28th, 1991, using footage
secretly filmed by Hans Kunink, who was working with the human rights
organization Terre des Hommes which is based in Den Haag, Mark Jones
presented a documentary on NBC’s Cable News Network in which he reported
that
Ceauşescu started the camps as early as 1965; there had been years of
planning. When Auschwitz, the Nazi concentration camp, was discovered
in January, 1945, Nicolae Ceauşescu was 27 years old. Like the Nazis,
Ceauşescu advocated racial purity. Years later, he would express his
concern for, quote, “the new human type we intend to mold in our
society.” Ceauşescu had Romania’s history books rewritten. He argued
that the true Romanians were Dacians, far more advanced than what he
called “the other aboriginal races . . . superior even to ancient Rome.”
Ceauşescu wanted a huge robot work force.
His intention was to breed on the one hand large numbers of
“pure” Romanians and on the other, those who were to make up his “robot work
force,” the status the Romani slaves had already endured for over five hundred
years in his country. In both cases, the weak were allowed to die, since they were
of no use to either population. Terre des Hommes reported that the annual death
rate in some of the homes was between 50% and 65%. Such children were
classified as “irrecuperable” or “irrecoverable” by the government, and no attempt
was made to sustain them. Hans Hunink’s film showed the mass graves where
38
their bodies had been dumped, sometimes not even in boxes, after they had been
allowed to die. According to that report, irrecuperables were sent to Riu Radului,
near Sibiu,
. . . one of 170 isolated ‘forbidden zones.’ No visitors were allowed
inside; one mile up the road is a mass grave, four football fields long.
Dutch humanitarian Hans Hunink discovered the mass grave last winter;
Hunink believes that most of the dead are children.
Women, married or not, were encouraged to have many children; they
were rewarded publicly for giving birth to five or more, and birth control was
made illegal. Romanian officials have since maintained that Romanies were not
therefore discriminated against, since the policy affected both populations
equally, but the awful difference lay in what was destined for each group.
Because of the state of the Romanian economy, and because Ceauşescu was
executed in December, 1989, this bizarre plan never materialized, but it has left a
legacy in the surplus children who languish in Romania’s orphanages, and whose
bodies fill the graves reported by Terre des Hommes.
A report dated August 28th, 1991, indicated that the coercive sterilization
of Romani women in Czechoslovakia and the permanent removal of their children
was still going on, despite assurances from the Czech government that it had been
stopped (Pellar, 1991; see also Offner & de Rooj, 1990).
The age-old charge of spying re-emerged a few years ago in 1989, when
the British government used it as a reason for their not allowing the construction
of a site for Romanies near a Ministry of Defence research facility. It was said
that the presence of Gypsies near the establishment would “pose a risk to security
. . . and allow terrorists near the top-secret site for reconnaissance work” (The
Surrey Advertiser, May 25th, 1990).
Lombroso’s and Dillmann’s and the Nazis’ insistence that criminality is a
genetic characteristic of the Romani people was the focus of a 1981 article in a
police journal by American criminologist Terry Getsay, who wrote about the
“criminal propensity” of the Gypsies as a people; two entire books on the topic
appeared in 1994, published by police specialty presses: Jack Morris’ The Master
Criminals among the Gypsies and Marlock & Dowling’s Licenced to Steal; the
latter talks about “dishonest Romani, the true Gypsies” (p. 17), and cautions that
“no one is invulnerable to Gypsy crime” on the dust-jacket. Such crime, it says,
“has a feel, a smell and an aura that screams ‘Gypsy’” (p. 5). An article on
Gypsies published in the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin in 1994, in wording
reminiscent of the 1899 police conference in Germany, stressed that “interagency
cooperation represents the greatest asset law enforcement can employ [against
Gypsies]” (Mazzone, 1994:5).
An unsettling echo of the 1920 decree which forbade Romanies to use
public facilities came on October 18th, 1995, when the mayor of Vsetin in the
Czech Republic issued a similar order banning Romanies from using public
39
bathing and swimming facilities in that city (Open Media Research Institute,
Daily Digest, 20th October 1995).
History also repeated itself in Munich in October, 1988, when the City
Council announced its intention forcibly to relocate Romanies refugees to a
containment center on the site of an earlier Nazi deportation and slave-labor camp
in that city; it was a toxic waste dump, and was to have guards and guard dogs
patrolling it (Die Tageszeichnung for October 26th, 1988). The same action was
taken in the same city in May, 1935.
In 1936, Romanies had been cleared from the streets of Berlin in
anticipation of the Olympic Games; fifty-six years later, the police in Spain did
exactly the same thing in preparation for the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona,
when Spanish Romanies were moved to the Campo de la Bota outside the city for
the same reason C to hide the Gypsy “eyesore” from the public.
When attempts to create a robot work force for a master race were being
made forty years after the fall of Nazi Germany, when the coercive sterilization of
Romani women is being reported in the 1990s, when Germany can deport its
unwanted Romanies to neighboring countries and pay those countries to take
them, we must ask ourselves how far we have come since the days of Hitler.
When we watch the present-day rise of neo-Nazi activity, not only overseas but
here in our own country, and stand impotently by as Romanies are beaten and
murdered in Europe, sometimes by the very police meant to protect them, we
must face the fact that the writing is clearly on the wall. If the situation is not
regarded seriously and steps are not taken to prevent it, then the world will have
another porrajmos, another massive devouring of Romani lives, to account for.
Notes
1This
is a modified version of paper originally presented at the Conference
entitled Gypsies in the Holocaust: The Nazi Assault on Roma and Sinti, cosponsored by the Drew University Center for Holocaust Study and The United
States Holocaust Research Institute, Drew University, Madison, New Jersey,
Thursday, November 9th 1995.
2Though
not entirely: Kimmerling (1995:63, fn. 26) notes that
Most mainstream Israeli historians and social scientists agree upon the
incomparability of the Holocaust with other organized genocides and
invest much energy in ‘proving’ this argument. Any counter-argument is
seen as ‘revisionism’ and virtually seen as equivalent to the denial of the
Holocaust itself. When in 1995 the Ministry of Education tried to
introduce an optional curricular program for high schools about the
Armenian and Gypsy genocides, the plan was vetoed by several
respectable history professors, who argued that the subject was better
presented as part of the more general program dealing with World War II.
40
This “competitive” aspect is particularly explicit in a monograph by Gilad
Margalit (1996), who 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 (p. 26).”
3Friedlander
deals in particular with the targeting of the handicapped in his new
book, the one other population selected for extermination according to Nazi
genocidal policy, and the one on which race-engineering techniques for dealing
with Romanies and Jews were later based.
4There
is considerable confusion about the terminology used when discussing the
Romani people, and some clarification is in order. All Romani populations
throughout the world share a single common origin in India, having left there as a
single group about a thousand years ago as a result of the spread of Islam
(Hancock, 1995); at the time of arrival in Europe was between 1250 and 1300
AD; the fragmenting into the various sub-groups occurred during this time, as a
result of different sociohistorical factors. These divisions were accompanied by
the acquisition and use of different names; Sinti refers to the Romani population
in northern Europe, a population which suffered especially severely at the hands
of the Nazis. The Sinti refer to their language and culture as Romani, and use the
word Rom only to mean (Romani) husband. Other groups use the word Rom in
the same way as Sinti, i.e. as the larger group designation; the Sinti do not refer
to themselves as a group as R(r)oma. When referring to the Sinti specifically, the
word Sinti should be employed. The International Romani Union recognizes the
historical unity of all Romani populations, and that all populations furthermore
have the word Rom in their respective dialects of Romani, either to mean
“(Romani) husband” (as opposed to “non-Romani husband”), or to refer to the
group as a whole, or else to mean both. Thus, the word Rrom (plural Rroma) is
now used in all IRU documents as the general ethnonym for all peoples who
descend from Romani-speaking populations, including the Sinti, Vlax, Manuš,
Romničel, Kale, &c. The spelling with double-/rr/ is in accordance with
standardized orthography, there being two /r/ phonemes in the language (Cortiade
et al., 1996) [Since writing this essay, I have edited in the word Romani(es)
throughout, following the rationale outlined in my book We Are the Romani
People, pp. xxj-xxij].
5Romani
cultural restrictions on contact with outsiders, while probably having
their origins in Hinduism and the caste system, are not maintained for religious
reasons today. They are based in the concept of ritual pollution, which must be
guarded against by the proper preparation of food, handling of animals, washing
and placement of clothes and bed linen, and by proper male-female relationships.
Since non-Romanies do not observe these behaviors, they are in a state of
defilement, and thereby able to defile others (specifically Romanies themselves)
41
by association. Not all Romani groups maintain all of these restrictions to the
same extent.
Works Mentioned in the Text
Ackovič, Dragoljub, 1995. Roma suffering in the Jasenovic camp. Belgrade:
Struša.
Bartels, Erik, & Gudrun Brun, 1943. The Gipsies in Denmark.
Copenhagen:Munksgaard.
Bauer, Yehuda, 1980. “Whose Holocaust?,” Midstream, November, pp. 42-46.
Bauer, Yehuda, 1994. “Gypsies,” in Gutman & Berenbaum, eds., 1994:441455.
Beck, Sam, 1985. “The Romanian Gypsy problem,” in Grumet, ed., 1985:100109.
Biester, Johann Erich, 1793. “Ueber die Zigeuner,” Berlinische Monatsschrift,
21:108-165, 360-393.
Binding, Karl, & Alfred Hoche, 1920. Die Freigabe der Vernichtung
lebensunwerten Lebens. Leipzig: Felix Meiner.
Bischoff, Ferdinand, 1827. Deutsch-Zigeunerisches Woerterbuch. Ilmenau:
Voigt Verlag.
Block, Martin, 1936. Die Zigeuner: Ihre Leben und Ihre Seele. Leipzig:
Bibliographisches Institut.
Block, Martin, 1936. Zigeuner: Ihre Leben und ihre Seele. Leipzig:
Bibliographisches Institut A.G.
Burleigh, Michael, 1994. Death and deliverance. Cambridge: The University
Press.
Chamberlain, Houston S., 1899. Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts.
Leipzig.
Cockroft, Barry, 1979. A Romany Summer. London: J.M. Dent & Sons.
Cortiade, Marcel, 1992. The “Zigeuner-Buch” or, when the KL were still paper
and ink. Fondàcija Rromani Baxt Occasional Paper.
Cortiade, Marcel, Nicolae Gheorghe & Ian Hancock, 1996. Romani ethnic
terminology. Toulouse: Collection Interface, Centre de Recherches Tsiganes.
Crowe, David, & John Kolsti, (eds.), 1989. The Gypsies of Eastern Europe.
Armonk: E.C. Sharpe.
Darwin, Charles, 1871, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex.
London: J. Murray.
Dillmann, Alfred, 1905. Zigeuner-Buch. Munich: Wildsche.
Döring, Hans-Joachim, 1964. Die Zigeuner im NS-Staat. Hamburg:
KriminalistikVerlag.
Dunstan, G.R., 1965. “A note on an early ingredient of racial prejudice in
western Europe,” Race, 6(4):334-339.
Eccard, J.G., 1723. Corpus historicum medii ævi. Leipzig.
Eichen, Claus, 1936. Raßenwahn: Briefe über die Raßenfrage. Paris: Carrefour.
42
Fichte, Johann, 1807-1808. Versammlungen zum Deutschen Volk. Leipzig.
Fings, Karola, & Frank Sparing, 1990. Nur wenige Kamen zurück: Sinti und
Roma im Nationalsozialismus. Cologne: Stadt-Revue Verlag.
Fonseca, Isabel, 1995. Bury Me Standing: the Gypsies and their Journey. New
York: Vintage.
Fox, John P., 1995. “The Nazi extermination of the Gypsies: Genocide,
Holocaust, or a ‘minor irritant’?,” paper presented at the conference of the
Association of Genocide Scholars, Williamsburg, Virginia, June 14th - 16th.
Friedlander, Henry, 1995. The origins of Nazi genocide from euthanasia to the
Final Solution. Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press.
Friedman, Philip, 1950. “How the Gypsies were persecuted,” Wiener Library
Bull., 3-4.
Getsay, Terry, 1981/2. “GYP-sies and their criminal propensity,” Spotlight,
1(1):12-17, 1(2):14-19, 2(1):10-20.
Gilbert, Martin, 1985. The Holocaust: A history of the Jews of Europe during the
Second World War. New York: Henry Holt & Co.
Gobineau, Joseph Arthur, 1855. Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines. Paris.
Gobineau, Joseph Arthur, 1857. “Die Wanderstämme Persiens,” Zeitschrift der
Deutscher Morganländische Gesellschaft, 11:689-699 [on Gypsies in Iran].
Grautoff, H., 1872. Die lübeckischen Chroniken. Lübeck. 2 vols.
Grumet, Joanne, 1985. Papers from the Fourth and Fifth Annual Meetings of the
Gypsy Lore Society, North American Chapter, New York: GLS(NAC)
Monograph 2.
Günther, W. 1985. Zur preußischen Zigeunerpolitik Seit 1871. Hannover: ANS
Verlag.
Gutman, Israel, & Michael Berenbaum, eds., 1994. Anatomy of the Auschwitz
death camp. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press (in
association with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council).
Hancock, Ian, 1987. The pariah syndrome: An account of Gypsy persecution and
slavery. Ann Arbor: Karoma Publishers.
Hancock, Ian, 1988. “‘Uniqueness’ of the victims: Gypsies, Jews and the
Holocaust,” Without Prejudice: International Review of Racial Discrimination,
1(2)45-67.
Hancock, Ian, 1989. “Gypsy history in Germany and neighboring lands: A
chronology leading to the Holocaust and beyond,” in Crowe & Kolsti, eds., 1989,
11-30.
Hancock, Ian, 1995. A handbook of Vlax Romani. Columbus: Slavica
Publishers.
Hancock, Ian, 1996. “Responses to the Porrajmos,” in Rosenbaum, 1996.
Hancock, Ian, 2002. We Are the Romani People. Hatfield: University of
Hertfordshire Press.
Hobson, R.F., 1965. [Commentary on racism] in Dunstan, 1965, p. 338.
Hohmann, Joachim S., 1981. Geschichte der Zigeunerverfolgung in
Deutschland. Frankfurt & New York: Campus Verlag.
43
Hehemann, Rainer, 1987. Die “Bekämpfung des Zigeunerunwesens” im
Wilhelminischen Deutschland und in der Weimarer Republik, 1871-1933.
Frankfurt am Main: Haag & Herschen Verlag.
International Military Tribunal, 1948. Nuremberg.
Jahn, Freidrich Ludwig, 1810. Deutsches Volkstum. Lübeck.
Kenedi János, 1986. “Why is the Gypsy the scapegoat and not the Jew?,” East
European Reporter, 2(1):11-14.
Kenrick, Donald, & Grattan Puxon, 1972. The destiny of Europe’s Gypsies.
London:Sussex University Press.
Kimmerling, Baruch, 1995. History and memory.Tel Aviv: Spring-Samlea.
Knox, Robert, 1850. The Races of Men. London.
König, Ulrich, 1989. Sinti und Roma unter dem National- sozialismus. Bochum:
Brockmeyer.
Körber, Robert, 1936. [Jüdische u. Zigeunerische Artfremdesblut], Volk und
Staat. Cited in Tenenbaum, 1956:400.
Kulemann, Rudolph, 1869. “Die Zigeuner,” Unsere Zeit, 5(1):843-871.
Liebich, Richard, 1863. Die Zigeuner in ihrem Wesen und ihere Sprache.
Leipzig:Brockhaus.
Lombroso, Cesare, 1918. Crime: Its causes and remedies. Boston: Little, Brown
& Co.
Luther, Martin, 1883. Martin Luthers Werke: Kritische
Gesamtausgabe, 53:613 (“Vom Schem Hamphoras und von Geschlecht Christi”).
Margalit, Gilad, 1996. Antigypsyism in in the political culture of the Federal
Republic of Germany: A parallel with antisemitism?, Analysis of Current Trends
in Antisemitism No. 9, The Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of
Antisemitism, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Marlock, Dennis, & John Dowling, 1994. License to steal. Boulder: Paladin
Press.
Mason, Philip, 1968. “But O! My soul is white,” Encounter, April, pp. 57-61.
Mayall, David, 1988. Gypsy-travellers in nineteenth century society. Cambridge
UP.
Mazzone, Gary L., 1994. “Traveling criminals,” FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin,
63:1-5.
Mihalik, Eva von, & Doris Kreutzkamp, 1990. Du kriegst auch inen schönen
Wohnwagen: Zwangslager für Sinti und Roma während des Nationalsozialismus
in Frankfurt am Main. Frankfurt: Brandes & Apsel.
Miller, Gustavus Hindman, 1901. Das Traumlexikon (published as The
Dictionary of Dreams: 10,000 Dreams Interpreted, New York: Simon & Schuster
(1992).
Morris, Jack, 1994. The master criminals among the Gypsies. Loomis: The
Palmer Press.
Müller-Hill, Benno, 1988. Murderous science: Elimination by scientific
selection of Jews, Gypsies and others, Germany 1933-1945. Oxford: The
University Press.
44
Nicoll, Ruaridh, 1995. “Bimbo tribe lures men into foxglove trap,” The (London)
Observer, November 29th, p. 25.
Novitch, Miriam, 1968. Le génocide des Tziganes sous le régime nazi. Paris:
AMIF.
Ofner, Paul, & Bert de Rooj, 1990. “Survey on the sterilization of Roma women
in Czechoslovakia,” Amsterdam: Report of the Lau Mazirel Foundation.
Okely, Judith, 1983. The Traveller Gypsies. Cambridge: The University Press.
Pacepa, Ion Mihai, 1988. Red horizons. Washington: Regnery-Gateway.
Pellar, Ruben, 1991. “Sterilisierung von Roma-Frauen in der
Pogrom,
159 (May-June) p. 49.
Peukert, Detlev, 1987. Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition and
Racism in Everyday Life. London: R.T. Batsford.
Pischel, Richard, 1883. “Der Heimath der Zigeuner,” Deutsche Rundschau,
36:353-375.
Proester, Emil, 1940. Vraždňí čs. Cikánů v Buchenwaldu. Document No. ÚV
ČSPB-K-135 of the Archives of the Fighters Against Fascism. Prague.
Ranz, S., 1995. “Buchenwald: 50 years later,” Jewish Currents, October, pp. 1013.
Rosenbaum, Alan, ed., 1996. Perspectives on the uniqueness of the Holocaust.
Boulder: Westview Press.
Scharfenberg, J., 1930. “Omstreiferondet,” Arbeiderbladet, Oct. 31st & Nov.
25th.
Scheier, Alfred (ed.), 1925. Arnim’s Werke. Leipzig: Bibliographisches Institut.
Sibley, David, 1981. Outsiders in urban societies. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Smith, Julia, 1995. “People seem to imagine that Martin is such a sap,” The
(London) Times, Friday, October 27th, p. 18.
State Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau, 1993. Memorial book: The Gypsies at
Auschwitz-Birkenau. Documentary and Cultural Centre of German Sintis and
Roma. Munich: K.G. Saur.
Strandberg, Susan, 1994. “Researcher claims thousands of Gypsies
exterminated by Czechs,” The Decorah Journal, May 5th, pp. 1-2.
Strauss, Eva, 1989. “Gipsy policy and persecution in Bavaria from 1885 to
1945.” Leiden Fonds paper, translated from the Dutch by Margit von Stetten and
Christopher Martin.
Tenenbaum, Joseph, 1956. Race and reich: The story of an epoch. New York:
Twayne.
Vaux de Foletier, François, 1978. “Un recensement des Tsiganes de Bavière en
1905,” Etudes Tsiganes, 24(3):8-14.
Vossen, Rüdiger, 1983. Zigeuner. Frankfurt & Berlin: Ullstein Sachbuch.
Walters, E. Garrison, 1988. The Other Europe: Eastern Europe to 1945.
Syracuse: The University Press.
Wippermann, Wolfgang, 1986. Das Leben in Frankfurt zur NS-Zeit: Die
nationalsozialistische Zigeunerverfolgung. Frankfurt am Main: W. Kramer & Co.
45
3
THE ROMANIES IN THE HOLOCAUST
“In 1933 a process began which was to pursue the racial differentiation of
people into Aryans and non-Aryans. The intended goal was the final
annihilation of all Jews and Gypsies in Europe.”
(Herbert Heuss, From ‘Race Science’ to the Camps: The Gypsies During
the Second World War, University of Hertfordshire Press, 1997, p. 27).
“In 1935, Gypsy persecution was ushered in with the introduction of the
Nuremberg Laws. According to Stuckert and Globke, “As a rule . . . only
the Jews and the Gypsies are of foreign blood in Europe.”
(Erika Thurner, National Socialism and Gypsies in Austria, Alabama
University Press, 1998, p. 9).
“Jews were not the only biologically selected target. Alongside Jews, the
Nazis murdered European Romanies.”
(Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide from Euthanasia to the
Final Solution. Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 1995, p. xii).
“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.”
(Erika Thurner, “Nazi Policy against the Gypsies,” The Other Victims,
Washington, 1998, p. xvi).
“The motives invoked to justify the death of the Gypsies were the same as
these ordering the murder of the Jews, and the methods employed for the
one were identical to those employed for the other.”
(Miriam Novitch, Survivor, Ghetto Fighters’ House, Asherat, Israel,
1968).
“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
46
murdered within the entire sphere of influence of the National Socialists.”
(Roman Herzog, Federal President of Germany, 16 March 1997).
“The final solution, 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 Sinti and Roma.”
(The Auschwitz Memorial Book, State Museum, 1993, p. xiv).
“The Gypsies come closest of all to the Jewish tragedy.” (Elie Wiesel,
Chairman, USHMC; quoted in Bob Lundegaard, “Gypsies say their
Holocaust story remains untold,” The Minneapolis Star and Tribune, 7
July 1987, p. 1C).
“At the center of the tragedy of the Holocaust is the murder of European
Jews . . . near that center is the murder of the Romanies.”
(Michael Berenbaum, in his introduction to The World Must Know: The
History of the Holocaust as Told in the United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., Toronto and London, 1993).
To understand why Hitler sought to eradicate the Romanies, a people who
presented no problem numerically, politically, militarily or economically, one
must interpret the underlying rationale of the holocaust as being his attempt to
create a superior Germanic population, a Master Race, by eliminating what he
viewed as genetic pollutants in the Nordic gene pool, and why he believed that
Romanies constituted such contamination. The holocaust itself was the
implementation of his Final Solution, the genocidal program intended to
accomplish this vision of ethnic cleansing. Just two “racial” populations defined
by what they were born were thus targeted: the Jews and the Romanies1. The very
inventor of the term, Raphael Lemkin, referred to the genocide of the “gypsies”
even before the Second World War was over2.
It is also essential to place the holocaust of the Romanies3 in its historical
context. For perhaps most Romanies today it lacks the special place it holds for
Jews, being seen as just one more hate-motivated crisis—albeit an
overwhelmingly terrible one—in their overall European experience. Others refuse
to speak about it because of its association with death and misfortune, or to testify
or accept reparation for the same reason.
The first German anti-Romani law was issued in 1416 when they were
accused of being foreign spies, carriers of the plague, and traitors to Christendom;
in 1500 Maximilian I ordered all to be out of Germany by Easter. Ferdinand I
enforced expulsion and extermination orders in 1566; in 1659 the mass murder of
Romanies took place in Neudorf. In 1710 Frederick I of Prussia condemned all
males to forced labor, had the women whipped and branded, and their children
permanently removed. In 1721, Emperor Karl VI ordered the extermination of all
Romanies, 220 years before the same directive was issued by Hitler. In 1725,
Friedrich Wilhelm I condemned all those 18 years and older to be hanged.
47
By the end of the 18th century anti-Romani racism had received
establishment sanction from the Church and the Academy after Heinrich
Grellmann published his treatise demonstrating their Asian origin. He wrote that
in studying Romanies he felt a “clear repugnancy, like a biologist dissecting some
nauseating, crawling thing in the interests of science,”4 echoed in the words of the
Lutheran minister Martinus Zippel: “Gypsies in a well-ordered state in the present
day are like vermin on an animal’s body.”5 Acknowledgement of the physical and
social differences of the Romanies was being increasingly incorporated into
German scholarly and ecclesiastical attitudes.
In 1808 Johann Fichte wrote that the German “race” had been selected by
God himself for preeminence among the world’s peoples;6 two years later, the
German nationalist Jahn wrote that “a state without Volk is a soulless artifice,
while a Volk without a state is nothing, a bodiless, airless phantom, like the
Gypsies and the Jews;”7 the fact of non-territoriality marked both Romanies and
Jews as asocials, populations who didn’t fit in. In 1830, using the same
techniques employed in the previous century, the Nordhausen city council
attempted to bring about the eventual eradication of the Romani population by
taking children away from their parents for permanent placement with German
families. In 1835, Theodor Tetzner called Romanies “the excrement of
humanity.”8 Robert Knox described them as the “refuse of the human race.”9
In his influential treatise Gobineau argued that human beings could be
ranked into higher and lower races, with the white “Aryans”, and particularly the
Nordic people within them, placed at the very top: “Aryans were the cream of
mankind,” he believed, “and the Germans, the cream of the cream—a race of
princes.”10 This had particular impact upon the development of German
philosophical and political thinking. In 1863, Richard Liebich wrote about the
“criminal practices” of the Romanies,11 and described them as lives unworthy of
life, the first use of a phrase which was repeated in 1869 in an essay on Romanies
by Kulemann, and which was later to have ominous significance.12 The opinions
of these scholars were having repercussions at the highest administrative levels
for, just one year later, on November 18th, 1870, Imperial Chancellor Otto von
Bismarck circulated a brief demanding the “complete prohibition of foreign
Gypsies crossing the German border,” and which stated further that when
arrested, they were to be “transported by the closest route to their country of
origin.” When Alsace and Lorraine were annexed by the German Empire in
1871, each was made responsible for the control of Romanies at the borders into
other areas of the new Reich.13 Charles Darwin, also writing in 1871, used racist
language in referring to “the uniform appearance in various parts of the world of
Gypsies and Jews . . . which contrast[s] sharply with all the virtues represented by
the territorially settled and culturally advanced Nordic Aryan race.”14 Basing his
ideas on Darwin, Cesare Lombroso published his influential work L’Uomo
Deliquente in 1876, which contained a lengthy chapter on the genetically criminal
character of the Romanies, whom he described as “a living example of a whole
race of criminals.” This was later translated into German and had a profound
effect upon German legal attitudes. In 1890 or 1891 the Swabian parliament
organized a conference on the “Gypsy Scum”(Zigeunergeschmeiß) and suggested
48
means by which the presence of Romanies could be signaled by ringing church
bells. The military was also empowered to apprehend and move Romanies on.
Under the directorship of Alfred Dillmann the Bavarian police established
The Central Office for Fighting the Gypsy Nuisance in Munich in March, 1899.
Relevant documents began to be collected, particularly those pertaining to
legislation and “criminality,” and compiled into Dillmann’s Zigeunerbuch, in
which Romanies were described as “a pest against which society must
unflaggingly defend itself,”15 and special instructions were issued to the police by
the Prussian government to “combat the Gypsy nuisance.” The crimes listed in
Dillmann’s book consisted overwhelmingly of trespassing and stealing food. One
year later a policy statement from the House of Commons in Vienna, capital of
the Austro-German Alliance, was sent to the Ministers of the Interior, Defense
and Justice “concerning measures to reduce and eliminate the Gypsy population”
(emphasis added).
Using Liebich’s phrase in the title of their book,16 psychiatrist Karl
Binding and magistrate Alfred Hoche argued in 1920 for the euthanizing of those
who were “Ballastexistenzen,” dead weight within humanity. Three populations
were considered: those with gross physical disfigurements, those carrying
hereditary diseases, and those in comas considered unlikely to recover. Romanies
belonged to the second category, their genetically-transmitted disease being
criminality; this rationalized the “preventative detention” of Romanies in Weimar
Germany and was clearly racial: even if one had not committed a crime one was
likely to do so eventually because criminality was a genetic, i.e. racial,
characteristic.
By 1922 all Romanies in Baden were to be photographed and
fingerprinted. The Bavarian parliament issued a new law “to combat Gypsies,
nomads and idlers” and the Provincial Criminal Commission endorsed another
dated July 16 1926 aimed at controlling the “Gypsy Plague.”
By 1927 legislation requiring the photographing and fingerprinting of
Romanies had been introduced in Prussia, where eight thousand were processed in
this way. Bavaria instituted laws forbidding any to travel in family groups, or to
own firearms. Those over sixteen were liable for incarceration in work camps,
while those without proof of Bavarian birth began to be expelled from Germany.
In further direct violation of the Weimar Constitution—which guaranteed equal
rights for all citizens—after April 12 1928 Romanies in Germany were placed
under permanent police surveillance. In the same year, Professor Hans F. Günther
wrote that “it was the Gypsies who introduced foreign blood into Europe.”17 On
April 16-17 1929, the Munich Bureau’s National Center jointly established a
Division of Romani Affairs with the International Criminology Bureau (Interpol)
in Vienna. Working closely together, they enforce restrictions on travel for all
Romanies without documents, and impose up to two years’ detention in
“rehabilitation camps” upon those sixteen years of age or older.
On January 20 1933 officials in Burgenland called for the withdrawal of
all civil rights from Romanies; in May a law was introduced to legalize eugenic
sterilization. On July 14, Hitler’s cabinet passed a law against the propagation of
“lives not worthy of life” (Lebensunwertesleben) called “the law for the
49
prevention of hereditarily diseased offspring.” It ordered sterilization for certain
categories of people, “specifically Gypsies and most of the Germans of black
color” (i.e. the Afro-Europeans resulting from liaisons with African troops during
the First World War). Other 1933 Laws—to Prevent Offspring with Hereditary
Defects and for the Reform of Habitual Criminals and Social Deviants— directly
targeted Romanies. From January 1934 onwards they were being selected for
transfer to camps at Dachau, Dieselstrasse, Sachsenhausen, Marzahn and
Vennhausen for processing, which included sterilization by injection or castration.
Two laws issued in Nuremburg in July forbade Germans from marrying “Jews,
Negroes, and Gypsies.”
Starting on September 15 1935 Romanies became subject to the
restrictions of the Nuremberg Law for the Protection of Blood and Honor, which
forbade intermarriage or sexual relationships between Aryan and non-Aryan
peoples (“ The Law for Marriage Health”).
A telling policy statement issued by the Nazi Party read “In Europe generally,
only Jews and Gypsies come under consideration as members of an alien
people.”18
The earliest Nazi document referring to “the introduction of the total
solution of 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. In June and July, several hundred were
transported to Dachau by order of the Minister of the Interior as “dependents of
the Munich Bureau (of Gypsy Affairs).” In this year Dr. Hans Globke, Head of
Service at the Ministry of the Interior for the Third Reich who served on the panel
on racial laws, declared that “In Europe, only Jews and Gypsies are of foreign
blood,” and race-hygienist Dr. Robert Körber wrote in an essay entitled “Volk
und Staat” that “The Jews and the Gypsies are today remote from us because of
their Asiatic ancestry, just as ours is Nordic.” 19 This sentiment was reiterated by
Dr. E. Brandis, who wrote that besides the Jews “only the Gypsies are to be
considered as an alien people in Europe.”20 German romaphobia became
transnational when Interpol established the International Center for Combating
the Gypsy Menace, formerly the Bureau of Gypsy Affairs. The main Nazi
institution to deal with Romanies, the Racial Hygiene and Population Biology and
Research Unit of the Ministry of Health, was established under the directorship of
Dr. Robert Ritter at Berlin-Dahlem, the expressed purpose of which was to
determine whether the Romani people were Aryans or subhumans
(“Untermenschen”). In Berlin, Romanies were cleared off the streets away from
public view because of the upcoming Olympic Games, and placed in a toxic waste
dump. Pamphlets were distributed to those attending the games promoting
antigypsyism among the general public.
In his address to The German Association for Racial Research, Dr. Adolph
Würth of the Racial Hygiene Research Unit said “the Gypsy question is a racial
question for us today. In the same way as the National Socialist state has solved
the Jewish question, it will also have to settle the Gypsy question once and for all.
The race biological research on Gypsies is an unconditional prerequisite for the
Final Solution of the Gypsy Question.”21 This was further supported by Dr. Kurt
50
Ammon, who stated that the Nazi policy “views the Gypsy problem as being
foremost a racial one.” Himmler thereafter put groups of Romanies at the disposal
of a team of doctors for experiments on sterilization techniques. Ironically, the
more Romani ancestry an individual had, the less threatening he was seen to be.
Himmler’s suggestion that a number of “pure” Romanies be exempt and subject
to the “law for the protection of historic monuments” for future anthropologists to
study was mocked, and never implemented. An order released on December 14
stated that persons could be incarcerated on the grounds of their being inherently,
as well as habitually, criminal, i.e. whether they were actually engaged in criminal
activity or not, depending upon “genetic makeup” and potential threat to Aryan
security. By the end of this year, large-scale roundups of Romanies had begun. At
Buchenwald, a special camp for “pure” Romanies was set up, and Romanies were
incarcerated in camps in Nazi-controlled territories throughout Europe. Four
hundred were sent to Taucha, others to Mauthausen, Gusen, Dautmergen,
Natzweiler, Stutthoff, Flossenberg, Salzwed, Ravensbrück, Dusseldorf,
Lackenbach, Westerbork, Malines and elsewhere.
From 1937 onwards the Wehrmacht High Command began issuing
decrees ordering the exclusion of all Romanies from military service for reasons
of “racial policy”. In March 1938 Romanies were prohibited from voting, and in
that same month a letter to the “Imperial Leader of the SS” from Dr. Werner Best,
Head of the Nazi Security Police addressed the “initiat[ion of the] Final Solution
to the Gypsy problem from a racial point of view.”22 The first official publiclyposted Party statement to refer to the Final Solution of the Gypsy question
(endgültige Lösung der Zigeunerfrage) was also issued at that time signed by
Himmler, who also ordered the Bureau of Romani Affairs to be moved from
Munich to Berlin.
Between June 12-18 1938 “Gypsy clean-up week” (Zigeuneraufräumingswoche, in French la Semaine d’Epurations des Tsiganes) was in
effect, and hundreds throughout Germany and Austria were rounded up and
incarcerated;23 in Mannworth three hundred Romani farmers and vineyard owners
were arrested in a single night. In a parallel development to the 1938 Jewish
expulsions, Romanies were expelled from the left bank of the Rhine in August. In
that month too one Dr. Karl Hannermann wrote that “Rats, bedbugs and fleas are
also natural occurrences in the same way as Jews and Gypsies. All existence is a
struggle; we must therefore gradually biologically eradicate all these vermin.”24
After September 4 Romani children were forbidden to attend school.
Individuals were categorized by percentage of Romani ancestry; if two of
one’s eight great-grandparents were even part-Romani, that individual had too
much “Gypsy blood” to be allowed, later, to live. These criteria were twice as
strict as those applying to Jews; if the criteria for determining Jewishness had
been applied to Romanies, some 18,000 would have escaped death (18,000 was
also the total number of Romanies in Germany at the time).25 Romani women
married to non-Romanies and children over the age of 13 were sent to DusseldorfLierenfeld to be sterilized. Five thousand German Romanies were concentrated in
the Gypsy Section of the concentration camp at Łodź.
51
On December 8 1938 Himmler signed a new order based upon the findings
of the Office of Racial Hygiene, which had determined that Romani blood was
“very dangerous” to Aryan purity. Dr. Tobias Portschy, Area Commander in
Styria, wrote in a memorandum to Hitler’s Chancellery that “Gypsies place the
purity of the blood of German peasantry in peril,”26 and recommended mass
sterilization as a solution.
On March 1 1939 the Order for the Implementation of the Reich Criminal
Police Department was issued, that stated “The decree of the Reichsführer SS of
August 12 1938 orders the registration of persons living in the Reich territory who
count as Gypsies. Once it has been established how many there are in the Reich
territory, further measures can be taken.”27 Instructions for carrying out these
orders were also issued in March, stating that “the aim of the measures taken by
the state must be the racial separation once and for all of the Gypsy race from the
German nation, then the prevention of racial mixing.” Every police headquarters
was to set up a unit to monitor Romani matters, and one or more persons were to
be permanently responsible for Romanies. According to the minutes of a meeting
organized by Heydrich on September 27, Hitler instructed that German Romanies
and Jews were to be moved by rail into Poland. That order came on October 16:
“With regard to the transportation of the Gypsies, we advise that the first transport
of Jews is leaving Vienna on Friday, 20 October 1939; four wagons of Gypsies
are to be added to that transport.”28 This may not have taken place, but in
December Hitler issued a new decree regarding these transportations, forbidding
all “Gypsies and part-Gypsies” not already in camps from moving out of their
areas, and trains were subsequently reported moving east “packed with Gypsies.”
Dr. Johannes Behrendt of the Office of Racial Hygiene issued the statement that
“All 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.”29 Justice Reichs-Minister Thierack would
later write to Bormann that he “intended to make the Reichsfuhrer SS responsible
for the prosecution of Poles, Russians, Jews and Gypsies; Poles and Russians can
only be prosecuted by the police if they lived in the area of the former Polish state
prior to September 1st. Prosecution proceedings against Jews and Gypsies,
however, should be taken without observing these reservations.”30
The first mass genocidal action of the Holocaust took place in January or
February 1940, when 250 Romani children in the concentration camp at
Buchenwald were used as guinea pigs for testing the gas Zyklon B, later used for
mass killings at Auschwitz-Birkenau.31 Nazis in Alsace complied with an order to
round up “criminals, asocials, the sick, French nationalists and of course the Jews
and the Gypsies.” In this year, Nazi statisticians Wetzel and Hecht estimated that
“one hundred thousand Gypsies and others” were scheduled for deportation to
Poland, and were shipped between May 15-18.
A memorandum from Leonardo Conti, Secretary of State for Health in the
Ministry of Interior, to the Main Office of the Security Police, Kripo
headquarters, and the Reich Health Department, Berlin sent on January 24 read:
52
It is known that the lives of Romanies and part Romanies are to be
regulated by a Gypsy law (Zigeunergesetz) . . . I firmly believe, now as
before, that the final solution of the Gypsy problem (endgültige Lösung
der Ziegeunerproblems) can only be achieved through the sterilization of
full and part Romanies . . . I think that the time for a legal resolution of
these problems is over, and that we must immediately try to sterilize the
Romanies and part Romanies as a special measure, using analogous
precedents . . . Once sterilization is completed and these people are
rendered biologically harmless, it is of no great consequence whether they
are expelled or used as labor on the home front.
On May 18 Romanies were deported from seven assembly centers in the
Old Reich to Lublin, located in the General Government. The first transport
included 2,500 German Romanies, selected as full families wherever possible.
The transport included 1,000 from Hamburg and Bremen, 1,000 from Cologne,
Düsseldorf, and Hanover and 500 from Stuttgart and Frankfurt. The deportation to
Lublin proceeded as planned, although subsequent police reports revealed that a
further 300 had been “evacuated,” bringing the total number of deportees to
2,800.
In a speech delivered on February 29 to top-level Nazi party officials,
Himmler said “The Gypsies are a question in themselves. I want to be rid of them
this year if it is at all possible. There are only thirty thousand of them in the entire
Reich, but they do great racial damage.”32
On April 27 a joint order from NS Headquarters and the Chief of Police stated
that “The first transport of Gypsies to the General Government will leave in the
middle of May with 2,500 people.” The following day Reinhard Heydrich, chief
of the Reich Security Main Office, sent out more precise instructions to chiefs of
police and district governors in Germany in the so-called Umsiedlungserlaß for
the “resettlement, arrest, and deportation of Romanies above the age of 17 from
western and northwestern border zones.”
On May 18th 2,800 German Romanies were deported from seven assembly
centers in the Old Reich to Lublin, in the General Government. In Austria, the
deportations to Poland were planned for the second half of August 1940.
An ordinance dated February 11 1941forbade Gypsies and “part-Gypsies”
from serving in the German army “on the grounds of racial policy.” In July the
Chief Administrative officer of Oberwart issued the order for the prohibition of
the use of public transport by Romanies.
In Hungary Romanies were being targeted in the Nazi sympathetic regime
led by Admiral Horthy. Between 500 and 1,000 Hungarian Romanies were sent to
concentration camps in Transcarpathia.
On July 31 Heydrich, who had been entrusted with the details of the Final
Solution, included Romanies together with Jews: “The Einsatzkommandos
received the order to kill all Jews, Gypsies and mental patients.” On October 10
he proposed that the German Romanies be sent to Riga with the Jews instead of
being sent to Auschwitz and Chelmno in Poland. At the same meeting, the motion
that Litzmannstadt (Łodź) be chosen as the final destination for non-German-born
53
Romanies was approved, and between November 9-11 five trainloads each
transporting a thousand Romanies left from Austrian transit camps at Hartburg,
Fürstenfeld, Mattersburg, Roten Thurm, Lackenbach, and Oberwart for Łodź,
where they were joined by a transport of 20,000 Jews. Of the 5,000 Romanies
deported nearly two thirds were children. In December and in January Romanies
were taken from Łodź to Kulmhof (Chelmno), where they were among the first to
be killed in mobile gas vans.
On November 24, repeating his official orders, the Commander of the
Wehrmacht in Byelorussia stated “The Jews must disappear from the countryside
and likewise the Gypsies must be eradicated.” 33
In early 1942 Romanies were selected for experimentation at Dachau and
Buchenwald by Dr. Adolf Pokorny to see how long they could survive on sea
water, claiming that they “must not only be conquered, but exterminated also.”34
That same Spring, one thousand Romanies were shot and buried alive in a single
action on a collective farm near Smolensk.
Nazi death squads entered Greece in June, murdering hundreds of
Romanies. In Serbia, Military Governor Harald Turner announced—
prematurely—that “Serbia is the only country in which the Jewish Question and
the Gypsy Question have been resolved,” warning that “one must not forget that
the Jews and the Gypsies generally constitute a threat to security and, as such,
pose a threat to peace and public order; it is the Jewish nature which is
responsible for this war and, as for the Gypsy, by his nature he can never be a
useful member of international society.”35 In Greece, fifty Romanies were
murdered for each German casualty. In Croatia between 80,000 and 100,000
Romanies are estimated to have perished at the hands of the Ustaša, mostly at the
Jasenovac camp.36
On July 31 the Ministry of the Eastern Occupied Territories reaffirmed to
the SS and police leaders in Riga the order that “the treatment of both Jews and
Romanies was to be placed on equal footing (gleichgestellt).”37 Romanies were
being exterminated at Majdanek, Belsec, Sanok, Sobibor, Chelmno and Treblinka.
In Bucharest a policy statement that “for Romania, the Gypsy question is as
important as the Jewish” was published. In the minutes of a September 14
meeting Justice Minister Otto Thierack proposed that “Jews and Gypsies should
be unconditionally exterminated.”38 A memo signed by Himmler requested data
on Romani populations in Britain in anticipation of the eventual takeover of that
country.39
On January 26 1943 the president of the National Criminal Police
Association issued the following statement: “Political preventative custody can be
ordered to stop any further children of mixed blood issuing from the willful
continuation of sexual union between Gypsies and Gypsies of mixed race, and
those of German blood.”40 In February the remaining Romanies were transported
to Birkenau; the largest transport ever of Polish Romanies was brought to the
same camp in March, and exterminated within the first month. Dutch Romanies
began being transported to Auschwitz as well.41 A party bulletin entitled
Maintenance of the Race and the Genotype in German Law stated that “Gypsies
are of foreign blood, pursuant to German racial legislation; their political,
54
biological, cultural and vocational separation from the German race has now been
effected by means of the elimination of those of foreign blood in the same way as
was [done] for the Jews.” In his memoirs, SS Officer Perry Broad, who worked in
the political division at Auschwitz, wrote that ‘it is the will of the all-powerful
Reichsführer to have the Gypsies disappear from the face of the earth.”42 He
reiterated this elsewhere, saying “the Central Office knew it was Hitler’s aim to
wipe out all the Gypsies without exception”.43
Eva Justin’s book dealing with Romani children appeared in 1944. In it
she expressed the hope that it would serve as a basis for future race hygiene laws
regulating such “unworthy primitive elements.” In May, when she had finished
studying the children, they were all sent to Auschwitz and were killed there.
In the early morning hours of August 2-3 2,900 Romanies at AuschwitzBirkenau were killed and cremated in one mass action referred to as
Zigeunernacht. On September 26 a further 200 Romanies, mostly children, were
shipped to Auschwitz from Buchenwald, and gassed two weeks later.
Not one Romani was called to testify in behalf of his own people at the
Nuremberg Trials that began in October 1945. Current estimates now indicate that
between one and one and a half million Romanies died during the period 19331945. If this estimate is correct, between 50 and 75 percent of the entire Romani
population in Nazi-controlled Europe had perished at the hands of the Nazis,
victims of racially-motivated genocidal policy. At the Nuremberg Military
Tribunals in September 1947 former SS General Otto Ohlendorf told presiding
Judge Michael Musmanno that in the killing campaigns, “There was no difference
between Gypsies and Jews.” As late as this date, Romani survivors from the
camps were afraid to show themselves publicly because pre-Nazi laws were still
in effect which would have put them back into detention centers if they were
unable to show documentation proving German birth.
Despite the overwhelming documentary evidence to the contrary, in 1951
the Württemburg Ministry of the Interior issued a statement that judges hearing
restitution claims should bear in mind that “Gypsies were persecuted under the
National Socialist regime not for any racial reason, but because of an asocial and
criminal record.” Members of the shattered postwar remnants of the surviving
Romani population lacked the wherewithal legally to challenge this statement,
and no outside agency came forward to take up the Romani case.
A report was issued by the German Ministry of Finance in 1986 which
concluded that “all those victimized by Nazism have been adequately
compensated . . . the circle of those deserving compensation need not be extended
any further.” Two years later, in February, the East German government
announced its resolution to pay $100 million in war crimes reparations to Jewish
survivors, but refused to pay anything to Romani survivors. Finally, on April 12
1990, the East German Government released a statement apologizing for the
“immeasurable sorrow” the National Socialist regime had inflicted upon its
victims, including Romanies, but “while the world celebrates the changes in
Eastern Europe, the traditional Gypsy role of scapegoat is already being
resurrected in countries like Romania and Hungary . . . Collective rights for
minorities such as . . . Gypsies remains as elusive as ever.”
55
Romani language terminology
Holocaust:
Genocide:
Nazis:
Victims:
Jews:
Germans:
Final Solution of the Gypsy Question:
O Baro Porrajmos
Samudaripe
Nacoci (Nacjonalne Socjalisturja)
Dukhadile
Židovurja; Bibolde
Njamcurja
O Agoruno Impačimos le Rromane
Pučhimaske
O Agoruno Impačimos le
Židovickone Pučhimaske
E inkalde; e ankerarja
Sobi gasoske
Bova
E Rjat le Rromane Phabimatangi
E Rjat la Phagerdja Vojagake
O Kurko e Šulavimaske le
Rromenge
Skepisari; mestari
Lojari
Ažutari
Final Solution of the Jewish Question:
Survivors:
Gas chambers:
Ovens:
Gypsy Night, “Zigeunernacht”:
Kristallnacht:
Gypsy Clean-Up Week
Liberator:
Bystander:
Upstander:
Endnotes
1Recognition
of this has been a long time coming. Luebke wrote that “[n]o
comprehensive ‘Gypsy Law’ was ever promulgated” (David Luebke, The Nazi
Persecution of Sinti and Ròma. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Research Brief, 18 April 1990, 3), and Breitman that “[w]hatever 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 (sic) problem” (Richard Breitman, The Architect of
Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution. Hanover & London: University Press
of New England, 1991, 20). The fact that the concept of “race” has no scientific
basis is irrelevant here, since Nazi ideology fabricated its own “racial” identities
for Jews and Romanies and acted upon them. If we add the third group selected
for elimination, the mentally and physically handicapped, then the “gene-pool
pollutant” factor becomes all the more clear. One might consider too that male
homosexuality was also documented by the Nazis as a “racially destructive
phenomenon,” a further weakening genetic element in the proposed Master Race.
2Raphael
Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis
of Government, Proposals for Redress (Washington: Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace, 1944).
56
O Baro Porrajmos (“paw-rye-mawss”) “The Great Devouring” in the
Romani language.
The Romani people are commonly, but inaccurately, referred to as “Gypsies,” a
label based on the false assumption that they had come into Europe from Egypt.
The Romani population, numbering some 12 million throughout the world,
consists of very many subgroups, including the Sinti, the Roma, the Kalé, the
Bashalde, the Romanichals and so on. Originally from northwestern India, they
left that region a millennium ago as a result of Islamic expansion, and entered
Europe for the same reason some 250-300 years later.
3Called
4
Heinrich Grellmann, Die Zigeuner ( Dessau and Leipzig, 1783).
Johann Erich Biester, “Ueber die Zigeuner,” Berlinische Monatsschrift 21,
1793. 108-165.
5In
6Johann
Fichte, Versammlungen zum Deutschen Volk (Leipzig, 1807-1808).
7Friedrich
Ludwig Jahn, Deutsches Volksthum (Lübeck: Niemann & Co., 1810).
Hehemann, Die “Bekämpfung des Zigeunerunwesens” im
Wilhelminischen Deutschland und in der Weimarer Republik, 1871-1933
(Frankfurt am Main: Haag & Herschen Verlag, 1987).
99, 116, 127, and Wolfgang Wippermann, Das Leben in Frankfurt zur NS-Zeit:
Die nationalsozialistische Zigeunerverfolgung (Frankfurt am Main: W. Kramer &
Co., 1986), 57-58.
8Rainer
9Robert
Knox, The Races of Men ( London, 1850).
Arthur Gobineau, Essai sur l’Inégalité des Races Humaines (Paris,
10Joseph
1855).
11Richard
Liebich, Die Zigeuner in ihrem Wesen und ihre Sprache (Leipzig:
Brockhaus, 1863).
12Kulemann,
in Joseph Tenenbaum, Race and Reich (New York: Twayne
Publishers, 1956), 9.
13Karola
Fings & Frank Sparing, Nur wenige Kamen zurück: Sinti und Roma im
Nationalsozialismus (Cologne: Stadt-Revue Verlag, 1990), 250.
P. Fox, “The Nazi extermination of the Gypsies: Genocide, Holocaust, or a
‘minor irritant’?,” paper presented at the conference of the Association of
Genocide Scholars (Williamsburg, Virginia, June 14th - 16th. 1995), 7.
14John
15Alfred
Dillmann, Zigeuner-Buch (Munich: Wildsche, 1905).
57
16Karl
Binding & Alfred Hoche, Die Freigabe der Vernichtung lebensunwerten
Lebens (Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1920).
17Dov
Freiburg, “Testimony,” in Yad Vashem Archives, A-361.
18Hans
Joachim Döring, Die Zigeuner im Nationalsozialistischen Staat (Hamburg:
Kriminalistik Verlag, 1964), 37.
19Robert
Körber, Rassesieg in Wien, der Grenzseste des Reiches (Vienna:
Wilhelm Braumuller, 1939).
20Emil
Brandis, Ehegesetze von 1935 erläutet (Berlin, 1946), 37.
21Reichsfuhrer-SS-Dokument
S-Kr. 1, No. 557 (1938).
Rose, ‘Der Rauch hatten wir täglich vor Augen:’ Der
nationalsozialistische Völkermord an den Sinti und Roma.
(Heidelberg:
Wunderhorn, 1999), 347.
22Romani
23Miriam
Novitch, Le Génocide des Tziganes sous le Régime Nazi, AMIF
Publication No. 164 (Paris: La Comité pour 1’Erection du Monument des
Tziganes Assassinés à Auschwitz, 1968), 11.
24Karl
Hannemann, “Artfremde Gegenwart,” Bulletin of the German Association
of National Socialist Physicians, (August, 1938), 38.
25Donald
Kenrick. Historical Dictionary of the Gypsies (Romanies). (Lanham:
The Scarecrow Press, 1998), 74-75.
Kenrick and Grattan Puxon, The Destiny of Europe’s Gypsies (London:
Heinemann, 1972), 76.
26Donald
27Kenrick
28Miriam
and Puxon, op. cit., 74.
Novitch, op. cit., 9.
Behrendt, “Die Wahrheit
Korrespondenz, 10 (1939), No. 3.
29Johannes
30Nuremberg
über
die
Zigeuner”,
NS-Partei
Trial documents, Nos. NG 558 and PS-654.
Proester, Vraždňí čs. Cikánů v Buchenwaldu. Document No. ÚV ČSPBK-135 of the Archives of the Fighters Against Fascism, (Prague, 1940).
31Emil
32Romani
Rose, op. cit., 150.
58
33Romani
Rose, ed., The National Socialist Genocide of the Sinti and Roma
(Heidelberg: Dokumentations- und Kulturzentrum Deutscher Sinti und Roma,
2003), 172.
34Raul
Hilberg, Destruction of the European Jews (Chicago: Quadrangle Books,
1961), 608.
35Raul
Hilberg, op. cit., 602, 1275.
36Dragoljub
Acković, “Suffering of the Roma in Jasenovac,” in Barry Lituchy,
ed., Jasenovac and the Holocaust in Yugoslavia: Analyses and Survivors’
Testimonies (New York: Jasenovac Research Institute, 2006), 53-62.
37Zentrale
Stelle des Landesjustizverwaltungen, 19 August 1961.
38Nuremberg
Trial document No. PS-682
39Document
No. 66558/42, Central Office for Reich Security Dept. VI-D-7B,
dated 14 August 1942. This contradicts the Yad Vashem rationale for excluding
Romanies from the definition of “Holocaust,” viz. that Nazi policy against them
was not extended globally.
40Staatliche
Kriminalpolizei Memo No. K.130/43 (Z), dated 28 January 1943,
Duisberg.
41Jerzy
Ficowski, Cyganie na Polskich Drogach (Cracow: Wydawnicwo
Literackie, 1965), 110.
Broad, “KZ Auschwitz: Erinnerungen eines SS Mannes”. Hefte von
Auschwitz, 9:7-48 (1966), p. 41.
42Perry
43Die
Auschwitz-Hefte: Texte der polnischen Zeitschrift "Przeglad lekarski" über
historische, psychische und medizinische Aspekte des Lebens und Sterbens in
Auschwitz (Auschwitz: Panstwowe Muzeum, 1959), 54.
59
4
THE FINAL SOLUTION OF THE GYPSY QUESTION
O Agoruno Impačimos le Rromane Pučhimaske
The Holocaust was the implementation of the genocidal action referred to
as the Final Solution. Some Holocaust historians have denied that it
included the Romani people: in his The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and
the Final Solution (Hanover & London: University Press of New England
1991, 20) Richard Breitman wrote that “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 [sic] problem.” Guenther Lewy in his The Nazi
Persecution of the Gypsies not only claimed that Romanies were not a part
of the Holocaust, but that they were not even the victims of genocide.
When countries are at war, certain individuals and organizations in those
countries become singled out as being potentially harmful to the national interest
and are dealt with in different ways, usually by detention or by expulsion. In
Germany during the Second World War many groups were thus identified:
Communists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, trades union representatives and others, but
only two populations identified by what they were born were targeted for
eradication: the Jews and the Romanies (“Gypsies”). Policies aimed at these two
peoples predate the Second World War, beginning in the year that Hitler became
Chancellor of Germany, and when the plans for the Holocaust were laid: “In 1933
a process began which was to pursue the racial differentiation of people into
Aryans and non-Aryans. The intended goal was the final annihilation of all Jews
and Gypsies in Europe.”1 The overarching label for this intent was the Final
Solution.
Although the word Holocaust is sometimes generalized to include all
groups targeted by the National Socialists between 1933 and 1945, it should
strictly only refer to the implementation of this policy: the genocide of the Jews
and the Romanies. Though not a ‘racial’ group nor one defined by religion, the
60
handicapped too were singled out and destroyed for the same reason: they were
seen to constitute a genetic contaminant in the creation of Hitler’s envisioned
Herrenvolk, his ‘Master Race.’2
The term final solution has also had different applications at different
times. The words “The final solution of the Gypsy problem” (in the Romani
language o Agoruno Impačimos le Rromane Pučhimaske) can be found as early as
1888 on the first page of the first issue of The Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society,
though the “problem” referred to there was for scholars to determine the origins
of the Romani people and language. And an early reference to “the final solution
of the Jewish question” found in a Nazi party document from 1931 concerned the
possible use of Jews as forced labor to drain areas of swampland.3 For Romanies,
a Nazi document addressing the creation of a “Gypsy law” (Reichzigeunergesetz)
referred to “the introduction of the total solution of the Gypsy problem on either a
national or an international level,” a solution then still to be determined. It was
drafted under the direction of State Secretary Hans Pfundtner of the Reichs
Ministry of the Interior on March 4 19364. For Jews and Romanies, the various
proposed “solutions” for dealing with each differed over time—in 1937 one SS
memo recommended the mass drowning of Romanies by towing them out to sea
and sinking the boats—but for both peoples the solution moved inexorably
toward a single goal—complete physical elimination.
In his 1938 address to The German Association for Racial Research, Dr.
Adolph Würth of the Racial Hygiene Research Unit said “the Gypsy question is a
racial question for us today. In the same way that the National Socialist state has
solved the Jewish question, it will also have to settle the Gypsy question once and
for all. The race biological research on Gypsies is an unconditional prerequisite
for the Final Solution of the Gypsy Question.”5
In March the same year a letter to the “Imperial Leader of the SS” from
Dr. Werner Best, Head of the Nazi Security Police, addressed the “initiat[ion of
the] Final Solution to the Gypsy problem from a racial point of view.”6 The first
official publicly-posted Party statement to refer to the Final Solution of the Gypsy
Question (die endgültige Lösung der Zigeunerfrage) was issued at that time
signed by Himmler, who also ordered the Bureau of Romani Affairs to be moved
from Munich to Berlin.7
In his post-war memoirs, SS Officer Perry Broad of the political division
at Auschwitz wrote that “it was the will of the all-powerful Führer to have the
Gypsies disappear from the face of the earth” (“es war der Wille des allmächtigen
Reichsführers, alle Zigeuner von der Erde verschwinden zu lassen”), and that
“the Central Office knew it was Hitler’s aim to wipe out all the Gypsies without
exception” (“das Zentralbüro wusste, dass es Hitlers Ziel war, alle Zigeuner ohne
Ausnahme auszulöschen”).8
“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”9 (emphasis added). In 1939 Johannes
Behrendt of the Office of Racial Hygiene issued a brief stating that “[a]ll
Romanies should be treated as hereditarily sick; the only solution is elimination.
61
The aim should therefore be the elimination without hesitation of this defective
element in the population.” 10
A conference on racial policy and to decide, inter alia, upon the Final
Solution of the Gypsy Question, was held in Berlin on 21 September 1939 and
organized by Reinhard Heydrich, who was Head of the Reich Main Security
Office and the leading organizational architect of the Nazis’ Final Solution of the
Jewish Question. Four issues were decided: the concentration of Jews in towns,
their relocation to Poland, the removal of 30,000 Romanies 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.’11
On January 24 1940 a memorandum from Leonardo Conti, Secretary of
State for Health in the Ministry of the Interior, which was sent simultaneously to
the Main Office of the Security Police, to the Kripo headquarters, and to the Reich
Health Department in Berlin, read:
“It is known that the lives of Romanies and part Romanies are to be
regulated by a Gypsy law (Zigeunergesetz) . . . I firmly believe, now as
before, that the final solution of the Gypsy problem can only be achieved
through the sterilization of full and part Romanies.”
On July 31 1941 Heydrich also included the Romanies in his ‘final
solution’ shortly after the German invasion of the USSR, ordering the
Einsatzkommandos “to kill all Jews, Romanies and mental patients.”12
Complying with this, the senior SS officer and Chief of Police for the East, Dr.
Alfred Landgraf, informed the Reich Commissioner for the East, Hinrich Lohse,
of this inclusion of the Romanies in the ‘final solution,’ and on December 24
1941 issued the order that the Romanies “should be given the same treatment as
the Jews.”13
Himmler signed the order dispatching Germany’s Sinti and Roma to
Auschwitz on December 16 1942. The ‘Final Solution’ of the ‘Gypsy Question’
had begun.14 Thurner adds:
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 their complete extermination.
According to the implementation instructions of 1943, all Romanies,
irrespective of their racial mix, were to be assigned to concentration
camps. The concentration camp for Gypsy families at AuschwitzBirkenau 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 Romanies were initiated prior to this policy decision; the
62
first gassing operations against Romanies did indeed take place in
Chelmno as early as late 1941/early 1942.15
The term has emerged since. In August 2008, in an attempt to succeed
with its radical anti-Romani rhetoric in the upcoming 2010 general elections, the
Czech National Party released details of its proposed “Final Solution to the Gypsy
Question in the Czech Lands.” In a 150-page study it claimed that it did not want
to kill the Romanies, but instead buy land in India and to relocate them there.16
Notes
Heuss, 1997. From ‘Race Science’ to the Camps: The Gypsies During
the Second World War. Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 27.
2Ian Hancock, 2011. “The neglected memory of the Romanies in the
Holocaust/Porrajmos,” in Jonathan C. Friedman, ed., The Routledge History of
the Holocaust, London & New York, 375-384.
3Ronald Rosenbaum, 1998. Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His
Evil. New York: Harper Books, 15.
4Donald Kenrick & Grattan Puxon, 2009. Gypsies Under the Swastika and
Herbert Heuss, Frank Sparing, Karola Fings and Henriette Asséo, 1997. From
Race Science to the Camps. Both Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press.
5Reichsfuhrer-SS-Dokument S-Kr. 1, No. 557 (1938).
6Romani
Rose, ‘Der Rauch hatten wir täglich vor Augen:’ Der
nationalsozialistische Völkermord an den Sinti und Roma. Heidelberg:
Wunderhorn, 1999, 347.
7NS-Rechtspiegel, 21 February 1939.
8Percy Broad, 1966. “KZ Auschwitz: Erinnerungen eines SS Mannes”. Hefte von
Auschwitz, 9:7-48, 41.
9The Auschwitz Memorial Book, State Museum, 1993, xiv.
10Johannes Behrendt, 1939. “Die Wahrheit über die Zigeuner”, NS-Partei
Korrespondenz, 10, No. 3.
11Michael Burleigh & Wolfgang Wippermann, 1991.
The Racial State:
Germany, 1933-1945. Cambridge: The University Press.
12Benno Müller-Hill, 1988. Murderous Science: Elimination by Scientific
Selection of Jews, Romanies and Others, 1933-1945. Oxford: The University
Press, 58-59. See also Henry Friedlander, “Die Vernichtung der Behinderten, der
Juden und der Sinti und Roma,” in Edgar Bamberger & Annegret Ehmann,
(eds.).
Kinder und Jugendlicher als Opfer des Holocaust. Heidelberg:
Dokumentations- und Kulturzentrum Deutscher Sinti und Roma. 1995, 15-28.
13Müller-Hill, loc. cit.
14Michael Burleigh & Wolfgang Wippermann, 1991, loc. cit.
15Erika Thurner, 1987. “Nazi policy against the Romanies.” Paper delivered at
the United States Holocaust Memorial Council’s Conference on Other Victims
held in Washington, in March that year.
16Romea.cz News Agency, Bulletin, August 8 2002.
1Herbert
63
5
USEFUL QUOTES FOR STUDENTS OF THE PORRAJMOS
Complete references may be found in the online archives at www.radoc.net
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
existed.
Heye, Sartorius & Bopp, 2000: 14
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.
Thurner, 1998: xvi
“The motives invoked to justify the death of the Gypsies were the same as
these ordering the murder of the Jews, and the methods employed for the
one were identical to those employed for the other.”
Miriam Novitch, Survivor, Ghetto Fighters’ House, Asherat, Israel, 1968.
“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
64
National Socialists”
Roman Herzog, Federal President of Germany, 16 March 1997
The 1997 figure reported by the late Dr. Sybil Milton, 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.” 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.”
Heine, 2001: 1
[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 language.
Haberer, 2000: 212.
“A law was introduced on May 26th, 1933, to legalize eugenic
sterilization. Beyond this, the Cabinet, headed by Hitler, passed a law on
July 14th, 1933, against propagation of lebensunwertes Leben (‘lives
unworthy of life’), now called ‘The Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily
Diseased Offspring.’ It ordered sterilization for certain categories of
people; specifically Gypsies and most of the Germans of black color were
targets for sterilization.”
Bock, 1983:408.
“One exhibit [at the Holocaust Museum at Buchenwald] quotes SS chief
Heinrich Himmler on December 8th, 1938, as calling for the ‘Final
‘Solution of the Gypsy Question,’ and cites his order of December 16th,
1942, to have all Gypsies remaining in Europe deported to Auschwitz.”
Sheldon Rantz 1995:11
“The Nuremberg Law for the Protection of Blood and Honour was
instituted on 15 September 1935, forbidding intermarriage or sexual
unions between Aryan and non-Aryan peoples. It affected both Gypsies
and Jews, though not equally: criteria for identification as a Gypsy were
exactly twice as strict as these applied to Jews. If two of a person’s eight
great-grandparents were even part Gypsy, that person had too much
Romani ancestry later to be allowed to live. The Nuremberg Decree, on
the other hand, defined a Jew as being minimally a person having one
65
Jewish grandparent, i.e. someone who was of one quarter Jewish descent.
If criteria for classifying who was Jewish had applied equally to Gypsies,
some eighteen thousand would have escaped being murdered.”
Ritter, 1941; Kenrick & Puxon, 1971 :68.
‘‘A Gypsy Law (Reichzigeunergesetz) is to be created the purpose of
which is to deal with the complete registration of the Romani population,
their sterilization, their movement and means of livelihood, and the
expulsion of all foreign-born, stateless Gypsies.”
State Secretary of the Interior Hans Pfundtner, March 4th, 1936.
‘‘All Gypsies should be treated as hereditarily sick; the only solution is
elimination. The aim should, therefore, be the elimination without
hesitation of this characteristically defective element in the population.”
Dr. Johannes Behrendt, Office of Racial Hygiene Policy Statement, 1939
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
Würth of the Racial Hygiene Research Unit in September, 1937. The first
official Party statement to refer to the endgültige Lösung der
Zigeunerfrage was issued in March, 1938, signed by Himmler.
‘‘A conference on racial policy organized by Heydrich took place in
Berlin on 21st September 1939, which may have decided upon the ‘Final
Solution of the Gypsy Question.’ An express letter sent by the Reich Main
Security Office on 17th October 1939 to its local agents stated that ‘the
Gypsy question will shortly be regulated throughout the territory of the
Reich. At 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; the ‘Final Solution of the Gypsy Question’ had begun.”
Burleigh & Wippermann, 1991 :121
“SS Officer Percy Broad, who worked in the political division at
Auschwitz, wrote that ‘it is the will of the all-powerful Reichsführer to
have the Gypsies disappear from the face of the earth’.”
Milton, 1966:31
“The Führer has ordered the liquidation of all Jews, Gypsies and
communist political functionaries in the entire area of the Soviet Union.”
Security Police Commando Bruno Streckenbach, June, 1940, following a
meeting with Hitler and Heydrich.
66
“At the beginning of 1940, the first mass genocidal action of the
Holocaust took place when 250 Romani children from Czechoslovakia
were murdered during tests with the new Zyklon-B gas in the camp at
Buchenwald.”
Proester, 1968:1
“The Nazi institutions involved with the persecution of the Gypsies knew
about the particularly close family ties in this ethnic group. If these family
ties were not taken into account, as happened in part with the deportation
of 2,500 Sinti to Poland in 1940, there were certainly difficulties for the
police, which were recorded negatively. To this extent, the State Security
Office order of 29 January 1943 to deport the Sinti and Roma to
Auschwitz ‘in families’ reflected efforts to keep the friction and resultant
bureaucratic problems associated with the deportation and internment as
small as possible”
Zimmermann, 1990:107-8
“Heydrich, who had been entrusted with ‘The final solution of the Jewish
Question’ on July 31st, 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 Jews.’”
Müller-Hill, 1988: 58-59
“The official decision to exterminate the Gypsies was made in the spring
of 1941 when the Einsatzgruppen were formed. Gypsies were subject to
three methods of genocide: sterilizations, deportation and homicide. Mass
killing was the most common.
Sherer, 1987: 5
“The Himmler Decree of December 16th, 1942 (Auschwitz-Erlass)
according to which the Gypsies should be deported to AuschwitzBirkenau, 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.”
Auschwitz State Museum Memorial Book, 1993:3
“Heinrich Himmler’s infamous Auschwitz Decree of December 16th,
1942, can be seen as the final stage of the Final Solution of the Gypsy
67
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 see 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: the first gassing
operations against Gypsies did indeed take place in Chelmno as early as
late 1941/early 1942.”
Thurner, 1987:3
“With respect to the extermination of antisocial forms of life, Dr.
Goebbels is of the opinion that the Jews and the Gypsies should simply be
exterminated.”
Nazi Reichsminister of Justice Otto Thierack, September 14th, 1942
“The suggestion by Himmler [that certain families of ‘pure’ Gypsies were
to be kept alive in a compound for anthropologists to study] was mocked
by his peers as ‘one more of Himmler’s hare-brained schemes,’ and
rejected outright by Bormann.”
Tyrnauer, 1985:24
“The count of half a million Sinti and Roma rnurdered 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
Liquidierungsubrigen [remainder to be liquidated]. 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
camp produced statistical material.”
König, 1989:87
“Attempts to express Romani casualties in terms of numbers cannot do
justice to the physical and psychological damage endured by those who
survived. Any numbers we have cannot be verified by means of lists, or
card-indexes, or camp files; most of the Gypsies died in eastern and
southern Europe, shot by execution troops or fascist gang members. The
numbers of those who actually died in the camps have only partially been
handed down to us; almost all the files were destroyed when those camps
were evacuated.”
Streck, 1979:148
“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
68
hundreds. In 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 number of victims.”
Auschwitz State Museum Memorial Book, 1993:2
An article entitled “Dutch World War II deaths higher than recorded”
reported that “The number of Dutch people who died in World War II is
considerably higher than the accepted figure to date according to
researchers at Utrecht University, reports ANP news service on Monday.
The researchers say not 210,000 but 280,000 Dutch people died in the
war. The discrepancy comes from the statistics of those who were
deported. These are recorded as ‘emigrants’ while in reality they were
Jews and Gypsies who were transported to the gas chambers in German
concentration camps.”
Dutch News nl for Tuesday 9 October 2007
“The Nazis killed between a fourth and a third of all Gypsies living in
Europe, and as many as 70 percent in those areas where Nazi control had
been established longest.”
Strom & Parsons, 1978:20
“How many people in Britain and America today are aware that the
Gypsies of Europe were rounded up by the Nazis and sent to their death in
almost similar proportions to the Jews?”
Heger, 1980:15
“The Gypsies had been murdered in a proportion similar to the Jews:
about 80% of them in the area of the countries which were occupied by the
Nazis.”
Simon Wiesenthal, in a letter to Elie Wiesel dated December 14th, 1984
“The downfall of the Third Reich did not halt the devaluation of Gypsy
lives. Though West Germany paid nearly $715 million to Israel and
various Jewish organizations, [as of 1979] Gypsies as a group received
nothing.”
Time Magazine, 3(12):67, 1979
“Being a Jew under Hitler made you first a guilty party and then a parcel
which the yellow star, itself now become a label, dispatched to those
unknown camps—a process which took a more or less brief period of
time, but a period of time all the same. Being Gypsy, however, made you
69
an instant target, since the relatively small number of persons of that race
facilitated their individual execution.”
Françoise Sagan, 1988: 96-97
70
6
ROMA IN EUROPE: A CHRONOLOGY LEADING TO THE
HOLOCAUST
RROMA AND’E OROPA: XRONOLOGIJA KAJ VODIL E BARE
PORRAJMASKE
1407: First appearance of Romanies in Germany, in Hildesheim.
1414: Second possible appearance of Romanies in Germany, in Hesse.
1416: First anti-Romani law issued in Germany. Forty-eight such laws are
passed between this date and 1774.
1417: First detailed description of arrival and appearance of Romanies in
Germany.
1418: Arrival documented in Hamburg.
1419: Arrival documented in Augsburg.
1428: Arrival documented in Switzerland.
1449: Romanies driven out of Frankfurt-am-Main.
1496: Romanies accused of being foreign spies, carriers of the plague, and
traitors to Christendom, at the Reichstag meetings this year, and in 1497
and 1498, in Freiburg and Landau. These charges are repeated frequently
over the following centuries.
1498: New anti-Romani laws issued by the Freiburg Diet.
1500: Maximilian I orders all Romanies to be out of Germany by Easter,
1501. Cases are on record of Germans who killed Romanies being
protected by this law, which stated that “taking the life of a Romani . . .
71
did not act against the policy of the state.” A general order is issued at
Augsburg stating that Romani men may be shot and their women raped if
found in Germany.
1514: Switzerland encourages “Gypsy hunts” among its citizens as a
means of urging Romanies to leave the country.
1531: The Augsburg Reichstag forbids Romanies the use of travel
documents, in order to make re-entry impossible once banished. This
method is being used in modem-day Poland.
1566: Ferdinand I maintains expulsion and extermination orders; two
Romanies were drowned in the Elbe for violating this order in Dresden.
1568: Pope Pius V banishes all Romanies from the realm of the Holy
Roman Church.
1579: Augustus, elector of Saxony, confiscates Romanies’ travel permits
and banishes them from the state.
1580: Governments encourage Romani hunts in Switzerland.The
Netherlands and Germany.
1652: Townspeople in Bautzen are fined by the local magistrate for doing
business with Romanies.
1659: Mass murder of Romanies in Neudorf, near Dresden.
1661: Elector Johann Georg II of Saxony imposes penalty on Romanies
found in his territory. “Romani hunts” instigated as means of
exterminating Romani population.
1709: Romanies apprehended for any reason, whether criminal or not,
were to be sent to the galleys or deported, according to a law in the district
of Ober-Rhein.
1710: Frederick I of Prussia condemns all male Romanies to forced labor,
and women to be whiprfcd and branded, and their children permanently
placed with white families.
1714: An order is issued in Mainz in this year sending all male Romanies
apprehended to the gallows, and requiring the branding and whipping of
women and children. Frederick Augustus, Elector of Saxony, orders the
murder of any Romani resisting arrest.
1721: Emperor Karl VI orders extermination of Romanies.
72
1722: In Frankfurt-am-Main Romani parents are branded and deported
while their children arc taken from them and placed permanently with
non-Romani families. During this period, Friedrich Wilhelm makes it a
hanging offense in Prussia merely to be bom a Romani for all those above
the age of eighteen. A thousand armed Romanies confront German
soldiery in an organized fight for their freedom. Nineteen Romanies
arrested at Kaswasser are tortured to death: four broken on the wheel,
three beheaded and the rest shot or stabbed to death.
1725: An edict from King Frederick William I of Prussia condemns all
Romanies throughout the land eighteen years or older, to be hanged.
1726: Johann Weissenbruch describes wholesale murder on November
14th and 15th, of a community of Romanies in Germany: five were broken
on the wheel, eleven were beheaded, and nine hung. In the Netherlands
during this period, “Gypsy hunts” were organized nation-wide in order to
expel them from the land. German monarch Charles VI passes a law that
any male Romani found in the country was to be killed instantly, while
Romani women and children were to have their ears cut off and be
whipped to the nearest foreign border.
1736: Document relating punishment of a runaway Romani slave in
Siebenburgen. He has his feet burned in lye, and his lip cut off which he is
forced to roast and eat in front of his owners.
1740: All Romanies entering Bohemia are to be hung by decree.
1782: Two hundred Romaies are arrested and tortured until they confess
to charges of cannibalism, in Esabrag, Frauenmark and Kamesa in
Hungary.
1783: Heinrich Grellmann publishes the first treatise establishing the
Indian origin of the Romani people, but claims in it that in doing his
research among them, he felt a “clear repugnancy, like a biologist
dissecting some nauseating, crawling thing in the interests of science.”
1793: Establishment attitudes are further expressed by the minister
Martinus Zippel who writes that “Gypsies in a well-ordered state in the
present day are like vermin on an animal’s body.”
1830: Using the method introduced by Maria Theresa in the AustroHungarian Empire during the previous century, authorities in Nordhausen
attempt to bring about the eventual extinction of the Romani population by
forcibly and permanently removing children from their families for
placement with non-Romanies.
73
1835: November 11, record of a “Gypsy hunt” for sport in Jutland, which
included over 260 in the list of kills. A Rheinish landowner entered “a
Gypsy women and her suckling baby” in his record of the hunt.
1863: In his essay on Roma, Richard Leibich refers to them as
Lebensunwertesleben, or “lives unworthy of life,” introducing the phrase
for the first time.
1864: Complete legal freedom from five centuries of slavery is finally
granted to Roma in Wallachia and Moldavia.
1869: In his essay on Roma, Kulemann repeats Liebich’s phrase,
referring to Roma as “lives unworthy of life.”
1888: September 14. The Imperial Ministry of the Interior issued a lengthy
order which said, in part, “Any Gypsies roaming about without legal
earning, business or profession are to be criminally prosecuted in keeping
with the law of 24 May 1885 regardless of whether domestic or foreign
citizens, or whether they are in possession of legitimizing paperwork or
not; the main duty of the authorities in fighting the Gypsy Plague must be
a unified coactions, involving not only the police, but also the heads of
community administrations.”
1890: (Exact date not known; early 1890s.) The Swabian parliament
organizes a conference on the “Gypsy Scum” (Das Zigeunergeschmeiss),
and suggests means by which the presence of Romanies could be signalled
by ringing church bells. The military is also empowered to apprehend and
move Romanies on.
1899: In March, under the directorship of Alfred Dillman in Munich,
Bavarian police create a special Romani affairs unit, later to be named The
Central Office for Fighting the Gypsy Nuisance, to regulate the lives of
Romanies. Available historical documents relating to Romanies begin to
be collected, particularly those pertaining to legislation and “criminality.”
1904: Prussian Landtag unanimously adopted a proposition to regulate
Romani movement and means of livelihood.
1905: A census of all Romanies in Bavaria is taken, in which they are
described as “a pest against which society must unflaggingly defend
itself.” Citizens are urged to report all Romani activity to the Gypsy
Affairs office in Munich. Dillmann’s Zigeunerbuch is published.
1906: February 17; the Prussian minister issues special instructions to the
police to “combat the Gypsy nuisance.” A special register is started to
74
keep a record of Romani activity.
1907: Increasing anti-Romani terrorism in Germany leads to influx of
Romanies from that country into western Europe, including Britain.
1908: A policy statement from the House of Commons in Vienna, capital
of the Austro-German Alliance, was sent to the Ministers of the Interior,
Defence and Justice “concerning measures to reduce and eliminate the
Gypsy population.”
1909: Recommendations coming from a policy conference on “the Gypsy
question” in Hungary include the confiscation of their animals and carts,
and permanent branding for purposes of identification.
1920: In their book Die Freigabe der der Vernichtung Lebensunwerten
Lebens (The Eradication of Lives Unworthy of Life), psychiatrist Karl
Binding and magistrate Alfred Hoche argue for the killing of those who
were “Ballastexistenzen,” i.e. whose lives were seen to be simply dead
weight within humanity. This included Romanies. The concept of
“worthless life” becomes crucial to Nazi racist policy after 1933.
1922: In Baden, requirements are introduced that all Romanies be
photographed and fingerprinted, and have documents completed on them.
1926: The Bavarian parliament brings a new law “to combat Gypsies,
nomads and idlers” into effect, and the Provincial Criminal Commission
endorses a law dated July 16 aimed at controlling the “Gypsy Plague.” In
Switzerland, “proto-Nazi ideas of racial hygiene” are used to justify a
program of forced permanent removal of Romani children from their
families for placement in foster homes. This remained in effect until the
mid 1980s.
1927: Legislation requiring the photographing and fingerprinting of
Romanies is instituted in Prussia, where eight thousand Romanies are
processed in this way. Bavaria institutes laws forbidding Romanies to
travel in family groups, or to own firearms. Those over sixteen are liable
for incarceration in work camps, while those without proof of Bavarian
birth start being expelled from Germany. A group of Romanies in
Slovakia is tried for cannibalism, which Friedman interprets as part of the
growing campaign against the Romani population.
1928: After April 12, Romanies in Germany are to be placed under
permanent police surveillance. The law is reaffirmed in May. These acts
are in direct violation of the Weimar Constitution which guaranteed equal
rights for all citizens. In the same year, Professor Hans F. Gunther writes
that “it was the Gypsies who introduced foreign blood into Europe.”
75
1929: April 16 and 17, the Munich Bureau’s National Center jointly
establishes a Division of Romani Affairs with the International
Criminology Bureau (Interpol) in Vienna. Working closely together, they
enforce restrictions on travel for Romanies without documents, and
impose up to two years’ detention in “rehabilitation camps” upon numbers
of Romanies sixteen years of age or older.
1930: Recommendation is made by a Norwegian journalist that all
Romanies be sterilized.
1933
On January 20 in this year, officials in Burgenland called for the
withdrawal of all civil rights from Romanies, and the introduction of
clubbing as a punishment. On May 26, Nazis introduce a law to legalize
eugenic sterilization. On July 14, Hitler’s cabinet passes a law against the
propagation of “lives not worthy of life” (Lebensunwertesleben) called
“the law for the prevention of hereditarily diseased offspring.” It ordered
sterilization for certain categories of people, “specifically Gypsies and
most of the Germans of black colour” (i.e. those resulting from the contact
between German women and the Senegalese troops deployed by the
French during the First World War to patrol the Ruhr Valley, as well as
residents in Europe from German ex-colonies in Africa). The Oberwarth
District Prefect submits a petition demanding that the League of Nations
investigate the possibility of establishing a colony for the resettlement of
European Romanies in the Polynesian islands. In September, the
Reichsminister for the Interior and Propaganda initiates a round-up of
“vagrants,” including large numbers of Romanies.
For mental patients, the institutionalized handicapped and social
deviants, there was the Law to Prevent Offspring with Hereditary Defects
in July, the Law for Reform of Habitual Criminals and Social Deviants in
November.
1934
From January onwards, Romanies are being selected for transfer to camps
for processing, which includes sterilization by injection or castration.
These camps will be established at Dachau, Dieselstrasse, Sachsenhausen, Marzahn and Vennhausen during the next three years. Two laws
issued in Nuremburg in July forbid Germans from marrying “Jews,
Negroes, and Gypsies.”
1935
Starting on September 15, Romanies become subject to the restrictions of
the Nuremberg Law for the Protection of Blood and Honor, which forbids
intermarriage or sexual relationships between Aryan and non-Aryan
peoples (“ The Law for Marriage Health”).
76
A policy statement issued by the Nazi Party reads “In Europe
generally, only Jews and Gypsies come under consideration as members
of an alien people.” For the Romanies the German bureaucracy applied the
miscegenation clauses of the Nuremberg laws as well as the laws against
habitual criminals, social misfits, vagabonds, and so-called asocials to
intimidate, harass, arrest, and sterilize Romanies in Germany and Austria.
1936
The earliest Nazi document referring to “the introduction of the total
solution of 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. In June and July, several
hundred Romanies are transported to Dachau by order of the Minister of
the Interior, as “dependents of the Munich Bureau (of Gypsy Affairs);”
attempts to escape are punishable by death. In this year Dr. Hans Globke,
Head of Service at the Ministry of the Interior for the Third Reich, who
serves on the panel on racial laws, declares that “In Europe, only Jews and
Gypsies are of foreign blood,” and race-hygienist Dr. Robert Korber
writes in his book Volk und Staat that “The Jews and the Gypsies are
today remote from us because of their Asiatic ancestry, just as ours is
Nordic.” This sentiment is reiterated by Dr. E. Brandis, who wrote that
“only the Gypsies are to be considered as an alien people in Europe
(besides the Jews).” German antigypsyism becomes transnational in
Europe when Interpol in Vienna establishes the International Center for
Combating the Gypsy Menace, which has grown from the earlier Bureau
of Gypsy Affairs. Martin Block publishes his general study of Romanies
in Leipzig, and justifies Nazi racist attitudes by speaking of the
“nauseating Gypsy smell,” and the “involuntary feeling of mistrust or
repulsion one feels in their presence.” The main Nazi institution to deal
with Romanies, the Racial Hygiene and Population Biology and Research
Unit of the Ministry of Health is established under the directorship of Dr.
Robert Ritter at Berlin-Dahlem; its expressed purpose is to determine
whether the Romani people are Aryans or subhumans (“Untermenschen”).
By early 1942, Ritter has documented the genealogy of almost the entire
German Romani population. In Berlin, Romanies are cleared off the
streets away from public view, because of the upcoming Olympic Games.
Pamphlets are distributed to those attending the games promoting antiGypsyism among the general public.
1937
The second specific reference to “the final solution of the Gypsy
question” was made by Adolf Würth of the Racial Hygiene Research Unit
in September, 1937. In a speech delivered before the German Association
for Racial Research he said “The Gypsy question is a racial question for us
today. In the same way as the National Socialist state has solved the
77
Jewish question, it will also have to settle the Gypsy question once and for
all. The race biological research on Gypsies is an unconditional
prerequisite for the Final Solution of the Gypsy Question.”
An order released on December 14 stated that persons could be
incarcerated on the grounds of their being inherently, as well as habitually,
criminal, i.e. whether they were actually engaged in criminal activity or
not, depending upon “genetic makeup” and potential threat to Aryan
security. By the end of this year, large-scale roundups of Romanies begin.
At Buchenwald, a special camp for “pure” Romanies is set up, and there
are Romanies incarcerated in camps in Nazi-controlled territories
throughout Europe. Four hundred sent to Taucha; others end up in
Mauthausen, Gusen, Dautmergen, Natzweiler, Stutthoff, Flossenberg,
Salzwed, Ravensbrück, Dusseldorf, Lackenbach, Westerbork, Malines and
elsewhere. An SS study group recommends the mass drowning of
Romanies in boats to be towed out to sea and sunk, though this is not
implemented.
From this year onwards the Wehrmacht High Command began
issuing decrees ordering the exclusion of all Romanies from military
service for reasons of “racial policy”. Auschwitz commandant Rudolf
Hoess was later to say at his tribunal in 1947 said “Many soldiers who had
been highly decorated, who had been wounded several times, whose
father, mother or grandfather were Gypsies or Gypsies of mixed race,
were arrested while on leave from the front”.
1938
An order dated 13 march 1938 prohibits Romanies from voting.
A letter dated March 24th to the “Imperial Leader of the SS” from Dr.
Werner Best, Head of the Nazi Security Police addresses the “initiat[ion
of the] final solution to the Gypsy problem from a racial point of view.”
The first official publicly-posted Party statement to refer to the Final
Solution (endgültige Lösung der Zigeunerfrage) was also issued in March,
1938, signed by Himmler.
His decree of May 16 ordered that the Bureau of Romani Affairs be
moved from Munich to Berlin.
Between June 12th and June 18th “Gypsy clean-up week” (the
Zigeuneraufraumungswoche, in French the Semaine d’Epurations des
Tsiganes) is in effect, and hundreds of Romanies throughout Germany and
Austria are rounded up and incarcerated. This law was also enforced
against Jews previously sentenced for any violation. In Mannworth in
Austria, three hundred Romani farmers and vineyard owners were arrested
in a single night.
In a parallel development to the 1938 Jewish expulsions, Romanies were
expelled from the left bank of the Rhine in August. In that month’s issue
of The Journal of the German Association of National Socialist
Physicians, Dr. Karl Hannermann writes that“Rats, bedbugs and fleas are
also natural occurrences in the same way as Jews and Gypsies. All
78
existence is a struggle; we must therefore gradually biologically eradicate
all these vermin.”
Also in August, 1938 Burgenland provincial governor Tobias
Portchy, one of the driving forces of the Nazis’ racial policy, published a
report entitled The Gypsy Question. On the title page it warned “if you as
Germans don’t want to become to gravediggers of the Nordic blood in
Burgenland, do not overlook the threat which the Gypsies pose to it!”
After September 2nd Romanies were prohibited from “wandering”
in the western areas of the Reich.
A decree dated September 4th forbids Romani children from
attending school. After November, the same year, Jewish children can
attend only Jewish, and not state, schools.
A request from the Mayor of Reutlingen dated September 6th states
“We urgently request the entire population not to conclude tenancy
agreements with Gypsies, and to terminate existing agreements as quickly
as possible. It would be extremely serious and totally incomprehensible if
individual citizens of Reutlingen sold property to Gypsies”
The Romani problem was repeatedly identified “categorically as a
matter of race.” In his address in September to The German Association
for Racial Research, Dr. Adolph Würth of the Racial Hygiene Research
Unit said “the Gypsy question is a racial question for us today. In the
same way as the National Socialist state has solved the Jewish question, it
will also have to settle the Gypsy question once and for all. The race
biological research on Gypsies is an unconditional prerequisite for the
Final Solution of the Gypsy Question.” This was further supported by Dr.
Kurt Ammon, who stated that the Nazi policy “views the Gypsy problem
as being foremost a racial one.” Himmler thereafter puts groups of
Romanies at the disposal of a team of doctors for experiments on
sterilization techniques. Ironically, the more Romani ancestry an
individual has, the less threatening he is seen to be. Himmler’s suggestion
that a number of “pure” Romanies be exempt and subject to the “law for
the protection of historic monuments” for future anthropologists to study
is mocked, and never implemented. Romanies were categorized by
percentage of Romani ancestry; if two of an individual’s eight greatgrandparents were even part-Romani, that individual had too much
“Gypsy blood” to be allowed, later, to live. These criteria were twice as
strict as those applying to Jews; if the criteria for determining Jewishness
had been applied to Romanies, some 18,000 would have escaped death
(18,000 was also the total number of Romanies in Germany at the time).
Romani women married to non-Romanies and children over the age of 13
are being sent to Dusseldorf-Lierenfeld to be sterilized. Five thousand
German Romanies were concentrated in the Gypsy Section of the
concentration camp at Lodz Heydrich’s Festsetzungs-erlaß of 17 October
prohibits all Romanies and part-Romanies not already interned in camps
from changing their registered domiciles.
79
On December 8th, Himmler signs a new order based upon the
findings of the Office of Racial Hygiene, which had determined that
Romani blood was “very dangerous” to Aryan purity. Dr. Tobias Portschy,
Area Commander in Styria, writes in a memorandum to Hitler’s
Chancellery that “Gypsies place the purity of the blood of German
peasantry in peril,” and recommended mass sterilization as a solution.
1939
On March 1st, the Order for the Implementation of the Reich Criminal
Police Department is issued, which states “The decree of the Reichsfhrer
SS of August 12 1938 first of all orders the registration of the persons
living in the Reich territory who count as Gypsies in the population. Once
it has been established how many Gypsies there are in the Reich territory,
further measures can be taken.” Instructions for carrying out the order to
register and categorize Romanies are also issued in March, which state
that “the aim of the measures taken by the state must be the racial
separation once and for all of the Gypsy race from the German nation,
then the prevention of racial mixing.” Every police headquarters was to set
up a unit to monitor Romani matters, and one or more persons were to be
permanently responsible for Romanies.
According to the minutes of a meeting organized by Heydrich on
September 27, Hitler instructed that German Romanies and Jews were to
be moved by rail into Poland. The order came on October 16th: “With
regard to the transportation of the Gypsies, we advise that the first
transport of Jews is leaving Vienna on Friday, 20 October 1939; four
wagons of Gypsies are to be added to that transport.” This may not have
taken place.
On October 19th a bulletin from the State Criminal Police office
states “This order is to inform all Gypsies and Gypsies of mixed race in
your area that they are not to leave their place of residence, or their present
residence, until further notice.”
A statement is circulated at a Reichs press conference on October
th
24 stating that “Poland is the land of the subhuman; Poles, Jews and
Gypsies should all be mentioned in the same breath.”
Referring to Gypsy pupils, a letter dated November 1th from the
State administration of Reichsgau-Vienna to the Reichskommisar for the
reunification of Austria with the German Reich states that “No teacher and
no school place can be made available to this scum.”
A memorandum from the Dept. of Public Welfare in Hamburg,
dated December 8th states that “In the same way that no one can expect a
German to work together with a Jew, it can also not be demanded of him
that he share his workspace with a Gypsy.”
In December, Hitler issued a new decree dated November 17, 1939
in preparation for these transportations, forbidding all “Gypsies and partGypsies” not already in camps from moving out of their areas. Trains are
reported moving east “packed with Gypsies” from the Fall of 1939 on. Dr.
80
Johannes Behrendt of the Office of Racial Hygiene issues the statement
that “All 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.” In that report, he
estimated that, based on Nazi research, the total world Romani population
was two million, of which eighteen thousand lived in Germany. ReichsMinister of Justice Thierack wrote to Bormann that he “intended to make
the Reichsfuhrer SS responsible for the prosecution of Poles, Russians,
Jews and Gypsies; Poles and Russians can only be prosecuted by the
police if they lived in the area of the former Polish state prior to
September 1st. Prosecution proceedings against Jews and Gypsies,
however, should be taken without observing these reservations.”
1940
In January or February, 250 Romani children from Brno in the
concentration camp at Buchenwald are used as guinea pigs for testing the
gas Zyklon B which was later used for mass killings at AuschwitzBirkenau. This was the first mass genocidal action of the Holocaust. Nazis
in Alsace comply with an order to round up “criminals, asocials, the sick,
French nationalists and of course the Jews and the Gypsies.” In this year,
Nazi statisticians Wetzel and Hecht estimate that “one hundred thousand
Gypsies and others” are scheduled for deportation to Poland, and shipped
between May 15th -18th .
A memorandum from Leonardo Conti, Secretary of State for
Health in the Ministry of Interior, to the Main Office of the Security
Police, Kripo headquarters, and the Reich Health Department, Berlin sent
on January 24th states:
It is known that the lives of Romanies and part Romanies is to be
regulated by a Gypsy law (Zigeunergesetz). Moreover, the intermarriage
of Romani with German blood is to be resisted and if necessary, this could
be legally achieved by creating a statutory basis for the sterilization of
part-Romanies (Zigeunermischlinge). These questions were already in a
state of flux before the war started. The war has apparently suddenly
created a new situation, since the possibility of expelling Roma to the
General Government is available. Certainly, such an expulsion appears to
have particular advantages at the moment. However, in my opinion, the
implementation of such a plan would mean that because it is expedient to
do this at the moment, a genuine radicalization would not be achieved. I
firmly believe, now as before, that the final solution of the Gypsy problem
(endgültige Lösung der Ziegeunerproblems) can only be achieved through
the sterilization of full and part Romanies . . . I think that the time for a
legal resolution of these problems is over, and that we must immediately
try to sterilize the Romanies and part Romanies as a special measure,
using analogous precedents . . . Once sterilization is completed and these
81
people are rendered biologically harmless, it is of no great consequence
whether they are expelled or used as labour on the home front.
On May 18th Romanies were deported from seven assembly
centres located in the Old Reich to Lublin, located in the General
Government. The first transport included 2,500 German Romanies,
selected as full families wherever possible. The transport included 1,000
from Hamburg and Bremen, 1,000 from Cologne, Düsseldorf, and
Hanover and 500 from Stuttgart and Frankfurt. The deportation to Lublin
proceeded as planned, although subsequent police reports revealed that a
further 300 had been “evacuated,” bringing the total number of deportees
to 2,800.
In a speech delivered on February 29th to top-level Nazi party
officials, Himmler said “The Gypsies are a question in themselves. I want
to be rid of them this year if it is at all possible. There are only thirty
thousand of them in the entire Reich, but they do great racial damage.”
On April 27th a joint order from NS Headquarters and the Chief
of Police states that “The first transport of Gypsies to the General
gouvernement will leave in the middle of May with 2,5000 people.”
The following day Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Reich Security
Main Office, sent out more precise instructions to chiefs of police and
district governors in Germany in the so-called Umsiedlungserlaß for the
“resettlement, arrest, and deportation of Romanies above the age of 17
from western and northwestern border zones.”
The deportation procedures generally followed Heydrich’s
guidelines. For each transport, the local detective force compiled lists
based on local residential registration by the police and racial evaluations
prepared by the staff of the Office for Research on Race Hygiene and
Population Biology in the Reich Health Department. The designated
individuals were picked up by the local police and kept in collection
(assembly) centres until the transports were fully assembled and the
paperwork had been completed. The deported Romanies were permitted to
take with them only a limited quantity of personal possessions (up to 50
kg.). On the day of deportation, after delousing, Romanies were taken by
train or truck and loaded by family group onto passenger cars; transport
monitors were assigned to each train car (“an older Romani person
responsible for order and cleanliness during the journey”), whose job
paralleled the role of the Transportführer in the later Jewish deportations.
Each transport was to be accompanied by one police officer and 25
uniformed “officials.”
On May 18th 2,800 German Romanies were deported from seven
assembly centres located in the Old Reich to Lublin, located in the
General Government. In Austria, the deportations to Poland were planned
for the second half of August 1940. The Romanies were to be imprisoned
in a special camp until deportation; there they would be registered and
given medical examinations.
82
A law passed on August 14th forbids official employment of any
kind to Romanies.
1941
An ordinance dated February 11th forbids Gypsies and “part-Gypsies”
from serving in the German army “on the grounds of racial policy.”
Bulletin 153 from the Oberkommando of the Military repeats this on
February 21st: “[Regarding the] discharges of Gypsies and Gypsies of
mixed race from active military service.” This is repeated on July 10 the
following year.
On July 11th the Chief Administrative officer of Oberwart issued
the order for the prohibition of the use of public transport by Gypsies.
In Hungary Romanies were being targeted in the Nazi sympathetic
regime led by Admiral Horthy. A document dated July 16th this year
recorded the transport of between 500 and 1,000 Hungarian Romanies to
concentration camps in Transcarpathia.
On July 31st Heydrich, who had been entrusted with the details of
the Final Solution, includes Romanies together with Jews: “The
Einsatzkommandos received the order to kill all Jews, Gypsies and mental
patients.”
On October 10th, Heydrich proposes that the German Romanies be
sent to Riga with the Jews instead of being sent to Auschwitz and
Chelmno in Poland. At the same meeting, the motion that Litzmannstadt
(Lodz) be chosen as the final destination for non-German-born Romanies
is approved, and between November 9th-11th five trainloads transporting a
thousand Romanies each left from Austrian transit camps at Hartburg,
Fürstenfeld, Mattersburg, Roten Thurm, Lackenbach, and Oberwart for
Lodz, where they were joined by a transport of 20,000 Jews. Of the 5,000
Romanies deported, nearly two thirds were children; some died from
typhus, others were brutalized to death by the guards.
On November 24th, repeating his official orders the Commander of
the Wehrmacht in Byelorussia stated “The Jews must disappear from the
countryside and the Gypsies must be eradicated.” .
On Christmas Eve eight hundred Romani men, women and
children are shot to death at Simferopol in the Crimea by the
Einsatzgruppen.
In December and in January Romanies were taken from Lodz to
Kulmhof (Chelmno), where they were among the first to be killed in
mobile gas vans.
1942
On January 6th Germans in Oberwart are told to pressure Romanies to sell
their property, but “not in a way that would cause anxiety, or to think that
transportation was in store for them today or tomorrow”.
Shipments of Romanies to Chelmno in groups of two or three
hundred begin in January, followed shortly thereafter by mass shipments
83
of Jews to the same camp.
In the Spring, Romanies were selected for experimentation at
Dachau and Buchenwald by Dr. Adolf Pokorny to see how long they
could survive on sea water, claiming that they “must not only be
conquered, but exterminated also.” At Sachsenhausen race scientist
Ludwig Fischer attempts to show that Romani blood is different from that
of Germans, starting his medical experiments on forty Romanies. “At
Himmler’s request, he promised to widen his research by exploring Jewish
blood also.” That same Spring, one thousand Romanies were shot and
buried alive in a single action on a collective farm near Smolensk.
Nazi death squads enter Greece in June, murdering hundreds of
Romanies. In Serbia, Military Governor Harald Turner is able to announce
that “Serbia is the only country in which the Jewish Question and the
Gypsy Question have been resolved.” In the same statement he warned
that “one must not forget that the Jews and the Gypsies generally
constitute a threat to security and, as such, pose a threat to peace and
public order; it is the Jewish nature which is responsible for this war and,
as for the Gypsy, by his nature he can never be a useful member of
international society.” For each German soldier killed in war, a hundred
Romanies and Jews were murdered in retribution.
In Greece, fifty Romanies are murdered for each German casualty.
Most Romanies in Yugoslavia are killed by the Ustashi or Croatian
Fascists; figures on the numbers dispatched in this way are not complete.
On June 21st Chief of Police Fritz Jacob reports to Chief SS Group
leader Rudolph Querner that “there is no time to sleep, there are three or
four actions every week, sometimes Gypsies and other times Jews.”
On July 31st the Ministry of the Eastern Occupied Territories
reaffirms to the Higher SS and Police Leader in Riga the order that “the
treatment of Jews and Romanies was to be placed on equal footing
(gleichgestellt).” Romanies are being exterminated at Majdanek, Belsec,
Sanok, Sobibor, Chelmno and Treblinka. A survivor from Treblinka
testified that
After a few hours the SS arrived and separated the men from the
women and children . . . they drove 100 people into the pit at a
time and fired at them with submachine guns. The Gypsies who
were still alive were forced to bury those who had been shot, often
they were only wounded, and then they themselves were pushed
into the pit and once again the rattling of machine guns took the
lives of another hundred people.
In Bucharest, the policy statement that “for Romania, the Gypsy question
is as important as the Jewish” is published. In the minutes of a September
14th meeting Justice Minister Otto Thierack proposes that “Jews and
Gypsies should be unconditionally exterminated.” Nazis begin compiling
data on Romani populations in Britain and elsewhere in anticipation of
84
eventual takeover of those countries. Camp survivor B. Stawska (in
Fickowski, 1989:43) is one who has described the transportation of
Romanies to Sobibor:
In November, 1942, the pogrom against the Jews and Gypsies
began, and they were shot on a mass scale in street executions.
The Gypsies were driven into the square at the fore of the crowd,
and after them the Jews. It was cold, and the Gypsy women were
weeping loudly. They had all their possessions on their backs,
including eiderdowns; everything that they had, but all of that was
taken away from them later. The Jews behaved very calmly, but
the Gypsies cried a lot—you could hear one loud sobbing. They
were taken to the station and loaded into goods wagons, which
were sealed and taken to stations beyond Chelm, to Sobibór, where
they were burnt in the ovens.
By 1942, the abandoned property of both the deported Jews and
Romanies were sold at public auction.
1943
On January 26th the president of the National Criminal Police Association
issues the following statement: “Political preventative custody can be
ordered to stop any further children of mixed blood issuing from the
willful continuation of sexual union between Gypsies and Gypsies of
mixed race, and those of German blood.” In February, roundup of the
remaining Romanies throughout Germany takes place, and they are
transported to Birkenau; the largest transport ever of Polish Romanies is
brought to the same camp in March, and exterminated within the first
month. Dutch Romanies begin being transported to Auschwitz.
A party bulletin entitled Maintenance of the Race and the
Genotype in German Law states that “Gypsies are of foreign blood,
pursuant to German racial legislation; their political, biological, cultural
and vocational separation from the German race has now been effected by
means of the elimination of those of foreign blood in the same way as was
[done] for the Jews.”
1944
Eva Justin’s book dealing with Romani children is published. In it she
expresses the hope that it will serve as a basis for future race hygiene laws
regulating such “unworthy primitive elements.” In May, when she had
finished studying the children, they were all sent to Auschwitz and were
killed there.
SS Reichsphysician Ernst Grawitz rejects Pokomy’s use of
Romanies as subjects for sea-water experiments “for racial reasons.”
85
In the early morning hours of August 2nd/3rd 2,900 Romanies at
Auschwitz-Birkenau are killed and cremated in one mass action referred to
as Zigeunernacht.
On September 26th a further 200 Romanies, mostly children, were
shipped to Auschwitz from Buchenwald, and gassed two weeks later.
In October the Men of the Arrow Cross Party allied themselves
with the Wehrmacht and the SS and thousands of Romanies were arrested
and either transported to Reich territory or were the victims of mass
shootings in camps such as Komrom.
1945
War ends on September 2 with the surrender of Japan. The Nuremberg
Trials begin in October, though not one Romani is called to testify in
behalf of his own people. Current estimates now indicate that between one
and one and a half million Romanies died during the period 1933-1945. If
this estimate, and Behrendt’s (certainly low) official Nazi estimate for the
world total are correct, between 50 and 75 percent of the entire Romani
population in Nazi-controlled Europe has perished at the hands of the
Nazis, victims of racist genocidal policy. This may be compared with the
5,700,000-6,000,000 Jewish deaths out of a then total world population of
eighteen million, or roughly thirty-three percent.
1947
At the Nuremberg Military Tribunals in September, former SS General
Otto Ohiendorf tells Presiding Judge Michael A. Musmanno that in the
killing campaigns, “There was no difference between Gypsies and Jews.”
As late as this date, Romani survivors from the camps are afraid to show
themselves publicly because pre-Nazi laws arc still in effect which would
put them back into detention centers if they are unable to show
documentation of German birth.
1950
The Württemburg Ministry of the Interior issues a statement that judges
hearing restitution claims should bear in mind that “Gypsies were
persecuted under the National Socialist regime not for any racial reason,
but because of an asocial and criminal record.” Members of the shattered
postwar remnants of the surviving Romani population lack the
wherewithal legally to challenge this preposterous statement, and no
outside agency comes forward to take up the Romani case. Commenting
on this at the time, medical genealogist Professor Montandon in Paris
observed that “everyone despises Gypsies, so why exercise restraint? Who
will avenge them? Who will complain? Who will bear witness?”
1961
on September 11th at the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem the eleventh
charge against him was as follows: a crime against humanity by
86
participating in the deportation of tens of thousands of Gypsies, their
assembly in places of concentration, and their transportation to
extermination camps for the purpose of murdering them. “
1968
In Birmingham, England, in a political debate broadcast in March, a
speaker maintains that “there are some of these Gypsies you can do
nothing with, and you must exterminate the impossibles; we are dealing
with people whom members of this council would not look upon as human
beings in the normal sense.” A similar call for “extermination” is made
again in Britain in 1984. In the same country in October, the Sundon Park
Tenants’ Association Report includes the statement that “there is no
solution to the Gypsy problem short of mass murder.”
1971
Although the war crime victims are to be compensated under the terms of
the Bonn Convention, the Bonn government frees itself from its
responsibility to Romanies by claiming that their disposition was strictly
on the grounds of security.
1973
In November, a villager in Pfaffenhofen opens fire upon a Romani family
which has come to his farm to buy produce, killing three. The sympathies
of the police are with the farmer.
1980
West German government spokesman Gerold Tandler calls Romani
demands for war crimes reparations “unreasonable” and “slander[ous].”
The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council is established in Washington and
65 members are appointed, though no Romanies are invited to be a part of
the representation. In Poland, groups of Romanies are forcibly deported by
boat after having documents allowing their return confiscated.
1983
In evidence of a new wave of anti-Romani racism in Hungary, a song
calling for their extermination by flame-thrower for a “Gypsy-free land”
becomes popular, and the slogan “Kill the Gypsies” is found decorating
public walls.
1984
The Chairman of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council tells the
Washington Post in July that Romani demands for representation are
“cockamamie,” and questions whether Romanies really constitute a
distinct ethnic people. Council liaison officers tell the press that Romani
activists are “cranks” and “eccentrics.”
87
1985
In Germany Werner Nachman, President of the Jewish Central Council,
repeatedly refuses to allow Romani participation in a ceremony
commemorating the liberation of Bergen-Belsen. At the same time,
Darmstadt city mayor Günther Metzger tells the German Council of Sinti
and Roma that it had “insulted the honour” of the memory of the
Holocaust by wishing to be associated with it. Apartheid laws are
introduced in Bradford, England, making it illegal for Romanies to come
within city limits without a permit. In Sweden, “police watched from a
patrol car as fifty youths attacked a Gypsy family with stones and a
firebomb, in Kumla.” Authorities in Yugoslavia arrest a gang of
kidnappers which has been abducting children from defenseless Romani
families for sale abroad to Italians and Americans, or to be trained as
thieves in Rome and Paris.
1986
A report is issued by the German Ministry of Finance which concludes
that “all those victimized by Nazism have been adequately compensated . .
. the circle of those deserving compensation need not be extended any
further.” The Romani Union is informed by the Office of Presidential
Appointments that none of its eight candidates for membership in the
Holocaust Memorial Council was successful. “Proto-Nazi ideas of race
hygiene” in Switzerland come to public attention in June, when it is
learned that since 1926 a state-run foundation has been forcibly and
permanently removing Romani and Traveller children from their families
for placement in non-Romani homes, the intention being to destroy the
Romani way of life. In October, the U.S. Congressional Caucus on Human
Rights sends a petition to the government of Czechoslovakia protesting its
policy of coercive sterilization of Romani women and the forcible
permanent removal of Romani children from their families. The response
from the Czech government was that “[it] was the Gypsies’ fault for
refusing to let their children be civilized.”
1987
In February, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council holds an international
conference on “Other Victims” of Nazism, which includes a panel on the
Romani situation, though no Romanies are invited to participate in its
organization, or are included in the program. The first Romani
representative is appointed in May by President Reagan to the Council.
Despite this, Romanies continue consistently to be excluded from
participation in the Annual Days of Remembrance ceremonies every year,
and are still being excluded twenty years later. Speaking at that conference
on non-Jewish victims, Erika Thurner drew attention to the evident lack of
concern for the Holocaust’s Romani victims:
88
Gypsies have generally been forgotten or been reserved for the
footnotes of historical investigation. . . this very position, as a
fringe social group with negligible social status, is responsible for
the fact that, after 1945, the Gypsy Holocaust was not
acknowledged for so many years, and continues to be neglected to
a certain degree to this very day. Ignorance as to the fate of the
Sinti and Roma in the Third Reich has made historical
reconstruction espec-ially difficult.
It has led to further
discrimination against Gypsies, and to the refusal to recognize
their right to restitution of both a material and ideal nature
(1987:7).
1988
In February the East German government announces its resolution to pay
$100 million in war crimes reparations to Jewish survivors, but refuses to
pay anything to Romani survivors. Werner Nachman (1985, above) is
charged with stealing $20 million from a reparations fund set up by the
West German government; “the Government would not start disbursing a
new fund of 300 million marks until Mr. Nachman had accounted for the
400 million and interest by the end of 1988. The new fund was also
intended to compensate Gypsies.” Nachman dies suddenly, and this is
never paid. An Irish councillor calls for the incineration of Romanies in a
garbage dump. In Hungary, street gangs are beating up Romanies,
although “police are giving the violence against Gypsies low priority.”
The California State Board of Education votes not to include information
on Romanies in the Holocaust in its Model Curriculum on Human Rights
and Genocide published this year for use throughout the school system.
The Capitol Children’s Museum in Washington, DC, established as “a
tribute to the victims of the Nazis,” adamantly refuses to include
Romanies. In October the Munich city council announces plans to forcibly
relocate Romanies to a containment centre on the site of an earlier Nazi
deportation and slave-labour camp. The area is a toxic waste dump, is
surrounded by barbed wire, and will have guards and guard dogs posted.
In Austria, on the anniversary of the Anschlüss, Romani survivors tell a
London Times reporter that they are still haunted by fears of recurrent Nazi
persecutions.
1989
As West Germany welcomes incoming refugees from East Germany,
officials are moving to deport several thousand Romanies from their
country, some of whom have lived there for thirty years. To avoid
deportation, the Romanies were obliged to seek refuge in an abandoned
concentration camp at Neuengamme, near Hamburg, where they have no
food or sanitation and where they have been attacked and evicted by riot
police and dogs; numbers of Romanies, including mothers with their
babies, were wounded. This prompted a letter of protest from the U.S.
89
House of Representatives to Chancellor Helmut Kohl who replied that
“the federal government does not deem it necessary or expedient to
introduce special rules for this category of persons” whose “situation
cannot be compared” with that of German refugees. Chairman of the U.S.
Holocaust Memorial Council Harvey Meyerhoff refuses to sign a petition
protesting this, which had been drawn up by the one Romani member of
the Council. He is told by Mr. Meyerhoff that he is not there to represent
Romanies. Several other members do sign the petition. For the first time
ever, the national press, in Newsweek, acknowledges the extent of Romani
losses in the Holocaust: “Germany had exterminated roughly 70 percent of
Europe’s Jews and an even higher percentage of its Gypsies.” In Spain,
reports come of “extreme racism in some towns in Andalucia, where
people wanting to expel Gypsies are lynching some, in the towns of
Pegalajar and Torredonjimeno in Saens County.” In Romania, fifty
Romanies are shot and killed by border guards after having fled from that
country only to be turned back by Hungarian officials. Others were
wounded in separate incidents involving Yugoslavian border officials.
1990
In February, East German Prime Minister Hans Modrow announces that
his government will “provide material support to Jewish victims of the
Holocaust,” forty years after West Germany made the same pledge. On
April 12th the East German Government released a statement apologizing
for the “immeasurable sorrow” the National Socialist regime had inflicted
upon its victims, including Romanies, but “while the world celebrates the
changes in Eastern Europe, the traditional Gypsy role of scapegoat is
already being resurrected in countries like Romania and Hungary.”
“Collective rights for minorities such as . . . Gypsies remains as elusive as
ever.” One account from Romania, whose Romani minority is officially
reported as 2.3 million but is unofficially estimated to be closer to “six
million, more that a quarter of the population,” tells of treatment at the
hands of Ceauşescu’s militia where Romanies were first starved then
brutalized: “We were stripped naked, our legs and hands were tied and we
were made to lean on a table. Then they beat our backs using a rubber
hose with iron nuts which they had taken from a tractor.” Reports since
Ceauşescu’s deposition confirm that brutality against Romanies has
increased sharply in Romania where, in the city of Reghin, pogroms
directed at Romanies have led to their homes being burnt to the ground
and men, women and children being dragged to the local cemetery and
brutally beaten. In Czechoslovakia and Hungary, street gangs are
terrorizing and killing Romanies; in the latter country Romanies are being
denied entrance into stores and bus drivers now alert their passengers over
the public address system whenever Romanies board their vehicles. At a
governmental session on May 5th in Bremerhaven, Democratic People’s
Union representative Wilhelm Schmidt, commenting upon the murder of
Romanies in the Third Reich, announced for the record that “it is a pity
90
that only so few were killed.” In Recklinghausen a “Citizens’ Patrol” as
organized by State Parliament member Marr Müller to keep Romanies out
of the town. On March 19th, British Conservative Councillor Tookey
stated in a public address that she wanted to see “the filthy, dirty Gypsies
recycled and dumped into the sea,” following a similar public statement by
the Mayor of Dartford, in Kent, that Romanies be “pushed over the White
Cliffs of Dover.” A campaign announcement appearing in a British
Conservative Party periodical read “Gypsies: Filth: Crime: One day after
the election, we promise to move them OUT.” In June, specialist in
“Romani crime” Detective Dennis Marlock told American viewers of the
nationally-broadcast Geraldo Rivera Show that Romanies had not evolved
as a people to the point where they could distinguish between right and
wrong “like the rest of us,” and that those who became “professors,
musicians and other professionals” were no longer Gypsies, a point
reaffirmed by specialist on Romanies Professor John Dowling of
Marquette University on the same program. It is revealed that between
75% and 80% of the children suffering in the Romanian orphanages where
they are dying of AIDS and hepatitis are Romani children, although no
attention is drawn to this in the American media. The long-awaited
Encyclopedia of the Holocaust is published, but devotes just three and a
half of its 2,000 pages (a quarter of one percent of its total) to the
Porrajmos and provides the figure of Romani losses as 200,000. Yehuda
Bauer interprets current “anti-Gypsy sentiment” in Europe as being “in
competition” with “radical anti-Semitism” there. Gross anti-Romani
atrocities were reported in the 1990 Country Report on Human Rights
prepared for the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee on page 1262 which at
the same place indicates that “no incidents of anti-Semitic violence were
reported.” A more recent account of the murder of Romanies in Romania
was published on pp. 12-13 of the March 4th, 1991 issue of the New
Republic. At the Rom and Cinti Union International Congress, held in
Mülheim in November, the foundation was laid for the establishment and
instigation of the new European Romani Parliament (EUROM) which is
intended to rank with the combined governments of the New Europe after
1992. At that congress, a roster of human rights violations against the
Romani minority from Romania was released to the press that reported
that during 1990 the brutalizing, rape, incarceration and murder of
Romanies in that country were monthly occurrences. A typical statement
reads: “In Lingu, three homes were burned down on February 1st; in the
same month in Satu Mare, several Gypsy families were killed and their
homes burnt to the ground.” In Czechoslovakia, two non-Romani
foreigners were mistaken for Romanies and beaten to death, while in
Slovakia, Romanies were prevented from voting in Slovakian towns, and
no polling stations provided in the Romani ghettos. In eastern Hungary,
several hundred white skinhead gang members attacked a Romani village
and wounded nearly all of its inhabitants, including women and children.
On November 5th, the German government signed an agreement with
91
Yugoslavia for that country to accept back Romani refugees being
deported from Germany. In December, Germany announces the signing of
an agreement with the Soviet Union to accept Jewish refugees from that
country. A book containing the edited papers from the “Other Victims”
conference sponsored by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council in 1987 is
published, in which it is reiterated that “Gypsies shared much but not all of
the horrors assigned to the Jews—Even though the Gypsies were subject
to gassing and other forms of extermination, the number of Gypsies was
not as vast . . .” (Berenbaum, 1990:33). In a New York Times article
entitled “At a death camp, Gypsies confront indifference,” Marlise Simons
wrote of the Romani victims at Mauthausen being treated as a “dismissive
afterthought” in a commemorative ceremony that year (Simons, 1990),
quoting one Holocaust historian who said that “prejudice against Gypsies
has permeated all levels of our society, the academic world, the
bureaucracy.”
1991
At a January meeting of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council’s Annual
Days of Remembrance planning committee, when asked by committee
member William Duna when Romanies would ever be included as well,
chairman Benjamin Meed replied “ask me again in about twenty years.”
On January 25th, the London Times and the Wall Street Journal reported
that “Ernst-August Koenig was convicted in what was termed as the first
trial to recognize that Gypsies as well as Jews were victims of genocide
during the Third Reich.”
1993
A report issued in August by the Nemzetközi Cigány Szöveség on the
other hand quoted a physician from the Romanian town of Teleorman,
who said “our war against the Gypsies will start in the fall. Until then,
preparations will be made to obtain arms; first we are going to acquire
chemical sprays. We will not spare minors, either” (Balogh, 1993).
Events indicating that this persecution began to happen shortly thereafter
were described in the December 19th, 1993 issue of the San Francisco
Chronicle, where the following appeared:
An orgy of mob lynching and house-burning with police
collaboration, has turned into something even more sinister for
Romania’s hated Gypsies: the beginnings of a nationwide
campaign of terror launched by groups modeling themselves on the
Ku Klux Klan. . . “We are many, and very determined. We will
skin the Gypsies soon. We will take their eyeballs out, smash their
teeth, and cut off their noses. The first will be hanged” (Branson,
1993:A1,A15).
92
The December 23rd, 1993, issue of the New York Times refers to the U.S.
Holocaust Memorial Museum only as a monument to “the plight of
European Jews.”
1995
National Public Radio in Washington, DC, covered the 50th anniversary
of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau on January 26th extensively that
year, though Romanies were never once mentioned, despite being well
represented at the commemoration, at least outside the camp. In his
closing report on NPR’s Weekend Edition on January 28th, Michael
Goldfarb described how “candles were placed along the tracks that
delivered Jews and Poles to their death.” But it is little wonder that
Romanies weren’t mentioned; they were not allowed to participate. An
article on the Auschwitz commemoration in the British (but not the
American) press dated January 28th included a photograph of a group of
Romanies staring mournfully through a wire fence, with a caption reading
“Cold-shouldered: Gipsies, whose ancestors were among Auschwitz
victims, are forced to watch the ceremony from outside the compound”
(Stapinska, 1995:5). In a speech given at that ceremony, Elie Wiesel said
that the Jewish people “were singled out for destruction during the
Holocaust.” The Education Committee of the Holocaust Council prepared
a brochure on the Romani victims of the Holocaust, which it distributed in
its education package at the 23rd Scholars’ Conference on the Holocaust
and the Churches in March, 1996; this was the first time that William
Duna, the former and only Romani representative on the Council and
member of the education committee, learned of the existence of the new
publication.
1996
On April 23rd the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum organized a public
panel discussion entitled “Sinti and Roma during the Holocaust and
Today,” again in which no Romanies were invited to participate. The
promotional wording in the calendar announcing the discussion stated
merely that “Sinti and Roma suffered greatly as victims of Nazi
persecution and genocide,” making no mention at all of their being, like
Jews, specific targets of the Final Solution. British coverage of
Rosenbaum’s book Is the Holocaust Unique? in the Times Higher
Education Supplement focused entirely upon the Romani issue (Cornwell,
1996), while in the three-page review in its U.S. equivalent, the Chronicle
of Higher Education, Romanies are referred to just once in the entire
article (Shea, 1996).
1997
In a CNN news feature on the Romani suit against the Swiss banks
televised on June 9th, the number of Romanies murdered in the Holocaust
was announced as “two hundred and fifty thousand,” despite the U.S.
93
Holocaust Research Institute’s own estimate of “between a half and one
and a half million” being provided to them. The BBC’s World at War
segment entitled “Genocide” mentions the 1935 law forbidding Aryans
from marrying Jews, but fails to say that the very same law also referred to
Romanies; it mentions the Polish victims repeatedly, but remains
completely silent about Romanies, against whom—unlike Poles—the
Final Solution did operate. The first group of concentration camp inmates
pictured in that documentary is of Sinti prisoners at Buchenwald, but the
viewer isn’t told this. The granddaughter of American Romani leader
John Nickels is invited to light a candle for the Roma on The Day of
Remembrance in the Capitol Rotunda, but this was deleted from the final
version of the video of the event that was subsequently offered for sale to
the public.
2000
On 21 September the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the U.S.
Holocaust Memorial Museum held a symposium entitled Roma and Sinti:
Under-Studied Victims of Nazism. Not of the Holocaust, notice. I was
asked to find the invited speakers—which I did—but the organizers
insisted, against my very strenuous protests, that Guenther Lewy also be
included on the program. Lewy is a revisionist who not only denies that
Romanies were a part of the Holocaust, but that they were not even the
victims of genocide. He said as much in Washington, but the closing
speaker at the same symposium was the late Raul Hilberg, generally
considered to be the preeminent scholar of the Holocaust. In his talk he
not only pointed out the weakness of Lewy’s position, he also emphasized
the special relationship which exists between Jews and Romanies and their
shared experience in the Holocaust. When the Proceedings were published
(Shapiro & Ehrenreich, 2002), Lewy’s paper was included but Hilberg’s
was left out.
2001
In September, the Council of Europe “issued a blistering condemnation of
Europe’s treatment of the Roma Gypsy community, saying they are
subject to racism, discrimination and violence . . . the United Nations says
they pose Europe’s most serious human rights problem” (BBC, 2001).
The European Roma Rights Centre in Budapest issues the following
statement: “Roma remain to date the most persecuted people of Europe.
Almost everywhere, their fundamental human rights are threatened.
Racist violence targeting Roma is widespread in the last years.
Discrimination against Roma in employment, education, health care,
administrative and other services is observed in most societies, and hate
speech deepens the anti-Romani stereotypes typical of European public
opinion.”
94
2005
A report in The Economist states that “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.”
2006
A World Bank study concludes that “Roma are the most prominent
poverty risk group in many of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe.
They are poorer than other groups, more likely to fall into poverty, and
more likely to remain poor. In some cases poverty rates for Roma are
more than 10 times that of non-Roma. A recent survey found that nearly
80 percent of Roma in Romania and Bulgaria were living on less than
$4.30 per day . . . Even in Hungary, one of the most prosperous accession
countries, 40 percent of Roma live below the poverty line.”
2009
In New York in January The United Nations organized a symposium on
the Holocaust; no Roma were included. Despite its 2001 statement, a UN
symposium also held in New York in January on racism in contemporary
Europe does not invite Roma to participate.
To this date, there is no Romani representation on the U.S. Holocaust
Memorial Council.
95
7
ON NUMBERS
The question of the numbers of Romanies who were killed in the Holocaust is a
vexed one. Given the nature of their mode of life, no reliable estimate of the prewar European Romani population exists. Similarly, the circumstances of their
dispatch at the hands of the Nazis make this a question which can never be fully
answered. I dealt with this in some detail in Hancock (1988b), but rely on
König’s statement that
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 Liquidierungsübrigen [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 Romanies (König,
1989:87-89).
An article entitled “Dutch World War II deaths higher than recorded”
(Dutch News nl for Tuesday 9 October 2007) reported that
The number of Dutch people who died in World War II is considerably
higher than the accepted figure to date according to researchers at Utrecht
University, reports ANP news service on Monday.
The researchers say not 210,000 but 280,000 Dutch people died in
the war. The discrepancy comes from the statistics of those who were
deported. These are recorded as ‘emigrants’ while in reality they were
Jews and Gypsies who were transported to the gas chambers in German
concentration camps.
96
In the eastern territories, in Russia especially, Romani deaths were
sometimes counted into the records under the heading of Jewish deaths. The
Memorial Book for the Romanies who perished in Auschwitz-Birkenau 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 General-gouvernement [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 victims (State Museum: 1993:2 [emphasis added]).
This means that statements such as “somewhere between 20 and 50
percent of the entire population of European Romanies was killed by the Nazis”
(Berenbaum, 1993:129), and the low figure of 250,000 Romani deaths displayed
at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum must be considered
underestimations. Several published estimates (referenced in Hancock, 1988c)
put the figure in excess of one million, and even thirty years ago Pauwels &
Bergier listed it at 750,000 (1960:430). That perhaps an even higher number of
Romanies were murdered in the fields and forests where they lived than were
murdered in the camps, has been recognized for some time. A reference to this
appeared in the (London) Financial Times in an article by Tyler, who noted that
“between 500,000 and 750,000 were killed in the German death camps during the
war, and another million may have been shot outside” (1994:3). New information
is reaching us all the time which is pushing the death toll upwards. Dr. Paul
Polansky of the Iowa-based Czech Historical Research Center recently published
a report on his discovery of a hitherto unrecorded concentration camp at Lety in
the Czech Republic, which was used for the disposal of Romanies. Now used as a
pig farm, Lety and a chain of other camps processed mainly Roma, killing them
on the spot or sending them on to Auschwitz. Numbers from here, like those
from the Romani camps in northern Italy, have not yet been figured into the
estimate (Strandberg, 1994:1; Pape, 1997). We should nevertheless rejoice in the
numbers of those who lived, and not glorify those of the dead in some horrible
body-count; but if we are obliged to argue with numbers and quantity in this
97
peculiarly American way, then let us look at the situation from the other side, and
count the Romani survivors of the Holocaust, only five thousand of whom are
listed in the official register of the Zentralrat Deutscher Sinti und Roma in
Heidelberg, and only four of whom have been located in the United States, where
over eighty thousand Jewish survivors live today out of 350,000 still living worldwide. My respected colleague Donald Kenrick, co-author of The Destiny of
Europe’s Romanies, the first full-length treatment of the Porrajmos, has claimed
with some gladness that his own research points to the lowest figures for Romani
deaths by 1945; in his new Romanies under the swastika (Kenrick, 1995), he
estimates that they did not exceed 250,000, and in an article which appeared in
The Jewish Quarterly he places it even lower, at 200,000 (Kenrick, 19945:47). In his 1995 book The Holocaust for Beginners, Stuart Justman put it even
lower:
In addition to the Jews, the Nazis murdered prisoners of war, innumerable
Russian civilians, political prisoners, common criminals, Jehovah’s
Witnesses, homosexuals, vagrants and some 100,000 gypsies, among
others (1995:11).
If such estimates can be demonstrated as fact, then surely this is the
dialogue we should be striving for, not a competition over whose losses were
greater. Probably the most reliable statement regarding numbers was made at the
first U.S. Conference on Romanies in the Holocaust which took place at Drew
University in November, 1995, when Sybil Milton, senior historian at the U.S.
Holocaust Research Institute in Washington, stated that “[w]e believe that
something between half a million and a million and a half Romanies were
murdered in Nazi Germany and occupied Europe between 1939 and 1945.”
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.” 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: in
Greece, fifty Romanies were murdered for each German casualty. In Croatia
between 80,000 and 100,000 Romanies are estimated to have perished at the
hands of the Ustaša, mostly at the Jasenovac camp (Lituchy). Yahad-in-Unum has
located and visited more than sixty previously undocumented sites, mostly in
Russia, which were killing centers for Roma, though the numbers of deaths have
still to be determined. Erika Thurner of Graz University in Austria has identified
98
concentration camps in northern Italy that were specifically for Roma, but which
have also not been incorporated into the data on numbers.
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.
The overall percentage of losses for both Jewish and Romani populations
is generally considered to have been about the same. Simon Wiesenthal referred
to this in a 1984 letter to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, protesting the
omission of Romanies in its program: “The Gypsies had been murdered in a
proportion similar to the Jews, about 80% of them in the area of the countries
which were occupied by the Nazis.” In his 1980 study of the persecution of
homosexuals, Heinz Heger poses the rhetorical question: “How many people in
Britain and America today are aware that the Gypsies of Europe were rounded up
by the Nazis and sent to their death in almost similar proportions to the Jews?”
Margot Strom and William Parsons also conclude: “The Nazis killed between a
fourth and a third of the Gypsies living in Europe, and as many as 70 percent in
those areas where Nazi control had been established longest.” Wolf in der Maur
puts it higher still, citing a 70 percent death rate within Nazi-controlled territories
and 50 percent elsewhere in Europe. The same figure of 70 percent is also found
in a study by G. Von Soest.
More recent research is beginning to demonstrate that even these estimates
may be too low. A study undertaken at the Frankfurt Fachhochschule by Professor
Stephen Castles indicates that Romani losses may be as high as one and a half
million, nearly three times the next highest estimate; a report by Sylvia Puggiole
on the persecution of Romanies in contemporary Italy states that “[c]enturies of
prejudice culminated in the genocide of more than a million Gypsies in Nazi
concentration camps during World War II.” Sylvia Sobeck writes of the disposal
of “about one million Gypsies in the concentration camps.” Wolf in der Maur
makes it clear that all current estimates of Romani deaths “... are vague, the real
number of victims probably being much higher ... at least one million Gypsies
were murdered.” He makes the point in the same volume that many of those
killed who were listed in the category of “suspicious persons” were very likely, in
fact, to have been Romanies.
Dr. Tilman Zülch of the Göttingen-based Gesellschaft für Bedrohte
Völker, who has written widely on the Porrajmos, cites (though also queries)
research by one Dr. Mark Munzel of the Frankfurt Ethnologischesmuseum, which
suggests that the Romani death toll may actually have been as high as four
million. In his 1939 report on the Romanies, however, Johannes Behrendt
indicated that the total population was only half that: “There are two million
99
throughout Europe and in North America, and in Germany itself 6,000 pure
Gypsies living together with 12,000 part Gypsies.” If even the one-and-a-half
million assessment is accurate, then the total percentage of Romani lives lost far
exceeds that of any other targeted group. Today, the Romani population
worldwide numbers between six and twelve million (and is commonly estimated
at ten million), perhaps six or seven million of whom are in Europe.
100
8
UNIQUENESS OF THE VICTIMS:
GYPSIES, JEWS AND THE HOLOCAUST
“It was the will of the all-powerful
Reichsführer to have the Gypsies
disappear from the face of the earth”
SS Officer Percy Broad
Political Division
Auschwitz-Birkenau
In the late 1970s, the advisory board responsible for detailing the mission of the
planned U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum stated that “[t]his museum belongs at
the center of American life because America, as a democratic civilization, is the
enemy of racism and its ultimate expression, genocide.” Although the Nazi
treatment of the Romani people is acknowledged at the museum, representation
on the Council, however, is non-existent. The Romani voice remains stifled.
In Sydney Schiffer’s 1986 play, The Far Side of Enough,1 the
representative of a fictitious international Romani organization offers to give a
talk on the Romani (Gypsy) holocaust* at an equally fictitious Jewish holocaust
memorial center, but is told that while such a talk would be possible, even
welcome, the wording would first need to be changed. The rabbi explains that
“we believe the Nazis singled us out for extermination in a way that justifies our
applying the term ‘The Holocaust’ to us and us alone . . . I would feel honored to
have you speak, if you would only agree to substitute the term ‘Genocide’.” The
Romani becomes angry, and the discussion after his departure centers on how any
trouble he could make might be “neutralized,” since his having “wandered into
the precincts of the Jewish establishment.” Someone else says, “let the Gypsy
__________________________________________________________________
*In compliance with common standards of spelling and style, including The
Chicago Manual of Style (Thirteenth Edition, 1982) and Webster’s Ninth New
Collegiate Dictionary, the word “holocaust” is spelled lower case, except when
capitalized in direct quotation—ed.
101
speak. We’ll ask our friends in the media to bury it—so deep no one will notice.”
We are left wondering at the end of the play whether the address is ever given.
In some respects, this fictitious account mirrors rather uncannily the
situation as it actually exists. During this writer’s term as special advisor to the
U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council (USHMC) its former director, Richard Krieger,
advised that an argument could be made for treating the holocaust as a uniquely
Jewish event, although reasons for such an argument were not spelled out.
After meeting with Krieger in Washington, a review of USHMC
correspondence and publications was in order to see whether the word
“holocaust” had, in fact, ever been used in connection with Romani victims of
Nazism. It had not—not even on the program for the Romani Day of
Remembrance, which took place on 16 September 1986, separated by some
months from the Jewish Days of Remembrance earlier in the year (Gypsies were
left out altogether in the 1987 and 1988 Days of Remembrance.)
The U.S. Government Printing Office lists the booklet, In Memory of the
Gypsy Victims of Nazi Genocide, produced following the 1986 Day of
Remembrance
under the Library of Congress subject heading “Holocaust: Jewish,”2 and the
February 1988 USHMC circular announcing its National Writing Contest on the
holocaust referred to “The six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust, and
the millions of others.” The Council’s 62-page brochure circulated in May 1988,
The Campaign for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, on the first page singles
out Jewish victims by saying that only “[o]ne people, the Jewish people, were
killed because they were Jews.”3 Of course, only Gypsies were killed because
they were Gypsies, too; but this fact remains unstated and, by implication, is not a
part of holocaust history. Evidently, requests that this perspective be modified
continue to fall on deaf ears. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council had been
created in response to pressure from Jewish organizations which had the Jewish
tragedy firmly in mind. No one had thought about the Gypsies; no one was ready
for them.
At first, this writer’s reaction was academic; no answer was anywhere to
be found as to why the holocaust was being interpreted as only Jewish, but the
question seemed to be closely connected with the use of the word “unique,” which
appears repeatedly in the Council’s literature. According to the Oxford English
Dictionary, “holocaust” in English has meant since 1671 the “complete
consumation by fire ... of a large number of persons,” and “unique” means “one
and only; single, sole, solitary.” A number of personal inquiries have been made
over the past year to various individuals on the Council as to the justification for
the continued reference to the Jewish experience in the holocaust as “unique,” but
so far without success.
102
American language specialist William Safire again raised the issue of the
“uniqueness of Jewish suffering,” preferring the Hebrew word shoah to
“holocaust,” since the latter “has been used to encompass more than the murder of
Jews. From the casualties in our Civil War . . . to the wholesale murder of
[G]ypsies in World War II.”4 Claude Lanzmann similarly rejected “holocaust” in
favor of shoah, arguing that the former suggests “sacrifice” or “burnt offering,”
rather than “fearful catastrophe.” For Romanies, the holocaust was the baro
porrajmos, or “great devouring” of the people, a fearful catastrophe by whatever
name. Then again the editor of Midstream wrote in a letter on 8 February 1988,
after reading an earlier draft of this essay, to say he believed that the Jewish
tragedy was unique, because the treatment of Gypsies was “merely an
afterthought, a social prophylaxis” on the Nazis’ part.
It then occurred to this writer that perhaps his posing such questions, after
all, simply affirmed former USHMC Acting Director Micah Naftalin’s perception
of Gypsies as “naive.” The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council was established in
1980 to honor the memory of the victims of the holocaust, but if the holocaust can
be kept, in Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel’s words, as “an essentially Jewish
event,” and its Romani victims merely as the targets of genocide (or even just
wartime “casualties,” as referred to in the first issue of the Council’s Museum
Newsletter),5 then by its self-created definition, the Holocaust Memorial Council
was never meant for non-Jewish victims, since non-Jewish victims were not a part
of the holocaust specifically, and the memorial museum would be under no
obligation to involve, more than as a courtesy, other victims. Elie Wiesel made it
clear that, while the Council sought “no omission” of non-Jewish victims, it
would countenance “no equation” either.6
Edward Alexander writes at length of a “worldwide campaign of
misrepresentation of the holocaust” by not treating it as a uniquely Jewish event,
in an article in Midstream, significantly entitled “Stealing the Holocaust” in the
same issue of that magazine.7 Yehuda Bauer refers to “a certain paradoxical envy
on the part of non-Jewish groups directed at the Jewish experience of the
Holocaust . . . [which] would seem to be an unconscious reflection of anti-Semitic
attitudes.”8 From the Romani point of view, of course, such an assumption is
unthinkable.
The Struggle for History
For some time, a growing number of activists have been attempting to bring the
situation of the Romani people in Hitler’s Germany to the attention of historians
and, in particular, holocaust-related organizations in the United States and
Europe. Sadly, activity in this area is causing discomfort in some Jewish quarters.
There seems to have been a tightening of the ranks, as though admitting that
103
another population fared as badly somehow diminishes the magnitude or
exclusiveness of the fate of the Jewish victims. As already indicated, persistent
efforts have been made to find out why, but no plainly spelled-out or morally
justifiable responses have so far come forth.
The persistence of this attitude is cause for deep concern. What constitutes
“uniqueness” here? Is it a matter of who was victimized earliest? Or the extent of
the agonies endured? Or numbers lost? It seems quite tasteless to engage in a oneupmanship of suffering or, in this case, to quote numbers. After all, Gypsies lost
the same, or perhaps an even higher percentage of their overall population; but
presenting the facts of the Romani holocaust before the public does not qualify as
oneupmanship, nor should it be interpreted as confrontational. These are facts that
have been hidden for the past forty years. If they can be disproved, this can only
be cause for gladness; if the gloomy details can be shown to be fiction, then it
means that the Romani people were mercifully spared the fate endured by their
Jewish brothers and sisters. But if they can be shown to be factual, then they must
be acknowledged fully, without resentment or rancor.
Revisionists are to be denounced for obfuscating history, for writing out or
denying the episodes they want forgotten. When facts of history are not even
given the chance to find their place in our chronicles, when events are minimized
or allowed to fall through the cracks and become lost in time, this is as
unacceptable as rewriting history. Either way, the record is concealed; no lesson is
learned.
Romani organizations have not had a great deal of success so far in
redressing this omission of their history. This is perhaps understandable, just as it
is understandable that the holocaust should be seen to be “essentially Jewish”; the
world has been hearing about the Jewish tragedy for forty years, and a vast
amount of research has been undertaken by Jewish scholars on the shoah. For the
Romanies, no such body of scholarship, and only a handful of Romani scholars,
exists, and research on the Romani holocaust is in its infancy. When scholars have
approached the subject, invariably it has been from the perspective of their own
interests; emphasis is necessarily upon the areas of greatest concern to them.
When Yehuda Bauer wrote that the Nazi policy against the Gypsies was “more
apparent than real,” and that Gypsies were “the victims more of a campaign
against so-called ‘asocials’ than against the Gypsy people as such,” and that “not
to realize that the Jewish situation was unique, is to mystify history,”9 it is not
assumed by this author that he was deliberately diluting the facts. However, it
seems that very little effort was spent on his part to research or to understand the
Romani situation.
In her book addressing the holocaust and historians, the late Lucy
Dawidowicz devoted just two paragraphs to the fate of Romani prisoners,
admitting that “Gypsies and their offspring were to be treated as Jews, that is,
104
murdered,” but still goes on to say on the same page that “the fate of the Jews
under National Socialism was unique.”10 Gerald L. Posner and John Ware’s
Mengele: The Complete Story (1986) does not even list Gypsies in its index,
although Romanies, and especially Romani twins, were Joseph Mengele’s
obsession. Some descriptions of medical experiments in the book, such as that on
page 37, actually describe children that we know to have been Romanies, but they
are not identified as such.11
It is to such books that others go for the “history,” the “complete story” of
the holocaust. The California State Board of Education obviously did so when it
compiled its Model Curriculum for Human Rights and Genocide for use in the
schools in that state. While Jews were listed as an example of the victims of
genocide in the holocaust, ‘Gypsies’ were relegated only to a category of “people
who have suffered from totalitarian policies.”!12 The same document lists the
United Nations’ five criteria defining genocide, the last two of which (sterilization
and the permanent removal of children from their families) are still actively in
effect against Gypsies in parts of Europe today.13 This California curriculum will
ensure that school children statewide will receive only a partial account of what
happened in the holocaust. A recently published book by R. Conrad Klein, aimed
at the same audience and published by The Children’s Press, similarly glosses
over the Romani situation, which receives just two fleeting and uninformative
mentions in the entire volume.14
All this is not to say that these one-sided accounts are deliberate. It is
merely that, until now, few historians have given much thought to the Romani
case, or have been disposed to pursue it. Very little concern has been expressed at
all and, as one French doctor remarked after the war, “everyone despises Gypsies,
so why exercise restraint? Who will avenge them? Who will complain? Who will
bear witness?”15
The Roots of Discrimination
Prejudice has much to do with the treatment of Gypsies today and the negligible
attention given them in holocaust literature. In December 1986, the Holocaust
Memorial Council proposed the formation of a committee on anti-Semitism; but
no similar proposal was made to form a group to combat anti-Gypsyism. Because
they can usually get away with it, the news media and popular literature exploit
the Romani situation. The word “Gypsy” is used generically, so that it has come
to mean “confidence trickster.” However, the same reporters and writers are
careful to avoid using, for, example, “Mafia” and “Italians” interchangeably. In
the past year, the North American public has been exposed to an increasing
number of “special reports” on “Gypsy crime,” in which Romanies are treated as
a monolithic whole dedicated to bilking the non-Romani public. The point is not
105
made that the conviction rate for theft within the Romani population is no higher
than the national average, and for major offenses, such as rape or murder, it is
significantly lower. No acknowledgment is given to historical circumstances
which have brought those Romanies—just a few generations removed from five
hundred years of slavery in eastern Europe, and some refugees from eastern
Europe whom the post-holocaust situation still affects forty years later—to their
present situation. And too seldom is attention given to the thousands of lawabiding and concerned Romani citizens in skilled and professional occupations,
but who are citizens fearful of speaking up, lest they, too, be tarred with the same
bigoted media brush.
Although the popular conception holds that the Romanies are a wandering
people with mysterious origins, it has been known for over two centuries that their
roots are in India, and only a tiny fraction of the world’s twelve million or so
Romanies are truly nomadic. Romanies came into Europe at the beginning of the
Middle Ages, swept across the Bosphorus from the Byzantine Empire on the crest
of the Islamic tide, and were persecuted by the Turks because they were not
Muslims. Their ancestors had left India perhaps three centuries earlier, possibly as
a result of the Indo-Persian wars. One contemporary theory holds that these first
migrants consisted of Rajput horsemen who, with their camp followers, moved
further and further across Persia sometime in the early eleventh century, as
Ghaznavi prisoners of war and as contingents of the Seljuks. Certainly, the
Romani language and the culture, Romanija, point to this period of Indian history.
On arrival in the Balkans, the Romanies met a confused social order
resulting from the Crusades, which had caused a serious depletion of manpower
and had created an urgent demand for weaponry and labor. Romanies, who among
other things had been metal workers in Byzantium, filled these needs. By the mid1300s, so necessary had they become to the Moldavian and Wallachian economy
that legislation was adopted to make them the property of the state. This was the
beginning of the five hundred years of slavery, not fully abolished until 1864.
After emancipation, thousands of the liberated slaves fled from southeastern
Europe, many reaching the Americas. Most Romanies in North and South
America are descended from this population.
As legislation concerning the Romanies grew more stringent in the
fifteenth century Balkans, large numbers moved north and west into the rest of
Europe. Here, however, they were perceived to be part of the Islamic expansion
that had occupied Spain, parts of France, and eastern and southern Europe, and
they were vigorously repulsed. Even today, in a number of European languages,
including Dutch, German and Swedish, words for Romani are “Tatar” and
“Heiden” (i.e., heathen). Their strange appearance, language and customs were
too alien to the Europeans. Strict laws were brought into effect, first banishing
Romanies into neighboring lands, then requiring them to be put to death if caught.
106
Many of these laws are still in effect and have served as precedents for treatment
of the Romanies in the American legal system. Romani Americans are the only
ethnic minority in the United States today who face laws restricting them as a
people, and who are periodically subjected to those laws.
With the European colonial expansion overseas, western European nations
found a useful dumping ground for their Romani populations. From the early
1500s, Spain, Portugal, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, England and
Scotland all shipped Romanies off to the Americas, and even to West Africa and
India, their original homeland, to labor in the colonies. British Romanies were
well represented working alongside Africans in the early Virginia and Barbados
plantations.
Centuries of being moved on has perversely led to the literary myth of the
“wandering Gypsy.” But the truth is that the Romanies have had little choice. In
England today, a number of government reservations have been set up throughout
the country which Romanies there may inhabit, but they can be fined or jailed if
they stop anywhere in between, traveling from one to another. A consequence of
being kept on the move in western Europe (in eastern Europe, Romanies were tied
to the land in slavery or serfdom) has been a denial of access to shops and
merchants—hence subsistence stealing in order to survive—and a denial of access
to churches and schools. Most Romanies today are not literate in any language.
This has meant that the literary image has been able to flourish unchecked: no
organized rebuttals from the Romani population, no letters to the editor, no
literature countering the novelists’ fancies. It has been argued that societies need a
population on which to project their fantasies or to serve as scapegoat, and that
Romanies have fulfilled this function. It has been argued, also, that societies need
a cultural antithesis in order to keep a perspective on their own boundaries. As
Kai Erikson said, “one of the surest ways to confirm an identity, for communities
as well as for individuals, is to find some way of measuring what one is not.”16
The literary Gypsy challenges the establishment’s perception of honesty, sexual
decorum, hygiene, and social responsibility. And while the truth is very different,
the ‘Gypsy’ image is perpetuated, nonetheless, for these reasons.
Chronology of Nazi Racism: Romanies and Jews
The persecution of Romanies by the German people stretches back to the Middle
Ages, but the seeds of the persecutions in the twentieth century were sown in the
1800s. In the 1830s, German authorities in Nordhausen tried to bring an end to
Romani life by forcibly and permanently removing children from their families—
a technique employed in this century from the 1920s to the 1970s in
Switzerland.17 There were “open seasons” during which Romanies were hunted
down and killed for sport in the forests. In the early 1890s, a conference on the
107
“Gypsy scum” (das Zigeunergeschmeiss) was organized in Swabia; in 1899 an
information bureau monitoring the movements of Romanies was established in
Munich, later to be called the Central Bureau for Combatting the Gypsy Menace.
At a policy conference on Romanies held in 1909, it was suggested that they be
permanently branded for purposes of identification. During the 1920s, Romanies
were being routinely photographed and fingerprinted by special police.
Meanwhile, the Weimar constitution of 1918 had reaffirmed the equality of
Jewish citizens with other Germans, and according to one source,
[they] enjoyed full civil, political and economic rights. Many German
Jews were leaders in their communities and prominent in their professions.
Few suffered discrimination and anti-Semitism was even less prevalent in
Germany than in the United States at the time.18
For Jews, the coming to power of the Nazis meant the implementation of
new and terrifying policies against them. But for Romanies, the new regime
meant only the intensification of the measures already in effect; they had been
victims of this kind of institutionalized persecution in Germany since the end of
the previous century. For Romanies, it was nothing new.
Felice Davis noted that, while Jews were “constitutionally equal to other
Germans, Gypsies were treated as second class citizens and were being rounded
up.”19 Jeremy Noakes expanded on this:
Long before the Nazis came to power, the Gypsies had been treated as
social outcasts. Their foreign appearance, their strange customs and
language . . . they were seen as a-social, a source of crime, culturally
inferior, a foreign body within the nation. During the 1920s the police,
first in Bavaria and then in Prussia, established special offices to keep the
Gypsies under constant surveillance. They were photographed and
fingerprinted as if they were criminals. With the Nazi takeover, however, a
motive was added to the grounds for persecution: their distinct and
allegedly inferior racial character.20
In 1933, the very year in which Hitler came to power, a genocidal policy
directed specifically at “a-socials”—a category into which Romanies fell at that
time—was drawn up. From 1934 on, they were being sent to camps at Dachau,
Dieselstrasse, Mahrzan and Vennhausen for sterilization.
A law was introduced on May 26th, 1933, to legalize eugenic sterilization
. . . beyond this, the cabinet, headed by Hitler, passed a law on July 14th,
1933, against propagation of lebensunwertes Leben (“lives unworthy of
108
life”), now called the “Law for the prevention of hereditarily diseased
offspring,” It ordered sterilization for certain categories of people . . .
specifically Gypsies and most of the Germans of black color were targets
for sterilization.21
In fact, a recommendation to destroy the Romanies by sinking them in
boats at sea was made the year Hitler came to power in 1933, and again in 1937.
Also, the sterilization of all Romanies throughout the country had also been
recommended, though not implemented, in Norway, in 1933 (at the same time,
professor of theology and advisor to the Nazi party Gerhard Kittel had suggested
to the Nazis that Jews be given “guest status” in Germany). In 1938, a Nazi party
proclamation stated that the Gypsy problem was categorically a matter of race
(“mit Bestimmtheit eine Frage der Rasse”)22 and was to be dealt with in that light.
In the same year, race hygienist Adolf Wurth wrote that “the Gypsy question that
we face today is above all a racial question.”23 Dr. Kurt Ammon declared that the
Nazi policy “views the Gypsy problem primarily as a racial one.”24 The following
year, Dr. Johannes Behrendt of the Office of Racial Hygiene released a statement
asserting that
all Gypsies should be treated as hereditarily sick; the only solution is
elimination. The aim should, therefore, be the elimination without
hesitation (Aussondern ohne Zögern) of this characteristically defective
element in the population.25
According to Jewish historian Miriam Novitch, “[t]he decision to resolve the
Jewish and the Gypsy questions was made by Hitler in 1939, and Poland became
the tomb for both peoples.”26 Müller-Hill indicates that the decision to
exterminate both peoples came two years later.
The racial analysis which Dr. Ritter had made was disconcertingly
similar to that which the “race investigators,” such as Günther, had made
of the Jews: an oriental racial admixture with an asocial European
component.” This explains why Heydrich, who had been encrusted with
“the final solution of the Jewish question” on July 31st, 1941, also
included the Romanies in his final solution . . . The Einsatzkommandos,
who began their work shortly after the assault on the USSR, received the
order to kill all Jews, Gypsies and mental patients.27
In an address before the Holocaust Memorial Council’s February 1987
conference on “other” victims, Dr. Erika Thurner of the Institut fur Neuere
Geschichte und Zeitgeschichte at the University of Linz gave her own analysis of
109
the historical sequence: “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”
(emphasis added).28 Dr. Thurner, in fact, challenged the widespread assumption
that “the decision to seek a final solution for the Gypsy question came at a later
date than that for the Jewish question,” concluding that “the first steps taken to
exterminate the Gypsies were indeed initiated prior to this policy decision and that
the first gassing operations against Gypsies as taking place as early as late 1941 or
early 1942.” Romani holocaust specialist Rebecca Sherer places it even earlier:
It is believed that the official decision to exterminate the Gypsies was
made in the Spring of 1941 when the Einsatzgruppen were formed . . .
Gypsies were subject to three methods of genocide: sterilizations,
deportation and homicide. Mass killing was the most common.29
Under Nazism, only Jews and Romanies (and the few Afro-Europeans) in
German society were targeted for annihilation as distinct peoples, on specifically
racial grounds. Donald Kenrick and Grattan Puxon quote Nazi party statements
from 1935, such as: “In Europe generally, only Jews and Gypsies are of foreign
blood,”30 and “apart from the Jews, only the Gypsies came into consideration in
Europe as members of an alien people.”31 Kenrick and Puxon believe that “the
Romanies were considered as non-Aryans from the beginning of the Nazi
period.”32 Already in 1936, the German anti-Romani campaign became
transnational in Europe when Interpol established the International Center for
Combatting the Gypsy Menace in Vienna.
Documenting the Numbers
In assessing the Nazi tragedy, the comparison of numbers has provided a pretext
for claims of “uniqueness” of its victims. Selma Steinmetz, for example, relies on
this to state the case:
The Gypsies murdered in concentration camps and in mass executions in
Poland, Yugoslavia and the USSR, or killed in the gas chambers at
Auschwitz, remain in the shadow of the Six Million murdered Jews; in the
face of such enormous human suffering, numbers decide.33
Actually, the overall percentage of losses for both Jewish and Romani
populations is generally considered to have been about the same. Simon
Wiesenthal referred to this in a 1984 letter to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial
Council, protesting the omission of Romanies in its program: “The Gypsies had
110
been murdered in a proportion similar to the Jews, about 80% of them in the area
of the countries which were occupied by the Nazis.”34 In his 1980 study of the
persecution of homosexuals, Heinz Heger poses the rhetorical question: “How
many people in Britain and America today are aware that the Gypsies of Europe
were rounded up by the Nazis and sent to their death in almost similar proportions
to the Jews?”35 Margot Strom and William Parsons also conclude: “The Nazis
killed between a fourth and a third of the Gypsies living in Europe, and as many
as 70 percent in those areas where Nazi control had been established longest.”36
Wolf in der Maur puts it higher still, citing a 70 percent death rate within Nazicontrolled territories and 50 percent elsewhere in Europe.37 The same figure of 70
percent is also found in a study by G. Von Soest.38
More recent research is beginning to demonstrate that even these estimates
may be too low. A study undertaken at the Frankfurt Fachhochschule by Professor
Stephen Castles indicates that Romani losses may be as high as one and a half
million, nearly three times the next highest estimate;39 a report by Sylvia Puggiole
on the persecution of Romanies in contemporary Italy states that “[c]enturies of
prejudice culminated in the genocide of more than a million Gypsies in Nazi
concentration camps during World War II.”40 Sylvia Sobeck writes of the disposal
of “about one million Gypsies in the concentration camps.”41 Wolf in der Maur
makes it clear that all current estimates of Romani deaths “... are vague, the real
number of victims probably being much higher ... at least one million Gypsies
were murdered.”42 He makes the point in the same volume that many of those
killed who were listed in the category of “suspicious persons” were very likely, in
fact, to have been Romanies.
Dr. Tilman Zülch of the Göttingen-based Gesellschaft für Bedrohte
Völker, who has written widely on the Romani holocaust, cites (though also
queries) research by one Dr. Mark Munzel of the Frankfurt Ethnologischesmuseum, which suggests that the Romani death toll may actually have
been as high as four million.43 In his 1939 report on the Romanies, however,
Johannes Behrendt indicated that the total population was only half that: “There
are two million throughout Europe and in North America, and in Germany itself
6,000 pure Gypsies living together with 12,000 part Gypsies.”44 If even the oneand-a-half million assessment is accurate, then the total percentage of Romani
lives lost far exceeds that of any other targeted group. Today, the Romani
population worldwide numbers between six and twelve million (and is commonly
estimated at ten million), perhaps six or seven million of whom are in Europe.
Whatever those figures were, the point has been made by British holocaust
historian Donald Kenrick that “had the war continued, 100% of the Jews and the
Gypsies would have been killed, and the holocaust would have extended to the
Slavs.”45
111
The reason for our lack of precise documentation lies in the fact that
almost all research on Hitler’s racial policies has focused upon their Jewish, rather
than their Romani victims. In addition, while it was primarily the Schutzstaffel
that dealt with the disposal of the Jewish prisoners, Romanies were dealt with
together with the Jews and others by the Gestapo, whose records have not yet
been fully scrutinized. From even a cursory examination of the documents that are
now being collected by various holocaust scholars, it is becoming clear that all
previous estimates of the number of Romanies murdered are underrepresentations.
The Holocaust Memorial Council has made arrangements to obtain copies of
Gestapo-related and other documentation from German and Polish sources; and,
from an examination of these, more details of the Romani genocide will surely
emerge. It has been learned, for instance, that a special camp for the murder of
both Romanies and non-Romanies existed at La Risiera di San Sabba, near Udine
in northern Italy, and from 1940 began processing transports of Romani victims. 46
Erika Thurner of the University of Linz has published a study of the Lackenbach
concentration camp in Austria, where thousands of Romanies were sent to die.47
Neither of these camps has received adequate attention in the holocaust literature
to date.
In terms of actual materials—paperwork, racist posters and the like, much
more was produced, and has survived, which refers to Jews than to Romanies in
Nazi-occupied Europe. The Germans did not fear Romanies as they did the Jews.
Romanies were more easily identifiable than Jews and, as in modern America,
were in some sense “non-people,” characters whose real identity had been
distorted by writers of sentimental fiction and thus removed from reality.
Eradicating Jews from the fabric of German society meant purging from within;
with Romanies, it was often only a matter of locating them throughout the
countryside and dispatching them on the spot, methodically and without the
fanaticism we associate with the annihilation of the Jews. It is a cruel irony that
the German Zigeunerromantik, or preoccupation with the romantic Gypsy image,
persisted throughout those years of bitter persecution at the hands of the same
people.48
It is this method of murdering of Romanies where they were found that
makes it impossible to estimate the numbers lost. Holocaust historian Bernard
Streck wrote that:
Attempts to express Romani casualties in terms of numbers cannot do
justice to the physical and psychological damage endured by those who
survived . . . any numbers we have cannot be verified by means of lists, or
card-indexes, or camp files; most of the Gypsies died in eastern and
southern Europe, shot by execution troops or fascist gang members. The
numbers of those who actually died in the camps have only partially been
112
handed down to us; almost all the files were destroyed when those camps
were evacuated.49
Racial Classification
It has been argued that the genocide of the Romanies was socially, not racially
motivated. In his 1980 article, Yehuda Bauer states plainly that “[t]he Gypsies
were not murdered for racial reasons, but as so-called asocials . . . [nor] was their
destruction complete,” repeating his 1978 remark (cited above). This is a
commonly raised point; but Romanies were being categorized by race from the
very same year that Jews began to be so classified. In any case, as Gisela Bock
has made abundantly clear,
“Asociality” had been an important criterion in the sterilization courts . . .
race hygiene theory had established the hereditary character of the disease,
“asociality” with such efficiency that it had become a central category of
racism (emphasis added).51
Former Holocaust Memorial Council director Seymour Siegel, echoing
Yehuda Bauer’s sentiments, questioned whether Gypsies really did constitute a
distinct racial or ethnic population,52 a particularly insensitive comment, since it
was because of their “racial” identity that Romanies were targeted for genocide.
That the Romani people do not constitute a “racial” group has, in fact, been used
as an argument by the German governments to withhold reparations payments,
capitalizing on the fact that Romanies as a people were in no condition after the
war to be able to challenge this ruling. Grattan Puxon drew attention to the
German position in an article which appeared in 1977:
A circular issued by the Württemberg Ministry of the Interior,
early in 1950, said judges hearing restitution claims should bear in mind
that “Gypsies had been persecuted under the National Socialist regime not
for any racial reason, but because of an asocial and criminal record.” This
preposterous ruling excluded from compensation almost the entire Romani
population.53
But the Romanies were a race as far as Hitler was concerned, and most
recently have been determined to be such by a team of geneticists whose report
appeared in the prestigious medical journal, The Lancet:
Analysis of blood groups, haptoglobin phenotypes, and HLA types,
establish the Gypsies as a distinct racial group with origins in the Punjab
113
region of India. Also supporting this is the worldwide Gypsy language
Romani, which is quite similar to Hindi.54
Writing on the testimonies of Einsatzgruppen commanders, Glenn Infield
recounts:
At the U.S. Government War Crimes Tribunal, [SS general Otto]
Ohlendorf . . . told [presiding judge Michael A.] Musmanno that he did his
duty as best he could at all times. Asked if he killed others than Jews,
Ohlendorf admitted he did: gypsies.
“On what basis did you kill gypsies?”
“It is the same as for Jews,” he replied.
“Racial? Blood?”
. . .Ohlendorf shrugged his shoulders. “There was no difference between
gypsies and Jews.”55
Logistics of Extermination
Arguments have been made that the Romani situation was less extreme than the
Jewish one because some Romanies were to be spared for anthropologists to study
later, because Romani families were not broken up in the camps, and because
their destruction was (mercifully) not complete. Likewise, the last of these
conditions can apply equally to the other victims. Without Romani and Jewish
survivors, we would know far less about the Nazi horror than we do. The six
thousand or so Karaim (Karaite) Jews, scattered throughout eastern Europe from
the Crimea to the Baltic, were able to convince the Nazis to exempt them as
targets of genocide, and have survived.56 Jewish families were not broken up
either, in some cases, including those transported to Auschwitz from
Theresienstadt in September 1943, for example. Miriam Novitch further
documents the case of some Jews in Holland who were married to Aryan women,
who could escape death on condition that they submit to sterilization.57 Foreign
Jews were spared from deportation, but foreign Romanies weren’t.58 As Miriam
Novitch emphasizes, even those being kept alive for future study had eventually
gone to the ovens, too. In any case, the suggestion to keep some Romanies alive
was seen as a whim on Himmler’s part; and under pressure from Goebbels and
others, he was persuaded to abandon it in 1943, when his decree went out to have
all Romanies throughout Germany, without exception, sent to Auschwitz for
liquidation.
The Nuremberg Law for the Protection of Blood and Honor was instituted
on 15 September 1935, forbidding intermarriage or sexual intercourse between
114
Aryan and non-Aryan peoples. It affected both Romanies and Jews, though not
equally: criteria for identification as a Romani were exactly twice as strict as
those applied to Jews. If two of a person’s eight great-grandparents were even
part-Romani, that person had too much Romani ancestry later to be allowed to
live. The Nuremberg decree, on the other hand, defined a Jew as being minimally
a person having one Jewish grandparent; i.e., someone who was of one-quarter
Jewish descent.59 If criteria for classifying who was Jewish had also applied to
Romanies, some eighteen thousand would have escaped being murdered.
It is manipulative to take arguments out of context, without regard to the
time period involved or the changing policies in Nazi Germany. A recent example
of this appears in the U.S. Department of Defense pamphlet Guide for Days of
Remembrance Observances, which disqualifies Romanies as victims of the
holocaust in the statement, “Gypsies, too, were killed throughout Europe, but
Gypsies who lived in the same place for two years or more were exempt [from
Hitler’s genocidal policies].61 This statement must be interpreted in context; in the
spring of 1943, such a recommendation was indeed made by one field commander
in a small part of the Nazi-occupied U.S.S.R.;62 Himmler’s ruling, however,
which was the one which was instituted, stated that “Nomadic Gypsies and partGypsies are to be placed on the same level as Jews, and put into concentration
camps,”63 while settled Romanies were to be used as slave labor. This was, in any
case, applicable only in Russia and the Baltic territories, where Romani lives lost
reached nearly 100 percent by the end of the war, some Baltic Romani peoples,
such as the Layenge, having been exterminated completely.
The Aftermath: Dismissing the Romani Case
The Allied victory over the Nazi military in 1945 did not mark the end of the days
of suffering for the Romani people. There were Romanies who had left the
concentration camps afraid to show themselves publicly until as late as 1947
because prewar anti-Gypsy legislation was still in effect, and those unable to
provide documentation of German citizenship were being incarcerated in labor
camps. Jews were subject only to Nazi laws, which were abandoned with the fall
of the Third Reich. Romanies were subject to Nazi as well as pre-Nazi laws, and
the latter remained in effect until well into the 1950s. The Central Council of
German Sinti and Roma, an advocacy organization for the defense of Romani
rights, has evidence that documents compiled by Interpol in the 1930s are still
being used against their people in Europe today. In 1985, it came to light that
German Romanies are finding it to their advantage to give themselves “Jewish”
surnames, in order to find employment, so selective is the compassion for the
victims.64 A Time Magazine report made the point:
115
The downfall of the Third Reich did not halt the devaluation of Gypsy
lives. Though West Germany paid nearly $715 million to Israel and
various Jewish organizations, Gypsies as a group received nothing . . .
West German officials have rejected the efforts of several thousand Gypsy
survivors of the war to establish citizenship in the Federal Republic, even
though their families have lived in Germany for generations.65
And Kevin Costelloe reported further that:
Seven companies have paid more than 58 million marks ($29 million) to
Jewish forced laborers and their families. Oscar Rose [of the Central
Council of German Sinti and Roma, in Heidelberg said that] . . . absolutely
none of the Gypsies had been paid so far ... Rose said 700 German
Gypsies have notified him of claims for slave labor, but added that the
number could rise to 1,000.66
As recently as the 1970s, West German government spokesman Gerold
Tandler called Romani demands for war crimes reparations “unreasonable” and
“slander[ous],67 while in 1985, Mayor of the City of Darmstadt Günther Metzger
told the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma that they had “insulted the
honor” of the memory of the holocaust by wishing to be associated with it.68
issued a report in that year concluding that “all victims of Nazism have received
adequate compensation and that no new legislation is required to extend the circle
of beneficiaries,”69 while in late January 1988, the East German government
announced that it would begin the reparation process for Jewish, but not Romani,
survivors.70
A fact sheet distributed by the Los Angeles Simon Wiesenthal Center,
entitled, “Thirty-six Questions Often Asked about the Holocaust,” includes the
statement: “The Jews were the only group singled out for total systematic
annihilation by the Nazis.” Elie Wiesel defended this claim in an interview by
stating that the holocaust was only a “Jewish tragedy” on the grounds that “a
decision was made by the German High Command in January 1942 to
exterminate the Jews to the last man. The entire Jewish people were condemned
to death. No such decision was made to kill any other group in this way, although
the Gypsies come closest of all to the Jewish tragedy.”71
In the brochure accompanying the Auschwitz: A Crime Against Mankind
exhibition, Yitzchak Mais, director of the museums at Yad Vashem (Jerusalem),
wrote:
Denial of the right to live is what singles out the fate of the Jews from all
other victims—Gypsies, Poles, Russian prisoners of war, Jehovah’s
116
Witnesses—of the Nazi system. The brutal policies carried out against
chose and other so-called “enemies” of the Third Reich were clearly
inhuman, but nonetheless their fate was different from the fate of the
Jews.72
The program for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council’s February 1987
conference, entitled “The Other Victims,” made it clear that, while
acknowledgment was being made that many groups were murdered by the Nazis,
it has done so “without diminishing the uniqueness of the Jewish tragedy.” 73 That
word again. Incidentally, no Romanies were invited to participate in the
organization of that conference, which included a session on Romani victims. The
word “others” is dehumanizing in any case, and it categorizes all victims in terms
of being “plus or minus Jewish.”
While there are parties who refuse adamantly even to consider the Romani
situation (a number of participants in the Seventh Annual Conference on the
Holocaust, held at Millersville University, in April 1988, refused to attend this
writer’s presentation), there are others whose excesses lie in the other direction.
One hears from a growing number of individual Jews who declare staunchly that,
of course, Romanies must not be left out—and nor should homosexuals, Slavs,
Jehovah’s Witnesses, the physically disabled or the political dissidents either.
It is in the Romani reaction to this that we come closest to understanding
the Jewish position. For us, these groups were not the same, though their
liquidation and the justifications for their fate are clearly no less reprehensible.
But they were not targeted for genocide on racial grounds, nor did they lose 70
percent or more of their total number. They weren’t singled out for what they
were born.
One fear shared by both Jewish and Romani victims of the holocaust is
that including other groups will “generalize” it. The holocaust cannot and must
not be generalized. But we must be cautious that too self-centered an
interpretation does not turn on itself and provide antagonists with fuel for their
hatred. One hears such arguments as “if the holocaust was only directed at the
Jews, then the rest of us don’t need to worry for our own safety,” and “if it was
only the Jews, maybe they really were being divinely punished for something.”
We can dismiss this kind of rhetoric as naive and bigoted.
But what of the argument that insistence on the “uniqueness” of the Jewish
tragedy has taught the world that the racial persecution of the Jews was a crime
against humanity? Has the world really learned that racial hatred against all
humanity is equally destructive and vile? Is society really sensitized to the
dangers of its happening again, but to another (or even the same) people next
time? One might ask that, if the holocaust were a crime against all mankind,
which this writer believes it was, how does that equate with “uniqueness?”
117
In presenting the above argument, this writer does not intend to be
“alarmist,” as a spokeswoman for one holocaust memorial center has charged; the
message of the Romani holocaust is no cause for alarm. However, what is
alarming is that efforts to trivialize the past have been particularly effective in the
Romani case. But there is also hope. This writer addresses Jewish congregations
in synagogues and holocaust survivors’ children at Hillel centers, and corresponds
with a great many concerned Jewish friends in the United States and abroad; and
it can be stated that, on an individual basis, Jewish understanding of the Romani
situation is sincere and often passionate. The facts cited above are based on
Jewish research—Jewish scholars have in the main been the only ones even to
bother about the Romani holocaust. The main issue is not a Jewish-versusRomani one, and God forbid that it ever should be.
What, then, causes this situation to exist? Why is the word “holocaust”
being redefined to exclude non-Jews? It is possible that the consistent, exclusive
use of the word “unique” may have a theological basis; the “unique destiny” of
the Jewish people is referred to in the Aleinu prayer, for instance, a position
discussed in depth by Emil Fackenheim.74 This is the principal argument made in
a circular dated 13 May 1988, distributed to Council members by Rabbi Rav A.
Soloff of the Beth Sholom Congregation in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. In it, he
forcefully cautioned that the holocaust, and by implication the Holocaust
Memorial Council, be kept Jewish as they were “intended to be,” and not to allow
other human tragedies, “justified and unjustified,” to be equated with the shoah:
“Please keep the Holocaust Memorial just that, a memorial to the unique Shoah
which consumed six million Jews.” If any leeway were given, he warned, “the
U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council will be lobbied by Gypsies and Armenians,
Native Americans and Palestinians, ad infinitum. Surely that is not what we
want.” Yet, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council was established as a secular,
federal body and not as a religious or ethnic one, and has the express function of
honoring the memory of those who perished in Hitler’s Germany. This exclusivist
Jewish position seems, in any case, to conflict with the concept of the separation
of church and state as provided by the United States Constitution.
In her address to the Holocaust Memorial Council in March 1987, Erika
Thumer observed further that:
Gypsies have generally been forgotten, or been reserved for the footnotes
of historical investigation . . . this very position as a fringe social group
with negligible social status, is responsible for the fact that, after 1945, the
Gypsy holocaust was not acknowledged for so many years, and continues
to be neglected to a certain degree to this very day. Ignorance as to the fate
of the Sinti and Roma in the Third Reich has made historical
reconstruction especially difficult. It has led to further discrimination
118
against Gypsies, and to the refusal to recognize their right to restitution of
both a material and an ideal nature.75
Conclusion
It took until May 1987 to get just one Romani American appointed to the
Holocaust Memorial Council; The Washington Post reported in 1983 that the
composition of the Council made some people “uncomfortable, for it included
non-Jews among the victims of the holocaust,”76 though no Romanies were a part
of it when that was written. There were African Americans and Armenians, but no
Romani American. In 1984, the director of the USHMC at that time, Seymour
Siegel, was quoted as saying that Romani efforts to obtain representation on it
were “cockamamie,”77 while former acting director Micah Naftalin called the
Romanies “naive” in their dealings with the Council.78
The question must be raised why it took over seven years to get even one
Romani representative appointed to the Council, when the percentage of Romani
losses was the same as, or perhaps even higher than that of the Jews. Why have
the Romanies not been invited to participate in the annual Days of Remembrance?
And why was the Jewish tragedy unique, when Romani victims experienced
exactly the same fate, for exactly the same reasons, and the Romani people are
still paying Hitler’s price? If Jews were “ignored” and “abandoned”—themes
common in holocaust-related book titles—how much more do such terms apply to
the Romani case? There is just one argument which would be morally justifiable,
and that would be if it could be proved that statements about the Romani
holocaust were false, that it did not happen. There are those, of course, who make
this claim about the holocaust in its entirety.
The only argument remaining—and, sadly, it is one we do sometimes hear
one way or another—is that Romanies were not as valuable in terms of human
worth as other victims, and should, therefore, not be accorded the same
acknowledgment. This attitude differs little from that which led to the official
devaluation of the Romanies’ human worth in Hitler’s Germany, and to the
eventual establishment of racial policies leading ultimately to attempted total
extermination.
North American Jews have no privy knowledge of the Romani people;
they are subject to the same media biases and have the same prejudices. 79 Outlook
ended its May 1987 editorial, “Gypsies and Jews in the Nazi Holocaust,” with the
words: “American Jews need not fear the false Gypsy image any longer. Gypsies,
like Jews, have endured a long history of defamation, deportation and destruction.
They should stand together and demand equality.”80 But for some, that fear
remains. In 1987, the U.S. Romani Anti-Defamation League was threatened with
legal action by the B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation League, if they continued to
119
employ that same phrase in naming themselves. The phrase, “Anti-Defamation
League,” is copyrighted. One fears that the same claim would be made for the
word “holocaust” if it could. This writer has even been told that Romanies want
merely to “get onto the Jewish bandwagon,” to “get in on the act” (two of the
things which have actually been told him); but in the light of history, these
accusations are callous and unjustified. Jews and Romanies are not opponents, but
victims of the same circumstances. Why is it so difficult for them to stand side by
side? What the Romanies want least of all is to hitch a ride on Jewish coattails;
they must stand independently and be judged by their own history. But they do
ask for Jewish moral support. Who else can even come close to understanding
what the Romanies are trying to tell the world?
In 1980, the Polish government forcibly deported groups of Romanies by
boat, after having confiscated any documents which would have allowed their reentry into that country.81 At this time, the Czechoslovakian government is
maintaining a program of compulsory sterilization of Romani women and taking
away their children;82 and in 1984, a city councilor for the City of Bradford,
England called for the extermination of Romanies.83 Deportation, sterilization
and recommended extermination, not forty years ago, but all within the past
decade. For Romanies, the war is far from over.
Postscript (18:x:06)
“The Gypsies come closest of all to the Jewish tragedy.” (Elie Wiesel, Chairman,
USHMC)84
“At the center of the tragedy of the Holocaust is the murder of European Jews . . .
near that center is the murder of the Romanies.” (Michael Berenbaum, former
USHMM Project Director)85.
Since 2002, there has been no Romani member of the United States
Holocaust Memorial Council.
Notes
1. Sydney Schiffer. The Far Side of Enough (New York: Unpublished manuscript,
privately printed
and distributed by playwright [P. 0. Box 1883, New York,
NY 10009], 1986).
2. U.S. GPO List of Publications, 24-NLB, Part 2 (Washington: Goverment
Printing Office, October 1987), p. 23.
120
3. United States Holocaust Memorial Council. The Campaign for the U.S.
Holocaust Memorial Museum (Washington: USHMC, May 1988), 1.
4. William Safire. “On Language: Long Time No See,” The New York Times
Magazine, 20 September 1983.
5. Museum Newsletter (Washington), December 1986, p. 2.
6. The Washington Post, 13 April 1983.
7. Edward Alexander. “Stealing the Holocaust,” Midstream Vol. 26, No. 9
(November 1980), pp. 46-50.
8. Yehuda Bauer. “Whose holocaust?” Midstream Vol. 26, No. 9 (November
19th): pp. 42-46.
9. Yehuda Bauer. The Holocaust in Historical Perspective (Seattle: University of
Washington Press, 1978), p. 36.
10. Lucy Dawidowicz. The Holocaust and the Historians (Cambridge, MA;
Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 11.
11. Gerald L. Posner and John Ware. Mengele: The Complete Story (New York:
Dell, 1986), p. 37.
12. [California] State Board of Education, Francis Laufenberg, President. Model
Curriculum for Human Rights and Genocide. Sacramento: State Board of
Education, 1998). p. 5.
13. Ibid. This very practice prompted a petition by eleven members of the U.S.
Congress to be sent to the Czechoslovak government through the Congressional
Human Rights Caucus.
14. R. Conrad Klein. World at War: The Holocaust (Chicago: The Children’s
Press, 1986).
15. Christian Bernadec. L’Holocaust Oublié (Editions France-Empire, 1979), p.
34.
16. Quoted in Ronald Takaki. Iron Cages: Race and Culture in Nineteenth
Century America (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1979), p. 26.
17. Rieto Pieth. “Switzerland’s secret crusade against the Gypsies,” In These
Times, January 1988; also in Ian Hancock. The Pariah Syndrome (Ann Arbor,
MI: Karoma Publishers, 1987), p. 104.
18. The Holocaust: Genocide against the Jews (Hartford, CT: State of
Connecticut Department of Education, 1987), p. 3.
19. Felice Davis. “Gypsies and Jews in the Holocaust,” Outlook: Canada’s
Progressive Jewish Magazine (May 1987), p. 15.
20. Jeremy Noakes. “Life in the Third Reich,” History Today Vol. 35 (1985), pp.
15-19.
21. Gisela Bock. “Racism and Sexism in Nazi Germany,” Signs Vol. 8, No. 3, pp.
400-21; quoted from pp. 408, 412.
22. Published in the Nazionalsozialistischer Rechtsspiegel 21-11 (1939).
121
23. Quoted in Joachim S. Hohmann, Zigeuner und Zigeunerwissensschaft
(Marburg: Lahn, Guttandin and Hoppe, 1980), p. 201.
24. Ibid., p. 234.
25. Johannes Behrendt. “Die Wahrheit über die Zigeuner,” NS Partei
Korrespondenz Vol. 10, p. iii.
26. Miriam Novitch. Le Génocide des Tziganes sous le Régime Nazi, AMIF
Publication No. 164 (Paris: La Comité pour 1’Erection du Monument des
Tziganes Assassinés à Auschwitz, 1968), p. 11 [of the English translation by Ian
Hancock].
27. Benno Müller-Hill. Murderous Science: Elimination by Scientific Selection of
Jews, Gypsies and Others (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 56.
28. Erika Thurner. “Nazi Policy against the Gypsies,” a presentation to U.S.
Holocaust Memorial Council conference, “The Other Victims,” Washington, 2225 February 1987.
29. Rebecca Sherer. “Gypsies in the Holocaust,” Facing History and Ourselves
(Summer 1987), p. 5.
30. Donald Kenrick and Grattan Puxon. The Destiny of Europe’s Gypsies
(London: Sussex University Press, 1972), Chapter 4, p. 60.
31. Ibid. Racist categorization of Gypsies persisted even before the advent of Nazi
ideology despite the conservatively Aryan affiliation of the Romani language.
Some scholars, starting with Richard Pischel in the nineteenth century, have
argued for a Dravidian, rather than Indo-Aryan origin for the Gypsy population.
See, for instance, Richard Pischel. “The Home of the Gypsies” (English trans.),
Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society Vol. 2, Part 4 (1909), pp. 292-320. See also Ian
Hancock. “The development of Romani linguistics,” in A. Jazyery and W. Winter,
eds. Studies in Honor of Edgar C.
Polomé (The Hague: Mouton, 1988).
32. Kenrick and Puxon, op. cit., p. 60.
33. Selma Steinmetz. Oesterreichs Zigeuner im NS-Staat, Monographien zur
Zeitgeschichte. (Frankfurt: Europa Verlag, 1966).
34. Letter dated 14 December 1984.
35. Heinz Heger. The Men with the Pink Triangle (Boston: Alyson Publications,
1980), p. 9.
36. Margot Strom and William Parsons. Facing History and Ourselves: Holocaust
and Human Behavior (Brookline, MA: Facing History and Ourselves, 1978), p.
22.
37. Wolf in der Maur. Die Zigeuner: Wanderer zwischen zwei Welten (Vienna,
Munich and Zurich: Verlag Fritz Molden, 1969), p. 168.
38. G. von Soest. Aspekte zur Sozialarbeit mit Zigeunern (Weinheim: Beltz, 1979)
39. Stephen Castles. Here for Good: Western Europe’s New Ethnic Minorities
(London: Pluto Press, 1984), p. 197.
122
40. Sylvia Puggiole. “Swiss Government Apologizes to Gypsies,” a documentary
on Gypsies in Europe broadcast on (U.S.) National Public Radio, KUT-FM,
Austin TX, 5 December 1987.
41. Sylvia Sobeck. Menschen zwischen Macht und Ohnmacht.
42. Wolf in der Maur, op. cit.
43. Tilrnan Zülch. Referred to in unpublished document, 12 December 1980.
44. Behrendt, op. cit.
45. Donald Kenrick. In personal communication dated 10 May 1988.
46. A thesis dealing with San Sabba and other Italian camps is currently in
progress under the direction of Jane Zatta.
47. Kurzgeschichte des nazionalsozialistischen Zigeunerlagers in Lackenbach,
1940 bis 1945 (Eisenstadt: Rotzer Druck, 1984).
48. This will be dealt with in detail by Gabrielle Tymauer in her excellent study,
the first book-length work on the Romani holocaust to be published in the United
States: The Fate of the Gypsies during the Holocaust (New York: Basic Books, to
appear).
49. Bernard Streck, in G. A. Rakelmann, ed. Loseblattsammlung für Unterricht
und Bild-ungsarbeit (Freiburg [im Breisgau], 1979).
50. Yehuda Bauer (1980), op. cit.
51. Gisela Bock, op. cit., p. 418.
52. Lloyd Grove. “Lament of the Gypsies: Forty Years after Auschwitz,
petitioning for a place,” The Washington Post, 21 July 1984, p. C4.
53. Grattan Puxon. “The Forgotten Victims,” Patterns of Prejudice Vol. 11, Part 2
(1977), pp. 23-28; quoted from p. 24.
54. J. D. Thomas, and others. “Disease, lifestyle and consanguinity in 58
American Gypsies,” The Lancet 8555 (15 August 1977), pp. 377-79.
55. Glenn Infield. Secrets of the SS (New York: Stein and Day, 1982), p. 61.
56. Gabrielle Tymauer, op. cit., p. 10.
57. Miriam Novitch, op. cit., p. 16.
58. Minister of Justice Otto Thierack’s command read: “Foreign Gypsies are not
to be treated as foreign, and therefore are to be surrendered.” See Kenrick and
Puxon, op. cit., p. 60.
59. Robert Ritter. Die Bestandsaufnahme der Zigeuner (Berlin: Offizielle
Gesundheitsdienst, 1941).
60. D. Kenrick and G. Puxon, op. cit., p. 68.
61. Guide for Days of Remembrance Observances (Washington: Department of
Defense, 1988), p. 7.
62. Nuremberg Document NOKW-2022, March 1943.
63. Nuremberg Document NOKW-2535, 15 November 1943. See also Estonian
Governor Heinrich Lohse’s confidential order to the SS which determined that
123
Gypsies “should be treated in the same way as the Jews” in the Baltic. YIVO
Letter File for 7 July 1942.
64. J. Marre and H. Charlton. Beats of the Heart (New York: Pantheon Books,
1985), 196. Passing as Jews in order to find employment is also dealt with in the
documentary film on the Romani holocaust, Despised and Forgotten, distributed
by EBS Productions, San Francisco, p. CA.
65. “The Nazis’ forgotten victims,” Time Magazine Vol. 114 (19 November
1979), p. 67.
66. Kevin Costelloe. “Gypsies want reparation for slave labor under the Nazis,”
The Minneapolis Star and Tribune 25 March 1986, p. 4A.
67. Elizabeth Pond. “Romanies: Hitler’s other victims,” The Christian Science
Monitor, 7 March 1980, p. 17.
68. Simon Wiesenthal. “The Tragedy of the Gypsies,” Bulletin of Information
(Vienna) p. 26.
69. Anna Tomforde. “Holocaust victims seek payments: denial of further
compensation by West Germany revives debate,” The Boston Globe, 9 January
1988.
70. Don Oberdorfer. “East German Agrees on Reparations for Nazis’ Jewish
Victims,” The Washington Post, 26 January 1988.
71. Bob Lundegaard. “Gypsies say their Holocaust story remains untold,” The
Minneapolis Star and Tribune, 7 July 1987, p. 1C.
72. Prepared by the United Jewish Appeal, 1987.
73. Pre-conference brochure, “The Other Victims,” 1986.
74. Emil L. Fackelheim. Jewish Return into History (Syracuse: The University
Press, 1978).
75. Erika Thumer. “Nazi Policy against the Gypsies,” paper delivered at the
international scholars conference, “The Other Victims,” Washington, 22-25
February 1987.
76. The Washington Post, 13 April 1983.
77. Ibid.
78. The Washington Post, 21 July 1984.
79. See Ian Hancock. “Gypsies, Jews and the Holocaust,” Shmate: A Journal of
Progressive Jewish Thought 17 (Winter 1987), pp. 8-15.
80. Outlook, op. cit., p. 15.
81. Bogumila Michalewicz. “Another sour note from Poland,” Newsletter of the
Gypsy Lore Society 5
(3), p. 7.
82. See Insight Magazine, 15 September 1986 and 7 September 1987.
83. Hancock (1987), op. cit., p. 100.
84. In Lundegaard, n. 71, above.
124
85. In the introduction to Michael Berenbaum, The World Must Know: The
History of the Holocaust as Told in the United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum. Little, Brown & Co.: Boston, Toronto and London (1993.)
125
9
1938
In Augsburg in 1500, a general order was issued by Emperor Maximillian stating
that Romani men may be shot and their women raped if found anywhere in
Germany beyond Easter the following year. German citizens who killed
Romanies were protected by this law, which stated that “taking the life of a
Romani . . . did not act against the policy of the state.”
Nineteen thirty eight was a pivotal year in Holocaust chronology; Hitler’s foreign
policy advisor Joachim von Ribbentrop himself called it “the year of our destiny.”
In some respects it echoed the policy in Maximillian’s Germany.
It was the year of Kristallnacht, the commemoration of which brings us
here today, and it was the year of the Gypsy Clean-Up. Both events sent a clear
message: if the very guardians of law and order could openly brutalize and
murder Jews and Roma, then it gave carte blanche to the general public to do
likewise with impunity; national prejudice had become physical. I am extremely
grateful to the organizers for inviting me to participate in this commemorative
symposium, and for the opportunity to bring to you the details of the Porrajmos—
the Romani Holocaust, for which adequate scholarship is still lacking.
While I realise that not everyone will agree with me, I regard the
underlying rationale of the Holocaust as being Hitler’s attempt to create a superior
Germanic population, a Herrenvolk, by eliminating what he viewed as genetic
contaminants in the Nordic gene pool. I interpret the Holocaust itself as the
implementation of the Final Solution: the genocidal programme intended to
accomplish this vision of ethnic cleansing. Just two populations defined by what
they were born were thus targeted: Jews and Romanies. The fact that the concept
of “race” has no scientific basis is irrelevant here, since Nazi ideology fabricated
its own “racial” identities for Jews and Romanies and acted upon them. If we add
the third group selected for elimination, the mentally and physically handicapped,
then the “gene-pool pollutant” factor becomes all the more clear. One might
consider too that the Nazi view of male homosexuality was also documented as a
“racially destructive phenomenon,” a further weakening genetic element in the
proposed Master Race.
126
I have provided a chronology of the Porrajmos as an appendix to this
paper [now No. 6 in this collection] and it contains a detailed account of events in
Germany as they have affected Romanies since the Middle Ages. Because I also
want to use the time allowed me to say something about the situation of Roma
since 1945, I have brought its timeline up to the present day and included a
number of items by way of illustration. In it you will find a more detailed account
of the place of Roma in the Nazis’ world view. It is not my intention to cover that
ground here, but to focus on the events before, during and after 1938, and on
Gypsy Clean-Up Week, before saying something about the contemporary
situation.
In December 1937 the Minister of the Interior, Wilhelm Frick, notified the
regional German governments of the Decree on the Fight to Prevent Crime. Its
aim was the purification of the body of the nation from criminal and asocial
elements that had interbred with German blood. In April 1938, during the first
Special Operation resulting from this, some 2,000 persons were arrested and
interned in concentration camps. This action was ordered by Heinrich Himmler,
Head of the SS and Chief of the German Police. But because it was only partially
effective, a second operation was planned for the following June. Now merely
one’s classification as a Gypsy was sufficient grounds for arrest. With the
implementation of this second Special Operation in 1938, Romanies were to be
deported to concentration camps for forced labour. The rule of the Third Reich
meant that Romanies were subject to racist law and the complete loss of both
collective and individual rights, together with the possibility of annihilation—not
on behavioral grounds but simply because of membership of an “alien race.”
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.
A letter to Heinrich Himmler dated March 24th 1938 from Dr. Werner
Best, Head of the Nazi Security Police, called for the “initiat[ion of the] final
solution to the Gypsy problem from a racial point of view.” Thus the first official
publicly-posted Party statement to refer to the Final Solution of the Gypsy
question (endgültige Lösung der Zigeunerfrage) was issued later that same month
over Himmler’s signature. On the following May 16th Himmler then moved the
headquarters of the Central Office for Fighting the Gypsy Nuisance from Munich
to Berlin, where it was attached to the Central Police Headquarters. From that
date on its staff worked directly with the race-scientists, in particular those at
Robert Ritter’s Race Hygiene and Population Biology Research Centre. These
moves were linked directly with legislation drafted the following year (NS
127
Rechtspiegel 21-ii-39). Verwalter Portschy, the Administrator of Steiermark, sent
a recommendation to the Hitler’s chancellery that stated
Because the Gypsies have manifestly a heavily-tainted heredity and
because they are inveterate criminals who constitute parasites in the
bosom of our people, it is fitting in the first place to watch them closely, to
prevent them from reproducing themselves and to subject them to forced
labour in work camps.
Between June 12th and June 18th, Himmler’s second special operation,
“Gypsy clean-up week” (Zigeuneraufraümungswoche) was put into effect, and
hundreds of Romanies throughout Germany and Austria were rounded up, beaten
and incarcerated. This law was also enforced against Jews who had been
previously arrested for any violation. In Mannworth in Austria, three hundred
Romani farmers and vineyard owners were arrested in a single night. Romanies
were expelled from the left bank of the Rhine in August. A decree dated
September 4th forbade Romani children from attending school. The Romani
problem was identified “categorically as a matter of race;” in his address to The
German Association for Racial Research in September, Dr. Adolph Würth of the
Racial Hygiene Research Unit said
The Gypsy question is a racial question for us today. In the same way as
the National Socialist state has solved the Jewish question, it will also
have to settle the Gypsy question once and for all. The race biological
research on Gypsies is an unconditional prerequisite for the Final Solution
of the Gypsy Question.
This was further supported by Dr. Kurt Ammon, who stated that the Nazi policy
“views the Gypsy problem as being foremost a racial one.” Himmler thereafter
put groups of Romanies at the disposal of a team of doctors for experiments on
sterilization techniques. Romani women married to non-Romanies and children
over the age of 13 were sent to Dusseldorf-Lierenfeld to be sterilized. Heydrich’s
Festsetzungs-erlaß of 17th October prohibited all Romanies and part-Romanies
not already interned in camps from changing their registered domiciles.
On December 8th, Himmler signed a further order based upon the findings
of Ritter’s Office of Racial Hygiene, which had determined that Romani blood
was “very dangerous” to Aryan purity. The final resolution, as formulated by
Himmler in that Decree for Basic Regulations to Resolve the Gypsy Question as
Required by the Nature of Race meant that preparations were to begin for the
complete extermination of the Sinti and Roma throughout Nazi-occupied Europe.
128
In a memorandum to Hitler’s Chancellery Dr. Tobias Portschy, the Area
Commander in Styria, wrote that “Gypsies place the purity of the blood of
German peasantry in peril,” and recommended mass sterilization as a solution.
Five thousand German Roma were incarcerated in the Romani section of the
concentration camp at Łodź.
At the end of 1938 the combined efforts of the racial scientists and police
experts produced the first law directed specifically against Roma. The racial
nature of the law was clear. The action taken against Romanies was based on the
earlier 1933 Laws for the Prevention of Unhealthy Offspring and those for
Security and Improvement; an indeterminate number of Romanies were sterilized
as a result. Even more stringent instructions for carrying out this order were
issued later in March 1939, further tightening the racial control. No more foreign
The Fight against the Gypsy Menace
A.I. (1) Experience gained in the fight against the Gypsy menace and
the 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 . . . It is necessary to treat pure
Gypsies and part-Gypsies separately.
(2) To this end it is necessary to establish the racial affinity of every
Gypsy living in Germany and also of every vagrant living a Gypsy-like
existence.
(3) I therefore order that all settled and non-settled Gypsies, also all
vagrants leading a Gypsy-like existence are to be registered with the
The action
takenOffice
against
Romanies
was the
based
on Nuisance.
the earlier 1933 Laws for the
Central
for the
Fight against
Gypsy
Prevention
of
Unhealthy
Offspring
and
those
for
Security
and
Improvement;
an
(4) The Police authorities will report all persons who by
their
looks
indeterminate
number ofbyRomanies
wereor sterilized
as be
a regarded
result. Even
more
and appearance,
their customs
habits are to
as
stringent Gypsies
instructions
for carrying out this order were issued later in March 1939,
or part-Gypsies.
further tightening
the racial
control.
more
Roma
to be
2(1) An official
census
is to beNo
taken
of foreign
all Gypsies,
partwere
Gypsies
andallowed to
vagrants
Gypsy-like
existence
who have
passed
the age
of
enter Germany
andleading
those aalready
there
were expelled.
Every
police
headquarters
six.
(2) The nationality has to be entered on the index card. In cases
where
foreignproblems”
nationality and
cannot
persons
had to create
a German
unit for or
“Gypsy
onebeorproved
more the
persons
specifically
concerned
are to be classed
as stateless.
required to
oversee Roma-related
issues.
Those instructions contained the
3(1)aim
Theoffinal
decision about
of be
a person
as aseparation
The
the measures
takenthe
by classification
the state must
the racial
Gypsy,
part-Gypsy
or
Gypsy-like
vagrant
will
be
made
by
the nation
once and for all of the Gypsy race (Zigeunertum) from the German
Criminal Police
theprevention
advice of experts.
(Volkstum),
thenon
the
of racial mixing and finally the regulation
of the conditions of life of the racially pure Gypsies and the part-Gypsy.
129
Roma were to be allowed to enter Germany and those already there were
expelled. Every police headquarters had to create a unit for “Gypsy problems”
and one or more persons specifically required to oversee Roma-related issues.
Those instructions contained the following directive, indicating the specifically
racial nature of the law:
*
*
*
Nineteen thirty eight was also the year that Austria became part of Greater
Germany, and Nazi-inspired action against the 10,000 Austrian Roma started
almost immediately. Two months after its absorption into the Reich, an
announcement on May 4th stated that Romanies would be treated just as they were
in Germany. Himmler ordered the fingerprinting of the entire Romani population
and forbade them to move away.
Some of the first arrests in Austria occurred on June 22nd when the
Germans came to Stegersbach. In September the Government of Burgenland
ordered that all Romani men and women who were deemed fit for labour would
be forced to do agricultural work, and camps were set up around Vienna, in the
Tyrol and elsewhere.
In June 1939 a decree ordered between 2,000 and 3,000 Gypsy adults to
be arrested and sent to concentration camps. This move was similar to action
taken in Germany the previous summer, when Romanies had been transported to
Ravensbrück and Dachau. Male Roma in Austria were sent to Buchenwald in the
Fall of 1939, a camp where conditions were so awful that many had died from
disease and starvation by the end of the year.
A policy established in September 1939 ordered the deportation of the
Austrian Roma to the East together with those from Germany in order to make the
country Zigeunerrein—Gypsy-free. From October onwards it was decreed that
relatives of interned Roma would be disqualified from receiving welfare aid.
Also in October, Heydrich ordered that all Romanies in Greater Germany were to
be registered and held in several collection camps (in Salzburg and elsewhere)
which they were not allowed to leave, in preparation for their deportation to Nazioccupied Poland. The Burgenland Roma were to constitute the first of these
transports and arrangements were begun in April 1940. Local authorities
elsewhere seized the opportunity to rid themselves of Roma in their own districts
by shipping them all off to Burgenland for the transports to the East. The resulting
logistical confusion ultimately led to their temporary abandonment. A memo
dated October 31st, 1940 indicated that the “resettlement” of 6,000 Austrian
Gypsies was to be delayed “because after the war another solution of the Gypsy
problem is planned.”
Nevertheless the Nazi leaders were anxious to take harsh measures against
the Roma in Austria. A letter from the Public Prosecutor in Graz, Rudolf
130
Meissner, recommended sterilization of all Romanies in Burgenland. It said in
part
The Gypsies, especially in the district of the lower court of Oberwarth
where about 4,000 of them live, are a danger, less from the political than
from the racial and economic point of view. Among them the pure bred
black Gypsies probably constitute the majority . . . The mass of the
Gypsies still resemble externally primitive African or Asiatic peoples . . .
Interbreeding with this morally and spiritually inferior people will
necessarily mean a decrease in the value of the offspring. On the other
hand interbreeding [among themselves] is encouraged by the fact that the
young Gypsy men are especially sexually aggressive. The only effective
way I can see of relieving the population of the Burgenland from this
nuisance . . . is the universal sterilization of all Gypsies.
I have described the events that subsequently built upon Nazi policies initiated in
1938 because that was a crucial year in the timeline of the Holocaust. The official
decision to exterminate the Romanies was made in the spring of 1941 when the
Einsatzgruppen were formed. It has been summarized in the following
contemporary excerpts:
Heydrich, who had been entrusted with ‘The final solution of the Jewish
Question’ on July 31st, 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 Jews.”
(Benno Müller-Hill, Murderous Science: Elimination by Scientific
Selection of Jews, Romanies and Others, 1933-1945. Oxford: The
University Press, 1988, pp. 58-59).
The Himmler Decree of December 16th, 1942 (Auschwitz-Erlass)
according to which the Gypsies should be deported to AuschwitzBirkenau, 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
131
natural for the other group of racially-persecuted people, the Gypsies, to
become victims of the same policy.
(State Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Memorial Book: the Gypsies at
Auschwitz-Birkenau. Munich: K.G. Saur, 1993, p. 3).
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 see 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: the first gassing operations against
Gypsies did indeed take place in Chelmno as early as late 1941/early
1942.
(Erika Thurner, “Nazi policy against the Romanies.” Paper delivered at
the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council Conference on Other Victims,
Washington, March, 1987, p. 3).
The Post-War Period
The United Nations 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 it was known
to the War Crimes Tribunal in Washington as early as 1946, as is evident from
file No. 682-PS (USDGPO, 1946, p. 496), which contains the text of the meeting
between Justice Minister Otto Thierack and Josef Goebbels on September 14th
1942. This 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 3-4 years of penal
servitude, and Czechs and Germans who are sentenced to death . . . the
idea of exterminating them by labour is best [emphasis added].
No Romanies were called to testify at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, nor
received war crimes reparations. Pre-1933 laws still in effect led to the arrest of
some families in Germany who were no longer in possession of their citizenship
papers; some remained in hiding in the abandoned camps until as late as 1947.
132
The Nazis subjected Romanies to deportation, sterilization and murder. In 1980,
the Polish government forcibly deported groups of Romanies by boat, after having
confiscated any documents which would have allowed their re-entry into that
country. In the post-1989 “New Europe” Romani asylum seekers have been
detained and returned to their place of origin by governments in Europe and North
America. In 1984, a city councilor in the City of Bradford in England called for
the extermination of Romanies. Until recently, the Czech government maintained
a programme of compulsory sterilisation of Romani women. Over the past three
decades the European Roma Rights Centre in Budapest has documented dozens of
murders of Roma by skinheads and other neo-Nazi gangs. Deportation,
sterilisation and murder; not 70 years ago but today. I have included a small
number of examples of Romaphobia from the current year in the handout. For
Romanies, the war is far from over.
We are a population of some 12 million throughout the world, but are in a
severely disadvantaged position socially. While we are working hard to change
the situation, in 2005 The Economist reported that 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.” I do believe that the granting of monetary
compensation following the Second World War would have helped the survivors
reorient themselves, and that those reparations would have had a positive impact
upon our efforts with repercussions reaching into the present day; but that didn’t
happen and the point is moot. I chair the United Romani Education Foundation,
Inc., which has had a claim for the release of funds from the Looted Swiss Assets
on file with its overseers for the past nearly two decades—funds that would
provide educational opportunities for hundreds of young Roma, but we seem to be
no closer to achieving that relief. Human and civil rights programmes to assist
Roma are in place and we have our champions: George Soros is a notable
example. We have our champions academically too—people such as Simon
Wiesenthal who spoke out for Roma when no one else was doing so. But we
cannot rely on the outside world forever. We need our own educated people, our
own teachers and lawyers and physicians. We need to learn more about our own
history and disabuse the general public of the Hollywood Gypsy who stands
squarely in the way of its understanding our real identity. These changes are
coming, but they are coming slowly.
133
10
APPENDIX: MIRIAM NOVITCH
Along with Simon Wiesenthal, Roma owe a tremendous debt to the late
Miriam Novitch of the Ghetto Fighters’ House in Tel Aviv. In 1989 she
published Rezach haZoanim Bimei ha’Shilton ha’Nazi, later translated into
French and distributed by La Comité pour l’Erection du Monument des
Tziganes Assassinés à Auschwitz as Le Génocide des Tziganes sous le
Régime Nazi, (AMIF Publication No. 164, Paris, 1968). The section
relevant to my own paper is appended here.
Over 90% of all Romanies were “Mischlinge”—of mixed blood—in different
degrees, and they had a tendency to intermarry with other Gypsies of mixed
ancestry and, what was worse from a racial point of view, with Germans who
socialized with them. This was an S.O.S –”Save German Blood!”
The importance of the racial study of Roma is illustrated by the fact that a
doctoral thesis based upon this was allowed. Notably Eva Justin, Dr. Ritter’s
assistant, completed such a dissertation on Roma; she was above all interested in
their descent which, she claimed, was “very dangerous to the purity of the
German race”.
If a good deal of attention is given here to these “experts” and
“ideologists,” it is because their role in the genocide of the Romani people was no
less important that that played by the Einsatzgruppen and Sonderkommandos who
later shot and gassed their victims.
At the time that Eva Justin published her dissertation in 1943 on their
defectiveness, it was in their thousands that Gypsy children were being shipped to
Birkenau to submit to a destiny of horror and suffering which had no equal,
except in that reserved also for a million and a half Jewish children.
134
On December 14th, 1937, a new order (No. SK-1682/37-2098) worsened
the situation of the Gypsies yet further. This stated that a person could still pose a
danger to society whether or not he were a common-law or an habitual criminal.
This included Romanies, who (as well as being categorized as a racial threat)
were additionally classified along with beggars, alcoholics, prostitutes and so on.
In other words, they were seen as being just as defective as the Jews of the
Stürmer.
At the end of 1937, and in 1938, raids began to take place everywhere. At
first, it was the men who were apprehended. Fathers and sons were arrested, and
Roma were found in all of the concentration camps alongside Jews. In
Buchenwald, a special barracks was assigned to “real Gypsies with brown skin.”
The heart of one Rom was so filled with anguish that he “begged to be allowed to
leave the camp so that he could bring back his wife and children and his horse and
waggon.” The Roma played in the camp orchestras, expressing all their pain in
their music. Boris Taslitzki, a Jewish artist deported to Buchenwald, painted their
suffering. There were many suicides among the Roma, who were unable to endure
the conditions in the camps, and above all their separation from other family
members. Maria Reinhard, whose father was in Buchenwald, killed herself.
A group of four hundred Romanies was sent to Taucha. Everywhere, in
every camp, Romani names were to be found among the deceased: at
Mauthausen, at Gusen, at Dautmergen, they were listed alongside the names of
Jews from Warsaw, Vilna, Radom and elsewhere. In the camp at Natzweilier can
be found the names of two young people who were murdered side by side: the 17year-old Hungarian Rom Geza Balő, and the 19-year-old Jewish boy Baruch
Gurwicz. Jews and Roma were found together at Stutthoff, Flossenberg and
Salzwed. Romanies were equally incarcerated in the “women’s hell” at
Ravensbrück. Kommandant Hoess, who would meet them at Oranienburg, was
amazed by the strength of their family feeling. Special Gypsy camps were also
built near Düsseldorf, and at Lackenbach in Austria.
In Holland and Belgium, before their transportation into Germany,
Romanies were kept in Jewish camps such as Westerbork and Malines. Felix
Vinicas reported that
One day in mid-winter, in the bitter cold, a crowd of about 300 Gypsies arrived at
the camp, people who had been arrested in Belgium, and around Lille, in France;
they were in a state of extreme poverty. To begin with, the Kommandant made
them run around in the snow in bare feet for an hour, men, women and children,
then he penned them up in a frightful room, forbidding them to use the toilet
which was outside. Starving, literally eaten by lice, they were quickly transported
to Germany on the pretext of a typhoid scare. This group of Gypsies, together
with 650 Jews, was later sent on into Poland.
135
Besides Jews and Romanies, thousands of others also knew the “paradise”
of the German camps. As the poet Katzenelson, among others, said, “they” killed
anyone who fought for liberty, or whom “they” suspected of wanting to defend
their countries; but Romanies and Jews were not murdered for what they did.
They were murdered for what they were. Even Jewish and Gypsy babies were
killed, and it was really because of this that the true principle of genocide applies
here; according to the historian J. Billig “one does not kill a man for what he does,
but for what he is.”
Nineteen thirty-eight was a crucial year for the Roma, just as it was for the
Jews. In October, the first transportations of Jews to Poland took place. Grunspan
made his gesture of protest and dispair; it was Kristallnacht: the burning of the
first synagogues preceded the burning which was to spread throughout the entire
world.
Himmler himself now comes into the picture. His decree of May 16th, 1938
(No. RMBLIV S. 883), ordered that the Bureau of Gypsy Affairs be transferred
from Munich to Berlin. Another decree, dated June 1st that year (No. RKPA
6001/295) recommended that police departments instigate a Gypsy “clean-up
week,” and between June 12th and June 18th, raids began to take place
everywhere. Thousands of Gypsies, both in the Reich and in Austria, were
arrested, as in the village of Mannwoerth, for example, where 300 people were
taken in one night—sedentary Gypsies who owned fields and vineyards.
On December 8th, 1938, Himmler signed a new order (No. 5557-VIII/38
2026-6) which to all intents and purposes condemned all of the Roma to death.
The theories developed by the Rassenhygienische Forschungstelle were to be put
into effect, part of the race for a solution to the “Gypsy Question.” Given that the
“experts” had determined that Gypsies of mixed descent were very dangerous to
German blood, it was necessary to separate the “pure” or “thoroughbred” Gypsies
from them who were seen as less of a threat. Himmler wanted the lives to be
spared for two groups, the Sinti and the Laleri, who had the right to travel around;
these stayed at Oldenberg. According to Hoess, Himmler wanted to see them
covered by the law for “the protection of historic monuments.” Dora Yates writes
of three groups who were allowed to travel, the Sinti, the Romungre and the
Kelderari; but later, these too became part of those deported. Of that five
thousand, only seven hundred survived.
Himmler’s order stated that these “pure” Gypsies had to obey the
following rules: no begging, no fortune-telling, no suspicious activities, and above
all no sexual union with part-Roma or with Germans. For the slightest infraction,
the doors of the camps remained wide open for these “pure” Gypsies too.
Children over 13 were also brought there to be sterilized; at the
Ravensbrück camp, over 120 little Gypsy girls were sterilized by doctors Horst,
Schumann, Treite, Rosenthal and others. The herding together of 5000 German
136
Gypsies at Łodź was one example of genocide by deportation—here, living
conditions were so inhuman that nobody could possibly survive. However it was
above all murder that was chosen by the Nazi torturers as their preferred means of
genocide.
137
11
RESPONSES TO THE PORRAJMOS (THE ROMANI HOLOCAUST)1
". . . ignorance and arrogance are in full flower . . .
"'Holocaust' has been used to encompass more than the
murder of the Jews. From the casualties in our Civil War to
the wholesale murder of gypsies in World War II."
(Alexander, 1990:13)
“the [mistaken] notion that not only Jews . . .but gypsies
were chosen by the Nazis for annihilation."
(Safire, 1983:12)
". . . the whole gypsy 'problem' was for Himmler and most
other Nazis only a minor irritant.”
(Bauer, 1994:446)
"Jews were not the only biologically selected target.
Alongside Jews, the Nazis murdered European Gypsies."
(Friedlander, 1995:xij)
Just four years after the fall of the Third Reich, Dora Yates, the Jewish secretary
of the Gypsy Lore Society, noted in the pages of Commentary that
It is more than time that civilized men and women were aware of the Nazi
crime against the Romanies as well as the Jews. Both bear witness to the
fantastic dynamic of the 20th century racial fanaticism, for these two
people shared the horror of martyrdom at the hands of the Nazis for no
other reason than that they were – they existed. The Romanies, like the
Jews, stand alone. (Yates, 1949:455).
138
And in the following year, the Wiener Library Bulletin, organ of what is now the
Jewish Institute of Contemporary History in London, published the statement that
Germany had in 1938 a gipsy population of 16,275. Of these, 85 per cent.
were thrown into concentration camps, and no more than 12 per cent.
survived (Anon., 1950:18).
Despite these very early observations2, and despite the overwhelming amount of
documentation relating to the fate of the Romanies in Nazi Germany which has
been examined during the past fourteen years that the U.S. Holocaust Memorial
Council has been in existence, that body, more than any other, rigorously persists
in underestimating and under-representing that truth, made plain forty-five years
ago, a position reflected in the permanent exhibit in the Memorial Museum-whose staff, it should be said, have on the other hand generally been much more
favorably disposed to the Romani case. In their 1989 book Holocaust: Religious
and Philosophical Implications, editors John Roth and Michael Berenbaum ask
“[w]hy should the fate of the Jews be treated differently than the fate of the
Romanies or the Poles...[t]he answer will be found in these essays” pp. 6-7). But
the answer to that question, at least for the Romani case, appears nowhere in any
of the 23 essays the book contains. More recently still Martin Gilbert, in his
foreword to Carrie Supple’s From Prejudice to Genocide: Learning About the
Holocaust, published in 1993 for use in British schools, refers to the Holocaust as
“the attempt by the Nazis to destroy all the Jews of Europe between 1941 and
1945,” and then mentions the fate of the Romani victims as being among “other
attempts at genocide, such as the slaughter of the Armenians . . . ,” placing
Romanies with a group outside of the Holocaust altogether, echoing the statement
on page 824 of his The Holocaust, that “[i]t was the Jews alone who were marked
out to be destroyed in their entirety.” And while Burleigh & Wippermann (1991)
discuss in detail the “Final Solution of the Gypsy Problem” in The Racial State,
Antony Polonsky is still moved in his introduction to that book to maintain that
“[a]s emerges clearly from the arguments of Burleigh and Wippermann, the mass
murder of the Jews was unique in that every Jew, man, woman and child,
assimilated or deeply orthodox, was singled out for destruction” (p. xiv). It is
abundantly clear that some historians see only what they want to see, and that a
very blind eye is being turned in the direction of Romani history, and that where
the Romani genocide in Nazi Germany is acknowledged, it is kept, with a few
notable exceptions (e.g. Ehmann, 1981, Milton, 1990, 1991a, 1991b, 1992, 1994a,
1994b, 1995, Thurner, 1987, Young, 1994, Lutz & Lutz, 1995, Friedlander, 1995a
and 1995b, Fox, 1988 and 1995 and Stannard, 1996), carefully separated from the
139
Jewish experience. Both Douglas (1985) and Lagrou (1997) have demonstrated
that this ethnic exclusivity is an academic construction which dates only from the
1960s. It is evident, however, that from an outright rejection of the idea of
Romanies sharing the fate of Jews, opinion is slowly moving in the direction of
acceptance of the idea, voiced by Margot Strom (Henderson, 1986:5C), that
“questions about who the Holocaust belongs to--whether it’s only a Jewish
concern--are superficial,” though some writers continue to hover on the fence.
Azriel Eisenberg, in his excellent edited volume Witness to the Holocaust, says in
his introduction that
The focus of this book is on the Jews, but in point of fact precious human
beings of other nationalities, faiths and ideologies were also annihillated
by the millions--among them Romanies, Czechs, Yugoslavs, Poles,
Russians and French. However, it was Jews who were singled out for
total destruction (1981:2),
nevertheless in the very next paragraph goes on to say
One people that shared the fate of the Jews were the Romanies. They, too,
had been persecuted through the ages and, like the Jews, the Romanies
were isolated and liquidated, country by country. Unlike the Jews,
however, they left almost no records of the atrocities committed against
them, which were no less horrible than those recorded in this book. When
the bloodbath was over, only pitiful remnants were left alive. The world
hardly knew of their sufferings, nor is it fully aware today of their
disappearance. Except for the few survivors, a whole people, unique in its
life-style, language, culture and art, was wiped off the face of the earth.
There are no memorials to their dead or commem- orations of their
tragedy [in 1981]. The death of the Gypsy nation was more than physical;
it was total oblivion (loc. cit.)
Others, such as Fackenheim and Meier, seem not yet to have made up their minds
about whether to include Romanies or not:
With the possible exception of the Romanies, Jews were the only people
killed for the “crime” of existing (Fackenheim, 1982:12).
Why. . . does it seem important to insist on the uniqueness of the Nazi
crimes? Because nowhere else but in Nazi-occupied Europe from 1941 to
1945 was there an apparatus so single-mindedly established to carry out
mass murder as a process in its own right. And not just mass murder, but
140
ethnic extermination—killing—without even a pretext of individual
wrongdoing, an entire people (if Romanies (sic) are counted, two peoples)
(Meier, 1988:82).
Similarly, Breitman admits that Romanies might eventually also get higher billing
once more details become available:
The Nazis did try to wipe out virtually all Jews, whereas their murderous
policies for other groups were more selective. In some cases, for example
with the Romanies, further research is needed to show what distinctions
were made, why some were killed and others spared (1991:19).
In the preface to one of the most recent treatments of the Nazi genocide,
Friedlander (1995:xij-xiv) states that
...historians have categorized the Nazis’ murder of the European Jews as
totally different from the murder of other groups...My research convinced
me that this definition of Nazi genocide had to be slightly revised, because
Jews were not the only biologically selected target. Alongside Jews, the
Nazis murdered the European Romanies. Defined as a “dark-skinned”
racial group, Gypsy men, women and children could not escape their fate
as victims of Nazi genocide...I have provided a relatively detailed account
of the murder of the Romanies because their annihilation has until now
received little attention. [On the other hand] I have not covered the murder
of the Jews, which has been the subject of much scrutiny and is relatively
well known.
But despite the focus of this 421-page book, the Library of Congress’
Cataloguing-in-Publication data included following its title page categorizes it
under the heading “Holocaust: Jewish (1939-1945).”
Acknowledging what does and does not qualify for inclusion in the
Holocaust is a profoundly emotionally-charged issue, and one fraught with
subjective interpretation and response. Assumptions are made, and repeated with
confidence, by individuals who have no special expertise in Romani Holocaust
history, and unqualified statements are reiterated which automatically assume a
lesser status for Romanies in the ranking of human abuse. These take the form of
entire articles, such as that by Katz (1988:200-216), which systematically
compares the fate of Jews in the Holocaust with (a) the mediaeval witch craze, (b)
North American Indians, (c) Black slavery, (d) Romanies under the Nazis, (e)
homosexuals during World War II and (f) Polish and Ukrainian losses during
141
World War II, concluding (p. 216) that “all . . . are to be fundamentally
distinguished from the Holocaust, even when they reveal horrifyingly large
casualty figures.” The same is found in the writings of Yehuda Bauer, who states
with assurance in his entry on “Romanies” in The Encyclopedia of the Holocaust
(Gutman, 1990; see also Gutman & Berenbaum, 1994) that “[t]he fate of the
Romanies was in line with Nazi thought as a whole: Romanies were not Jews, and
therefore there was no need to kill all of them.” Then, like Katz, he substantiates
this claim by selectively citing sources none of which is more recent than 1979,
and makes no comparisons with Jewish populations which were also exempted
from death, and for whom there was likewise “no need to kill all.” More recently
Michael Berenbaum told the New York Times that “the Nazis targeted different
groups, but singled out Jews for annihilation,” and that
Inclusion is not equivalence—not saying that their fate was equivalent.
All the victims of Nazism are memorialized in the museum. The
distinction between their fate and the fate of the Jews, is preserved”
(Sengupta, 1996).
The three and a half page entry for Romanies in the two volume, 2,000-page
Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, incidentally, amounts to less than one quarter of
one percent of the whole book, despite the enormity of Romani losses by 1945,
proportionately at least matching, and possibly exceeding, that of the Jewish
victims. In his more recent book, Katz elaborates upon these comparisons, and
expands upon the criterion of “intentionality” which, he says, characterized the
fate of Jews in the Holocaust but not that of any other victims of massive-scale
murder. Indeed, he claims that “the Nazi attack on the Jews was the only true
genocide in history” (Katz, 1994; see also Nemeth, 1994).
Typically accompanying these statements and assumptions is the
acknowledgement that yes, there were other victims of Nazism, but they belong
under a separate heading of non-Jews, and their fate was different. Berenbaum
places the Romani victims in a category we might easily call “unnamed
afterthought” in his own definition of the Holocaust: “the systematic statesponsored murder of six million Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators during
World War II; as night descended, millions of others were killed in their wake”
(1993:1; see also Shermer, 1994:33). Berenbaum presumed what the effect of
The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum upon the public consciousness would be
fully five years before its opening, in Newsday, when he said “[p]eople had to
grow. Jews had to learn to be sensitive to non-Jewish victims, and they, in turn,
had to learn to be sensitive to the uniqueness of the Jewish experience” (quoted in
Brenna, 1988:3). The central issue rests squarely upon this notion of
“uniqueness,” it was the basis of my presentation at the first Remembering for the
142
Future conference in Oxford, which was published in an expanded version in
Without Prejudice (Hancock, 1988b). Philip Lopate seems to be the only writer
to have listed the criteria for “uniqueness” in an unequivocal way:
The position that the Jewish Holocaust was unique tends to rest on the
following arguments: (1) scale—the largest number of deaths extracted
from one single group; (2) technology--the mechanization of death
factories; (3) bureaucracy—the involvement of the state apparatus at
previously unheard-of levels; (4) intent--the express purpose being to
annihilate every last member of the Jewish people (1989:291-292).
I will enumerate these and other principal challenges to the Romani case that have
emerged since the Oxford conference and which argue for categorization
separately from the Jewish case, and which thereby support the perceived
“uniqueness” of the latter, and comment upon each one in turn:
1) Jews were targeted to the last man, woman and child for complete
extermination, a policy which held true for no other population.
Jack Eisner is just one of many writers on the Holocaust who makes this
distinction:
Another misleading idea frequently advanced by those in the public eye is
the conclusion that our concept of Holocaust should embrace several
million non-Jewish civilians who perished at the hands of the Nazis along
with six million Jews . . . yet there is a crucial difference: As non Jews
they were not part of a race targeted for total extermination; that is the
significance of the Holocaust (Eisner, 1983:153).
There were in fact numbers of categories of Jews who were exempt, and who
escaped death. Hilberg discusses these in detail in the first chapters of his The
Destruction of the European Jews (1961). As early as 1938, the German Reich
asked various foreign governments to extend invitations to German Jews as a
means of getting them out of the country, but this policy was not extended to
include Romanies. Mention can also be made of the September 1st, 1941 law
confining Jews and Romanies to their place of residence which exempted Jews
married to non-Jews, but which did not similarly spare Romanies. Smelser
(1991:55-6) discusses the Brand Mission of 1944, when Eichmann himself was
prepared to spare the lives of one million Jews in return for ten thousand trucks,
and the effort of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, which
successfully secured the release of 318 Jews from Bergen-Belsen in the same
143
year. The U.S. War Refugee Board was able to save over 200 thousand Jews,
bringing them to America from Europe beginning in 1944, but their program did
not even mention the Romani victims of Nazism. As the Holocaust intensified,
most of these exemptions, for both groups, were progressively rescinded. When
making statements of this kind, the year should be specified to incorporate policy
changes. Ultimately, only Jews and Romanies were singled out for complete
extermination (with the exception of certain exempted groups within each
population) on the basis of race/ethnicity. No other targeted populations were
thus identified, and for this reason Romanies must not be placed in the residual
category of “Others.” By the time that the Nuremberg Laws were fully in place,
no other categories existed except “Jews” and Aryans.” While the latter category
was divided into numbers of specific populations, including e.g. Poles, the
handicapped, homosexuals, etc. (some of whom also belonged to the former
classification), Romanies were placed with “Jews,” and legislation directed at,
and naming Jews henceforth automatically included Romanies.
2) Romanies “come closest” to the Jewish situation but, as Messrs. Mais,
Bauer, Wiesel, Berenbaum and others have said, close is still a miss.
In this connection and most recently, Michael Berenbaum has said, in the
introduction to The World Must Know, that
At the center of the tragedy of the Holocaust is the murder of European
Jews--men, women and children--killed not for the identity they affirmed
or the religion they practiced, but because of the blood of their
grandparents. Near that center is the murder of the Romanies. Historians
are still uncertain if there was a single decision for their complete
annihilation, an enunciated policy of transcendent meaning to the
perpetrators (p. 2).
He further says “Romanies (Romanies) had been subject to official discrimination
in Germany long before 1933, but even the Nazi regime never promulgated a
comprehensive law against them” (p. 51), a statement which seems to have been
paraphrased from Luebke, who wrote that “[n]o comprehensive ‘Gypsy Law’ was
ever promulgated” (1990:3). To this might also be added Breitman’s statement
that “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 (sic) problem” (1991:20).
In fact the first document referring to “the introduction of the total solution to the
Gypsy problem on either a national or an international level” was issued under the
direction of State Secretary Hans Pfundtner of the Reichs Ministry of the Interior
144
in March, 1936, while the wording endgültige Lösung der Zigeunerfrage, i.e. the
“final (or “conclusive”) solution of the Gypsy question,” was made by Himmler
in May, 1938. What makes a decree calling for racial obliteration “comprehensive” or not isn’t discussed by Berenbaum, but his statement is neither
correct nor serves in any way to relegate the fate of the Romanies to some less
stringent category. But, as Keable (1995:24) asserts in her refutation of those
who claim that no so-called Gypsy Law ever existed, “while denial threatens...
oblivion, facts require repetition if they are to remain facts.” There are numerous
Nazi policy statements available to us calling for the total elimination of the
Romani population, several of which I have included in my Chronology, together
with references (Hancock, in Crowe & Kolsti, 1991:11-30). 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” (1993:xiv,
emphasis added). In 1939 Johannes Behrendt of the Office of Racial Hygiene
issued a brief stating that “[a]ll Romanies 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.” Müller-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 Romanies 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 Romanies in the ‘final solution.’ Thereupon, Lohse gave the order, on
24th December 1941, that the Romanies “should be given the same
treatment as the Jews” (Müller-Hill, 1988:58-59).
Reinhard Heydrich, who was Head of the Reich Main Security Office and the
leading organizational architect of the Nazi Final Solution, ordered the
Einsatzkommandos “to kill all Jews, Romanies and mental patients” (Müller-Hill,
loc. cit.). While there is no dispute about the Heydrich directive, which is also
dealt with in Burleigh & Wippermann, both scholars draw attention to the fact
that not all of the documentation regarding its complete details, relating to both
Jews and Romanies, has been found:
A conference on racial policy organized by Heydrich took place in Berlin
on 21 September 1939, which may have decided upon a ‘Final Solution’
of the ‘Gypsy Question.’ According to the scant minutes which have
145
survived, four issues were decided: the concentration of Jews in towns;
their relocation to Poland; the removal of 30,000 Romanies 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 despatching Germany’s Sinti and Roma to
Auschwitz on 16th December 1942. The ‘Final Solution’ of the ‘Gypsy
Question’ had begun (1991:121-125).
The Memorial Book for the Romanies who died at Auschwitz-Birkenau interprets
this somewhat differently:
The Himmler decree of December 16th, 1942 (Auschwitz-Erlaß),
according to which the Romanies should be deported to AuschwitzBirkenau, had the same meaning for the Romanies 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 Romanies, to
become victims of the same policy, which finally even included soldiers in
the Wehrmacht. (State Museum, 1993:3).
In a paper delivered at the March, 1987, conference on the non-Jewish victims of
the Holocaust, sponsored by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, Dr. Erika
Thurner of the Institut für 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 Romanies, 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
Romanies were initiated prior to this policy decision; the first gassing
146
operations against Romanies did indeed take place in Chelmno as early as
late 1941/early 1942. On September 14th, 1942, following a meeting in
Berlin with Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, Otto Thierack,
Reichminister of Justice, wrote that “with respect to the extermination of
antisocial forms of life, Dr. Goebbels is of the opinion that the Jews and
the Romanies should simply be exterminated.”
Six years earlier, a memorandum was sent to Hans Pfundtner, State Secretary of
the Interior, on March 4th, 1936, which addressed the creation of a “Gypsy Law”
(the Reichzigeunergesetz), the purpose of which was to deal with the complete
registration of the Romani population, their sterilization, the restriction of their
movement and means of livelihood, and the expulsion of all foreign-born,
stateless Gypsies.
3) Another argument, discussed in Fackenheim (1978) and most recently
given voice by Israeli Rabbi Eliezer Schach, is that “God used the Holocaust
to punish Jews for their sins.”
This would certainly exclude other groups, and is perhaps the most difficult
defense of “uniqueness” to address, from a non-Jewish perspective. But no doubt
speaking for most of the Jewish religious community, Rabbi Yitzak Kagan of the
Lubavitch Foundation of Michigan responded that Schach’s statement “borders
on heresy” (DeSmet, 1990:B-3); we must wonder how the murder of innocent
Jewish babies, thousands even unborn, can possibly be rationalized by this
argument. It is of some significance that some Romanies today have succumbed
to survivor’s guilt, and have also wondered, rhetorically, whether the Holocaust
was “punishment” for imagined transgressions. There is also the argument, made
e.g. by Vico (and discussed in Keable, forthcoming), that the Jewish experience
cannot be compared to that of any other people because Jews alone “dwell inside
divine history” (or “outside of history,” as it has also been stated, e.g. by Elie
Wiesel). Such an argument is likewise a difficult one to reconcile with prosaic
historical detail.
4) Certain Romani groups sedentary for two or more years were to be
exempted from death (Mais, 1988).
This two-year exemption was only a recommendation, and was never actually
implemented, being overridden by Himmler’s own directive, viz. that all
migratory Romanies be killed, and sedentary Romanies worked to death in labor
camps. In any case, this potential situation would only have applied to the USSR
and the Baltic lands, and nowhere else. A similar situation did, however, operate
147
for Jews in these countries, thus Hilberg (1961:142-144) writes of the
Gebietskommissar for northern Lithuania in September, 1941, complaining about
the killings, explaining that “the Jews were needed as skilled laborers.” Hilberg
continues “[i]n October 1941, the Reichskommissar forbade the shooting of Jews
. . . [and] during the quiet months of the winter and spring of 1942, they began to
adjust themselves to their hazardous existence.” By the end of 1943, “some tens
of thousands of Jews were being kept alive at Lida and Minsk in Byelorussia, and
looked forward to evacuation, or death.” Extermination of the Baltic Romanies
was particularly effective, their having been almost entirely destroyed by 1945.
5) Some Romanies were even allowed to fight in the German army (Mais,
1988).
Kenrick & Puxon (1972:82) discuss Romanies who served in the armed forces,
saying that “Romanies had officially been excluded from the army by law as early
as November, 1937. . . on the grounds of racial policy no more Romanies should
be called up. . . [t]he release of servicemen took some time and Romanies could
still be found in the army as late as 1943.” The sentence following this, however,
reads “Certain classes of Jews with mixed parentage were retained in the armed
forces throughout the war” (emphasis added).
6) Kenrick and Puxon discuss certain categories of exemptions which
applied to Romanies (Mais, 1988).
Kenrick & Puxon do deal with these on page 78 of their book, where they also
include the statement that “[t]hese exemptions compare with similar arrangements
for Jews.” If such an argument is to be used to characterize the treatment of
Romanies, then it must likewise be used to characterize the treatment of Jews.
And since it does apply to both populations, it cannot be used to support the
“unique” treatment of the latter.
Although Kenrick (1994-5 and elsewhere) has stated that anti-Jewish
legislation generally preceded anti-Romani legislation, this was not typically the
case. Being far fewer in numbers and more containable, Romanies often served
as the test population for directives then later applied to Jews, e.g. attendance in
schools, membership in trades union, enlistment in the armed forces, sterilization,
Zyklon-B experimentation, salt-water experimentation, genetic determination
experimentation, and so on.
7) It has been claimed, including by the German government itself as a
means of avoiding the payment of war crimes reparations, that Romanies
were not targeted for racial, but for social, reasons.
148
Yehuda Bauer has supported this argument also, stating that “[t]he Romanies
were not murdered for racial reasons, but as so-called asocials . . . nor was their
destruction complete” (Bauer, 1980:45; 1994:441). But this argument originates
in the deliberate and despicable move on the part of the German government to
take advantage of the shattered condition of the surviving Romani population
which was in no condition to contest it, and for which the Romani population is
still suffering today. In fact in his most recent article (in Gutman & Berenbaum,
1994:446), Bauer maintained that Romanies were murdered by the Nazis because
“they were a minor irritant” (a statement he repeated at the Scholars’ Conference
on the Holocaust and the Churches in 1996)!
The racial identity of the Romani people, and the genetically-based
rationale for their extermination, are abundantly documented and referenced (see
e.g. Hancock, Chronology, in Crowe & Kolsti, 1991), and this was recognized in
the press forty years ago: “In his report on the matter, the Bonn Correspondent of
the Manchester Guardian, 9:i:56, points out that the Supreme Court’s decision ‘is
at direct variance with the known facts of Nazi policies for concentrating and later
exterminating the Romanies’” (Anon., 1956).
More recently, Professor Bauer has been quoted as saying that Romani
claims to the extent of their victimization in the Holocaust are “all lies and fairytales” and that “[n]othing happened to them” (Katz (K.), 1995); a statement
which, if it were made publicly in Germany today about the Holocaust’s Jewish
victims, would result in a fine or a jail sentence. Indeed, as long ago as 1984,
Yehuda Bauer dismissed Romanies from participating in the Holocaust, though
without saying why, when he stated that
The destruction of the Armenians and the Jews—but not of the
Romanies— which is a different problem again—belongs to the same
category of Holocaust situations (Bauer, 1984:20).
At the “task forces” meeting at the January 2000 Stockholm Holocaust
conference, Bauer told an official from the Goethe Institute that “Sybil Milton,
Henry Friedlander [and others like them] had not been invited to Stockholm,
because they belong to the last few examples of historians who still wrongly
maintain that the Gypsies were victims of the Holocaust.” It is surely why I have
not been invited back myself.
It is still the case that Romanies are widely believed to be a population
defined by behavior and social criteria rather than by genetic heritage or ethnicity.
Prof. Seymour Siegel, former chairman of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council
questioned, in the pages of the Washington Post, and in the context of their right
to full inclusion, whether Romanies did in fact constitute a distinct ethnic people
149
(Grove, 1984:C4), a particularly insensitive remark since Romanies have a far
more demonstrable claim to a “racial” identity than do Jews; this latter has been
the subject of many studies (e.g. Coon, 1942, Petersen, 1988, Patai & PataiWing, 1989, Pollack, 2003; see also Kohn, 1995). A report on the health of the
Romani American population by a team of Harvard geneticists which appeared in
the prestigious medical journal The Lancet concluded that
Analysis of blood groups, haptoglobin phenotypes, and HLA types
establish the Romanies as a distinct racial group with origins in the Punjab
region of India. Also supporting this is the worldwide Gypsy language
Romani, which is quite similar to Hindi (Thomas, 1977:379).
The fact remains, however, that whether Romanies and Jews are “races” or not
doesn’t matter; Hitler believed both populations to constitute a racial threat, and
race was his justification for their attempted extermination. It might be added
here, that the oft-repeated argument that Romanies were the “ultimate Aryans,”
having come from India, seems to be post-Holocaust folklore. The Nazis never
claimed this, and in fact it was their own scholarship which attempted to
demonstrate the Dravidian roots of the population. Pischel wrote about this as
long ago as 1883, and Block repeated it in his 1936 treatise, which had a profound
influence on Nazi anti-Romani policy. The notion seems to have arisen from the
linguistic affiliation of the Romani language which (like Yiddish in fact), is an
Indo-European (i.e. “Aryan” tongue). Bauer’s further observation, that “nor was
their destruction complete,” is a baseless and peculiar argument, since the same
statement applies, mercifully, to Jews, over 300 times as many of whom survived
the Holocaust than did Romanies (see No. 11, below).
8) Jews were a greater threat because they were responsible for Marxism
and Capitalism, while Romanies posed no political or economic threat to the
Third Reich (Bauer, 1996).
This latter statement is certainly true, and it might be added parenthetically that
Romanies have instigated no wars nor are recognized in the police records as
perpetrators of major crimes such as murder or rape. The determination to
eradicate the Romani population, therefore, was based solely on racial arguments,
with no other mitigating factors.
9) Some families of “pure” Romanies were to be preserved in special camps
for future anthropologists to study (Mais, 1988).
This has also been noted by Yehuda Bauer (loc. cit.), where he includes “pure”
150
Romanies with yet another category (apparently of his own devising: “racially
safe” Romanies--in direct contradiction of his reference in (7), above, to
Romanies as a non-racially-targeted population) in his statement that “Romanies
who were of pure blood, or who were not considered dangerous on a racial level,
could continue to exist, under strict supervision.” In the U.S. Holocaust Memorial
Museum’s published Holocaust history (Berenbaum, 1993:51) we find the same
argument made by Mais and Bauer repeated in slightly modified form, viz. that
“Pure gypsies were not targeted for extermination until 1942” (not true—but one
might ask ‘so what?’). The wording here gives the impression that there was an
existing policy that was then revoked in 1942, rather than its having been (like
point four, above) nothing more than a suggestion, by Himmler, which was
mocked by his peers as “one more of Himmler’s hare-brained schemes”
(Tyrnauer, 1985:24) and rejected outright by Bormann. Thus on December 16th
that same year, in compliance with this rejection of his idea, Himmler issued the
order that “all Romanies are to be deported to the Zigeunerlager at Auschwitz
concentration camp, with no regard to their degree of racial impurity.” This order
may even have been the result of a direct decision from Hitler himself (Milton,
1992:10). SS Officer Percy (“Perry”) Broad, who worked in the political division
at Auschwitz, and who participated directly in the murders of several thousand
prisoners there, wrote that “. . . it was the will of the all-powerful Reichsführer to
have the Gypsies disappear from the face of the earth” (1966:41). Richard
Breitman reproduces the statement made by Security Police Commander Bruno
Streckenbach following a policy meeting with Hitler and Heydrich held in Pretsch
in June, 1940, viz. that “[t]he Führer has ordered the liquidation of all Jews,
Romanies (sic) and communist political functionaries in the entire area of the
Soviet Union” (1991:164). Even if Himmler’s Gypsy Zoo had been a reality, it
would only have involved the lives of several dozen individuals, fewer by several
hundred percent than the six thousand Karait Jews who were able to argue
successfully for their own lives to be spared. The Karaits were “a community
who professed not only to be Jews but to be the authentic Jews since they accept
no post-biblical Jewish texts as being authoritative, basing this ... on the words of
a rabbinic decision” (Lang, 1997:20).
10) Romanies received kinder treatment because parents and children were
allowed to stay together in special family camps, unlike other prisoners.
Lagnado and Dekel are among those who have referred to this: “The Romanies
were allowed to stay together, perhaps because they were faithful Christians.
Despite their inferior racial stock, it was their one privilege. . . the Romanies
alone among the inmates had the comfort of being with their loved ones”
(1991:82). Their unqualified reference to Romanies as constituting “inferior
151
racial stock”, their guess at their faithful Christianity, and their stunningly
unfeeling description of the Romani camp in Auschwitz as resembling a “vast
playground, an ongoing carnival” can only reflect the authors’ stereotypes about
Romanies, and it is abundantly obvious that neither one of them ever spoke to a
Romani survivor or was there at the camp at Birkenau. König (1989:129-133)
makes it very clear that the “family camps” were not created out of any
humanitarian motive, or desire to bestow any “privilege,” but because the
Romanies became completely unmanageable when separated from family
members. Zimmermann also discusses this:
The Nazi institutions involved with the persecution of the Romanies knew
about the particularly close family ties in this ethnic group. If these family
ties were not taken into account, as happened in part with the deportation
of 2,500 Sinti to Poland in 1940, there were certainly difficulties for the
police, which were recorded negatively. To this extent, the RSHA [the
Reichssicher-heitshauptamt, or State Security Office] order of 29 January
1943 to deport the Sinti and Roma to Auschwitz “in families” reflected
efforts to keep the friction and resultant bureaucratic problems associated
with the deportation and internment as small as possible (1990:107-108).
First Lieutenant Walther of Infantry Regiment 734 and head of the execution
squad, wrote in his Report on the Executions of the Jews and the Romanies that
“[t]he execution of the Jews is simpler than that of the gypsies. One must admit
that the Jews go to their deaths very composedly; they remain very calm. The
gypsies, however, wail and scream and move about incessantly as soon as they
get to the place of execution.” It was simply more expedient, and caused the
guards less problems, to keep families together for processing. König writes of
their sometimes having to smash the hands and feet of the Romanies, who even
used loaves of stale bread as weapons, in order to render them docile as they were
being herded to the ovens. Survivor Hermann Diamanski told jurists at a war
crimes trial in Frankfurt in 1964 that
thousands of gypsies battled Gestapo guards [who were] driving them into
the mass gas chambers of Auschwitz, but in the end they all died . . . the
gypsies fought with knives, razor blades and their fists against the Gestapo
guards armed with submachine guns and other weapons . . . the gypsies
screamed all night; it was awful. Unlike the Jews, the gypsies fought.
They sold their lives dearly” (Anon., 1964:B5).
König’s book is a monument to Romani heroism and resistance in the camps, and
should be required reading for any student of the Porrajmos. Romani families
152
were not kept together in every camp, incidentally (cf. those shipped to Poland in
1940 referred to above by Zimmermann); this seems to have been a policy
enacted at Auschwitz-Birkenau in particular. Jews transported to Auschwitz from
Theresienstadt in September, 1943, for example, were also allowed to remain
together with their families.
11) “The denial of the right to live is what singles out the fate of the Jews
from all other victims--Romanies, Poles, Russian prisoners of war, Jehovah’s
Witnesses . . . their fate was different from the fate of the Jews.” (Yitzhak
Mais, in the brochure published by the Museums at Yad Vashem).
Michael Berenbaum, in a better position than most to know the details of the
Romani Holocaust, repeats these arguments in his book (Roth & Berenbaum, p.
33), where he says “Gypsies shared much, but not all of the horrors assigned to
Jews. Gypsies were killed in some countries but not others . . . Even though the
Gypsies were subject to gassing and other forms of extermination, the number of
Gypsies was not as vast . . . In contrast, all Jews lived under an imminent death
sentence of death (sic).” Jews were killed in some countries but not others too,
and the number of Romanies was “not as vast” because (according to the Nazis’
own census conducted by Behrendt in 1939) there were nine times as many Jews
as Romanies to start with at the outbreak of The Second World War, so obviously
the numbers were greater. Steinmetz’ argument that “numbers decide” (1966:00)
would only be valid if the number of Jews and the number of Romanies had been
equal to begin with. But when we discuss genocide we must do so in the context
of the destruction of entire peoples, and in terms of overall percentage, the losses
of the Romanies almost certainly exceeded those of any other group; their
percentage was “vaster.” If there had been seventeen point four million
Romanies in 1939 (the government’s estimate of the number of Jews in that year),
the Nazis would surely have murdered six million too; if there were only two
Wisians on the planet and just one were murdered, that would be half of the
Wisian population.
The question of the numbers of Romanies who were killed is a vexed one.
Given the nature of their mode of life, no reliable estimate of the pre-war
European Romani population exists. Similarly, the circumstances of their
dispatch at the hands of the Nazis make this a question which can never be fully
answered. I dealt with this in some detail in Hancock (1988b), but rely on
König’s statement that
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-
153
übrigen [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 Romanies (König,
1989:87-89).
An an article entitled “Dutch World War II deaths higher than recorded” (Dutch
News nl for Tuesday 9 October 2007) reported that
The number of Dutch people who died in World War II is considerably
higher than the accepted figure to date according to researchers at Utrecht
University, reports ANP news service on Monday.
The researchers say not 210,000 but 280,000 Dutch people died in
the war. The discrepancy comes from the statistics of those who were
deported. These are recorded as ‘emigrants’ while in reality they were
Jews and Gypsies who were transported to the gas chambers in German
concentration camps.
In the eastern territories, in Russia especially, Romani deaths were sometimes
counted into the records under the heading of Jewish deaths. The Memorial Book
for the Romanies who perished in Auschwitz-Birkenau 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 victims
(State Museum: 1993:2 [emphasis added]).
This means that statements such as “somewhere between 20 and 50 percent of the
entire population of European Romanies was killed by the Nazis” (Berenbaum,
154
1993:129), and the low figure of 250,000 Romani deaths displayed at the U.S.
Holocaust Memorial Museum must be considered underestimations. Several
published estimates (referenced in Hancock, 1988c) put the figure in excess of
one million, and even thirty years ago Pauwels & Bergier listed it at 750,000
(1960:430). That perhaps an even higher number of Romanies were murdered in
the fields and forests where they lived than were murdered in the camps, has been
recognized for some time. A reference to this appeared in the (London) Financial
Times in an article by Tyler, who noted that “between 500,000 and 750,000 were
killed in the German death camps during the war, and another million may have
been shot outside” (1994:3). New information is reaching us all the time which is
pushing the death toll upwards. Dr. Paul Polansky of the Iowa-based Czech
Historical Research Center recently published a report on his discovery of a
hitherto unrecorded concentration camp at Lety in the Czech Republic, which was
used for the disposal of Romanies. Now used as a pig farm, Lety and a chain of
other camps processed mainly Roma, killing them on the spot or sending them on
to Auschwitz. Numbers from here, like those from the Romani camps in northern
Italy, have not yet been figured into the estimate (Strandberg, 1994:1; Pape,
1997). We should nevertheless rejoice in the numbers of those who lived, and not
glorify those of the dead in some horrible body-count; but if we are obliged to
argue with numbers and quantity in this peculiarly American way, then let us look
at the situation from the other side, and count the Romani survivors of the
Holocaust, only five thousand of whom are listed in the official register of the
Zentralrat Deutscher Sinti und Roma in Heidelberg, and only four of whom have
been located in the United States, where over eighty thousand Jewish survivors
live today out of 350,000 still living world-wide. My respected colleague Donald
Kenrick, co-author of The Destiny of Europe’s Romanies, the first full-length
treatment of the Porrajmos, has claimed with some gladness that his own research
points to the lowest figures for Romani deaths by 1945; in his new Romanies
under the swastika (Kenrick, 1995), he estimates that they did not exceed
250,000, and in an article which appeared in The Jewish Quarterly he places it
even lower, at 200,000 (Kenrick, 1994-5:47). In his 1995 book The Holocaust for
Beginners, Stuart Justman put it even lower:
In addition to the Jews, the Nazis murdered prisoners of war, innumerable
Russian civilians, political prisoners, common criminals, Jehovah’s
Witnesses, homosexuals, vagrants and some 100,000 gypsies, among
others (1995:11).
If such estimates can be demonstrated as fact, then surely this is the dialogue we
should be striving for, not a competition over whose losses were greater.
Probably the most reliable statement regarding numbers was made at the first U.S.
155
Conference on Romanies in the Holocaust which took place at Drew University in
November, 1995, when Sybil Milton, senior historian at the U.S. Holocaust
Research Institute in Washington, stated that “[w]e believe that something
between half a million and a million and a half Romanies were murdered in Nazi
Germany and occupied Europe between 1939 and 1945.” 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.” 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.
12) Only Jews qualify as victims of genocidal action; other victimized groups
were casualties of war.
In Sidney Schiffer’s play (see Hancock, 1988:45) a Jewish objection was made to
a Romani’s referring to the Romani Holocaust, and a request followed that it be
renamed the Romani genocide, since that word had already been taken. Now the
word genocide itself seems to have become privileged property for some
Holocaut historians; in their recent book Auschwitz, 1270 to the Present, authors
Debórah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt refer to “[t]he genocide of the Jews and
the mass murder of gypsies and Soviet prisoners of war” (1996:374) in that camp.
But not only does the treatment of Romanies under the Nazis qualify as genocide
(see Israel Charny’s introduction to this volume, and Stannard, this volume and
1996b, and Cornwell, 1996), the treatment today of Romani peoples in parts of
Europe qualifies as genocide according to the United Nations’ definition.
13) Although Romanies were likewise singled out for extermination, they
weren’t humiliated in the way that Jews were.
This is one of the most recent arguments, and one which almost seems to be
grasping to find a way to lessen the Romani experience. Avishai Margalit and
Gabriel Motzkin, both of whom teach at the University of Jerusalem, maintained
in an article published in 1996 that
156
The Nazis had plans for other peoples, and began to apply their programs
to the Poles by liquidating the Polish elites. Gypsies and homosexuals also
figured high on their list, and the whole process was given a trial run in the
partial extermination of the mentally retarded . . . [h]owever, the mentally
retarded, who were murdered through operation Euthanasia were not
humiliated, nor were the gypsies, who were also the victims of planned
extermination, humiliated in an elaborate structure of humiliation like the
one the Nazis created for the Jews (Margalit & Motzkin, 1996:79).
The single source given for this information is Müller-Hill, 1988. Nothing need
be said except that the authors of this statement clearly know nothing of the
history of the treatment of Romani peoples in Germany (in e.g. Hancock, 1989),
and like so many of those who make such careless statements, they likely believed
that no Romanies would read what they had written. Preaching to the converted
yields no change.
14) The “uniqueness” of the Jewish case should be defended at all costs
because it justifies the existence of the Jewish homeland, Israel.
On the main mall of the campus at my university, stands a structure some nine
feet high erected by the Jewish Students’ Association which is a monument to
Israel. It is covered with photographs and newspaper articles, and in the very
middle of it is a yellow placard bearing the words “Israel: The Six Million: Never
Forget.” This is not a new argument, indeed it has been suggested to me by more
than one well-disposed USHMC member, and Zygmunt Bauman explicitly refers
to the way in which “[t]he Jewish state tries to employ the tragic memories as the
certificate of its political legitimacy, a safe-conduct pass for its past and future
policies, and above all, as the advance payment for the injustices it might itself
commit” (1989:ix)3. Lagrou has written more recently of the Holocaust’s being
“gradually integrated as a cornerstone of Israeli national identity” (1997:221).
But it is a specious argument. Israel, a Jewish state, should exist under any
circumstances; speaking as a member of a people without a country, I can feel
very deeply the emotion associated with the possession of a homeland. To
acknowledge that Romanies received the same treatment as Jews, as Miriam
Novitch said “for the same reasons using the same methods,” cannot take
anything away from the enormity of the Jewish tragedy, or diminish the strength
of the right to Israel. One is reminded of Dermot Mulrony’s words in Where the
Day Takes You (Kurt & Rocco, 1992): “What’s mine is mine, and if I share it with
you, it becomes less mine!” I cannot imagine that the rest of the world would
interpret the Romani claim in this way, or see it as a threat to the right to the
existence of a Jewish state.
157
15) No other group was viewed with such disgust and contempt, or so
relentlessly and methodically persecuted, or was selected for total eradication
from the face of the earth.
Romanies don’t match this, I have been told, because Romanies weren’t
mentioned in Mein Kampf, or at the Wannsee Conference, and because some
Romanies were exempt from the death machine, and because a much higher
number of Jews had died by 1945.
Romanies were not mentioned specifically in the documentation of the
Wannsee Conference because by that time (January 20th, 1942), policies against
Jews, subsequent to the directive of December 24th issued four weeks earlier,
automatically included Romanies. The Wannsee Conference in any case was not
a policy or decision making meeting, although it has acquired that interpretation;
its purpose was rather to coordinate existing policies. And no argument was
necessary in Mein Kampf because it was totally unnecessary on Hitler’s part to
make any case for antigypsyism. There was simply no need to convince anybody
of the subhuman status of Romanies, against whom laws were already firmly
entrenched in Germany, despite the guarantees of the National Constitution of the
Weimar Republic. No public conscience ever provoked a defense of the Romani
case, a fact Fraser comments upon in his book The Romanies:
From about 1937 onwards, [Nazi] pressures. . . on Gypsies built up swiftly
and remorselessly, with no hostile public reaction, abroad or at home, of
the kind which had made the Nazis a little more circumspect in their
dealings with the Jews, at least in the early days, because of respect for
world opinion (Fraser, 1993:261-262).
When the question of this indifference was raised following the war, one French
physician commented, rhetorically, that “everyone despises Romanies, so why
exercise restraint? Who will avenge them? Who will bear witness?” (Bernadec,
1979:34). Nor can the excuse that the rest of the world was ignorant of what was
happening be maintained in the Romani case:
Whatever the real state of knowledge or ignorance among the German
civilian population during the Second World War about the transport and
the murder of millions of German and non-German Jews in Europe, the
initial internment of the Roma was kept secret from no one.
Concentration camps were built on the outskirts of the capital city, and the
internment of the Sinti and Roma was not only covered by a number of
Berlin newspapers, but was even joked about in their columns.
158
Psychologists engaged in racial research paid official visits to Marzahn to
study and take extensive film footage of the Romani children at play there.
A major trainline ran right past that camp, and its few survivors recall that
train passengers who pitied their situation, and who knew or suspected that
the interned Roma were surviving on only minimal rations, occasionally
threw packages of food down into the camp enclosure as their train passed
by (Trumpener, 1992:844).
While German anti-Semitism, like antigypsyism over the centuries, has bordered
upon the pathological (see especially Wilson, 1982), there was no one to argue in
support of the Romanies, unlike those who defended the Jewish position. As
Burleigh & Wippermann make clear (op. cit., p. 36), anti-Semitism was not an
undisputed part of the early [German] racial hygiene movement. Ploetz and a
number of other racial hygienists, such as Wilhelm Schallmayer, fiercely
denounced anti-Semitism; indeed, in his 1895 treatise, Ploetz classified Jews as a
part of the superior ‘white race.’” (Proctor, 198?:144n.). On the contrary, in the
early 1890s the Swabian Parliament organized a conference on the “Gypsy scum”
(Das Zigeunergeschmeiß), and in 1899 Alfred Dillmann established the Gypsy
Information Agency (Nachrichtendienst in Bezug auf die Zigeuner) which began
to collect data in the form of genealogical information, fingerprints and
photographs of Romanies throughout the territory. This led to the publication in
1905 of Dillmann’s Zigeuner-Buch, which laid the groundwork for what was to
come a quarter of a century later. It consisted of a lengthy argument for
controlling Romanies, stressing their inherent criminality, and calling them “a
plague against which society must unflaggingly defend itself.” The bulk of the
volume consisted of a register of over 5,000 individuals, which gave date and
place of birth, genealogy, criminal record if any, and so on. The third part of the
book consisted of photographs of Romanies taken from police files throughout the
German states. On February 17th, 1906, the Prussian Minister of the Interior
issued a directive to “Combat the Gypsy Nuisance” (Die Bekämpfung des
Zigeunerunwesens), and established bilateral, anti-Romani agreements with all
neighboring countries. Licenses were required by all Romani people wanting to
live and work in Prussia. In 1909 the Swiss Department of Justice began a
national register of Romanies, while in Hungary it was recommended at a “Gypsy
Policy Conference” that all Romani people be branded on their bodies for easy
identification. In 1912 France introduced the Carnet Anthropométrique, a
document containing personal data (including photograph and fingerprints) which
all Romanies were henceforth required to carry.
“The first anti-Jewish law was promulgated in 1933,” (Burleigh &
Wippermann, op. cit., p. 4), at a time when scores of anti-Romani laws had
already been in effect in Germany for centuries. In 1920, the Minister of Public
159
Welfare in Düsseldorf forbade Romanies from entering any public washing or
recreational facility, such as swimming pools, public baths, spas or parks; this
restriction also came to be applied to Jews after 1933 [Burleigh & Wippermann,
1991:77]); more ominously in that same year, Binding & Hoche published their
treatise on “Lives undeserving of life” (Lebensunwertes Leben), which argued for
the killing of those who were seen to be “dead weight” (Ballastexistenz) within
humanity, including Romanies. This notion of “unworthy life” was incorporated
into Nazi law on July 14th, 1933, less than six months after Hitler came to power,
in his “Law for the prevention of hereditarily diseased offspring.” In 1934,
Romanies were expelled from the trade unions. In June, 1935, the main Nazi
institution to deal with Romanies, the Racial Hygiene and Criminal Biology and
Research Unit was first established, the expressed purpose of which was to
determine whether Romanies and Blacks were human or subhuman, groundwork
on genetic evaluation which provided the model for the subsequent classification
of Jews. Five months later, on November 26th, the Ministry of the Interior, which
partially funded the Research Unit, circulated an order forbidding marriages
between Germans and “Gypsies, Negroes, and their bastard offspring.” On
September 15th, 1935, the Nürnberger Gesetze, the “Nuremberg Law for the
Protection of Blood and Honor” was passed, making marriage between “Aryan”
and “non-Aryan” people illegal. It stated that “[o]f the foreign blood common in
Europe, there are only Jews and Gypsies.” In 1936, in preparation for the
Olympic Games, and for fear of negative world opinion, “anti-Semitic posters and
placards were temporarily removed” from the streets of Berlin by the Nazis
(Burleigh & Wippermann, op. cit., p. 84), at the same time that Romanies were
being cleared from those streets as an eyesore, because visitors had to be “spared
the sight of the ‘Gypsy disgrace’” (Zimmermann, 1990:91), just as they were at
the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona. Just before the Berlin games, 600
Romanies were forcibly detained in a cemetery and next to a sewage dump at
Marzahn, which was “particularly offensive to a people hyper-sensitive about
cleanliness” (Burleigh & Wippermann, op. cit., p. 117); in Spain fifty-six years
later, they were placed in the Campo de la Bota outside of the city. More
significantly, we have now learned that Nazi propaganda encouraging public
support for the incarceration of Romanies was widely distributed together with
the program for those games in 1936. In 1938, more stringent criteria came to be
applied to the definition of “Gypsy;” if two of an individual’s eight greatgrandparents were even part Romani, that individual later was deemed to have too
much “Gypsy blood” to be allowed to live--a criterion twice as strict as that
defining who was Jewish. Indeed, if criteria for the latter had applied equally to
Romanies, some 18,000 (nine-tenths of the total Romani population of Germany
at that time) would have escaped death (Kenrick & Puxon, 1972:68; see also
160
Ehmann, 1981:10). One could argue, therefore, that Romanies in fact were seen
as posing twice the genetic threat to the Herrenvolk that Jews did.
According to eyewitness account, in January or February, 1940, 250
Romani children from Brno in the concentration camp at Buchenwald were used
as guinea pigs for testing the Zyklon B cyanide gas crystals, a lethal insecticide
which from 1941 onwards was used for the mass murders at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
“At Buchenwald then, for the first time, this gas was used for mass murder, and it
was for the murder of innocent Gypsy children” (Proester, 1968).
16) There is no comparison between the wrath which characterized the
Nazis’ determination to destroy the Jews and the way they went about
dealing with Romanies (point made by a member of the audience at the
“Encounters with the Holocaust” conference held at Texas A&M University in
April, 1997).
When questioned, the person making this assumption admitted that she in fact had
no actual knowledge of the way in which the Nazis processed Romanies, but just
“felt” that it was surely the case that Jews were dispatched with more fury. If one
thing typifies the way in which Hitler’s genocidal policies were put into effect, it
was the dispassionate, cold and clinical way in which the “subhumans” were
eradicated, both Jewish and Romani. It has been argued that if any anger were
evident, it was an anger redirected, originating in the transference of feelings of
guilt on the part of the Nazis.
*
*
*
The night of November 9th, 1938, is remembered in the annals of the Jewish
Holocaust as Kristallnacht, or “The Night of Broken Glass,” for it was on this
night that, in response to the murder of a German embassy official in Paris by a
Jewish teenager, over a thousand synagogues were desecrated and nearly a
hundred Jews were killed, while thousands more were arrested. This blatant,
public display of hatred marked the beginning of the open and official sanctioning
of the persecution of an “inferior race.” In effect, it sent a message to the general
public that such violence had full State approval. From this date onwards, antiJewish hostility escalated steadily towards the Holocaust. Nor was this the first
massive anti-Jewish outbreak in 20th Century Germany; in November, 1923, a
violent attack took place in Berlin against numbers of eastern European Jews who
had come there to live (Peukert, 1987:160). For the Romani victims, there were
also mass round-ups and displays of military and police brutality, designed to
show them, and the German public, exactly where they stood in the German
hierarchy, and how they could be treated by ordinary citizens with the approval
161
and encouragement of the government. As early as 1927, between November
23rd and November 26th, armed raids were carried out in Romani communities
throughout Prussia, to enforce a decree issued on November 3rd that year which
required that all Romanies be registered through documentation “in the same
manner as individuals being sought by means of wanted posters, witnesses,
photographs and fingerprints,” (Hase-Mihalik & Kreuzkamp, 1990:140). Even
infants were fingerprinted, and those over six years of age required to carry
identity cards bearing fingerprints and photographs. Eight thousand Romanies
were processed as a result of that raid, more than a third of the entire Romani
population in Germany. The second such action took place between September
18th and September 25th in 1933, when the Reichsminister for the Interior and for
Propaganda ordered the apprehension and arrest of Romanies throughout
Germany, in accordance with “The Law Against Habitual Criminals.” Many
were sent to concentration camps as a result, where they were forced to do penal
labor, and where some underwent sterilization. The most significant military
action, however, occurred during the summer of 1938, between June 12th and
June 18th, when Zigeuneraufräumungswoche or “Gypsy Clean-Up Week” was
ordered. Hundreds of Romanies throughout Germany and Austria were rounded
up, beaten and imprisoned. In Mannswörth, Austria, three hundred were arrested
in this way in a single night.
Following the collapse of the Third Reich, nothing was done to assist the
Romani survivors, no effort made by the liberators to reorient them; instead, the
terms of a 1926 pre-Nazi anti-Romani law which was still in effect ensured that
those lacking a trade remained out of sight, hiding in the abandoned camps, for
fear of arrest and incarceration. Since that time, all of the programs used by the
Nazis to deal with Romanies have been either suggested or implemented by
various European nations—sterilizations in Slovakia, recom-mendations for
incineration in a furnace from an Irish government official, forced incarceration
and deportation in Germany (Kinzer, 1992). Today, the Romani population faces
its severest crisis since the Holocaust; neo-Nazi race crimes against Romanies
have seen rapes, beatings and murders in Germany, Hungary and Slovakia; antiRomani pogroms in Romania and Bulgaria, including lynchings and home
burnings, are increasing. For my people, the Holocaust is not yet over.
The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum has not yet done enough to
educate the world about the Romani experience; there, the “Gypsy” artifacts on
display in the “other victims” corner of the Museum’s third floor, consist of a
violin, a wagon and a woman’s dress--more Hollywood than Holocaust--and very,
very few of the Romani victims and inmates depicted in the photo exhibits
(especially those involving Mengele’s experiments with twins) are identified as
such. Most galling of all was the total absence of the key words “Gypsy,” “Rom,”
“Sinti,” “Romani,” “Zigeuner,” etc. in the computerized question-and-answer
162
bank provided for the public to consult which led, in June, 1993, to an organized
protest at the Museum by a group represented by Ms. Mary Thomas of Adoptive
Parents and Friends of Romani Children demanding that more details of the fate
of Romanies be included in the Museum. They argued that, when their newly
acquired children grow older and begin to ask about their background and the
history of their people, and about the Holocaust in particular, the U.S. Holocaust
Memorial Museum would not be the place to go for their answers, that the
Romani story had been downplayed to the extent of differently representing
historical fact, of revision by omission. That protest led to the circulation of a
petition asking, among other things, that more Romani scholars (rather than nonRomani specialists) be directly involved, that more documentation on the Romani
Holocaust be displayed and made available to visitors to the Museum, and has
resulted in the inclusion of one or two Gypsy entries in the computerized data
bank.
I have been both praised and criticized for bringing attention to these
issues. The director of one Holocaust center referred to me as a trouble-maker;
another writer on the Holocaust called my discussion of the Romani case in the
Jewish context “loathsome.” A representative of the Memorial Council, whom I
have never met, told a researcher who called to find out how to reach me that I
was a “wild man.” while its one-time director told the press that Romani
spokespersons were “cranks” and “eccentrics” (Doolittle, 1984:5), and his
successor reported to the media that we were “naive” (Hirschberg, 1986:A16).
People have gotten up and walked out when it has been my turn to speak at
conferences about the Porrajmos, and one former professor at my own university
adamantly refused even to mention Romanies in his regular course on the
Holocaust. Others have intimated that I should not be pursuing this because I am
not a historian, and am therefore not qualified to engage in this kind of research.
If you think these things don’t hurt me, they do, deeply. There are those reading
this essay who I’m sure are angered by what is being said in these pages, and who
are ready to challenge me. Why should this be? I have tried to remain objective,
and let the facts argue my case. If I can be proven wrong, I am happy to
acknowledge that. I am well aware that for some people, insistence upon getting
all the facts of the Romani experience properly acknowledged has been regarded
as confrontational and even threatening; Yehuda Bauer (1990:1) felt that “antiGypsy sentiment” in Europe was, in his words, “in competition” with “radical
anti-Semitism” there, the “sentiment” in question having led to the murders and
pogroms against Romanies mentioned above, during the same period for which
the 1990 Country Report on Human Rights reported “no incidents of anti-Semitic
violence” (for an extended discussion in this competitive vein, see Margalit,
1996). An August, 1993, report issued by the Nemzetközi Cigány Szöveség on
the other hand quoted a physician from the Romanian town of Teleorman, who
163
said “our war against the Gypsies will start in the fall. Until then, preparations
will be made to obtain arms; first we are going to acquire chemical sprays. We
will not spare minors, either” (Balogh, 1993). Events indicating that this
persecution began to happen shortly thereafter were described in the December
19th, 1993 issue of the San Francisco Chronicle, where the following appeared:
An orgy of mob lynching and house-burning with police collaboration, has
turned into something even more sinister for Romania’s hated Gypsies: the
beginnings of a nationwide campaign of terror launched by groups
modeling themselves on the Ku Klux Klan. . . “We are many, and very
determined. We will skin the Gypsies soon. We will take their eyeballs
out, smash their teeth, and cut off their noses. The first will be hanged”
(Branson, 1993:A1,A15).
Antigypsyism is at an all-time high, and it can only begin to be combatted by
sensitizing the general public to the details of Romani history and suffering. My
purpose in this paper, as a follow-up to that given at the last conference in Oxford,
is to get these issues as they relate to the Holocaust out into the open, to air them
publicly, and hope that a more accurate, and more compassionate, attitude will
prevail.
Resistance to the Romani case must be due at least in part to the lateness
of its arrival on the academic scene; scholarship on the Porrajmos is
comparatively new, so much so that it has brought charges of “bandwagoning”
from some quarters. Our people are traditionally not disposed to keeping alive the
terrible memories from our history—nostalgia is a luxury for others, and the
Porrajmos was not the first, but the second historical attempt to destroy the
Romanies as a people, following Charles VI’s extermination order in 1721, and a
meeting of European national representatives was held in 1908, to formulate “an
international plot legally to expel the gypsies from Europe” (Holroyd, 1975:358).
Romanies in the United States, for example, have obliterated entirely from their
collective memories all recollection of the five and a half centuries of slavery in
Romania which their great great grandparents came to America to escape during
the last century (Hancock, 1988). Survivors of the Holocaust are today likewise
reluctant to speak about their experiences, and so it is that the story is only now
beginning to unfold. The task of those collecting testimonies is made the more
difficult because for some groups, the Sinti in particular, there are cultural
restrictions upon speaking about the dead.
It has to be said too that there is also an element of racism evident in the
Jewish response; after all, Romanies are a “Third World people of color,” as
Lopate coins the term in his discussion of the relative value of victimhood
(1989:292); Anton Fojn (“Bubili”) wrote of the SS guards’ whipping him and his
164
father off the transport and through the gates of Dachau, and calling them “Congo
niggers” on account of their dark skin (Friedman, 1990:18). I have been told—off
the record—that some Council members do not want to be judged by the
company they fear they might have to keep. The then director of the Holocaust
Memorial Center in Dallas told me in 1987, apparently without intent to offend,
that she believed that Jews did not want to be associated with Romanies in the
Holocaust because it would “detract from its solemnity.” In every single public
opinion poll, including that conducted in the United States (and reported in the
January 8th, 1992, issue of The New York Times), ‘Gypsies’ are listed as the most
discriminated-against minority, the most despised ethnic population, and some of
the stereotypes have evidently rubbed off on some Council members. At one
presentation I gave at a Hillel Center, I was interrupted by a woman who leapt to
her feet and angrily demanded why I was even comparing the Romani case to the
Jewish, when Jews had given so much to the world and Romanies were merely
parasites and thieves. On another occasion a gentleman in the audience stood up
and declared that he would never buy a book on the Holocaust written by a
Romani. I learned from James Michael Holmes of Phoenix Productions
International that two Hollywood studios have already declined to consider an
updated script of the 1947 film Golden Earrings, because it is a screenplay about
the Holocaust which does not deal with its Jewish victims. When research
revealed in a book published recently that “Esther,” the girl peering forlornly
from a transport wagon leaving for Auschwitz and who was assumed to be Jewish
was in fact a twelve-year-old Sinti girl named Settela, the Jewish community in
the Netherlands became furious (Wagenaar, 1995). Jan Morris began her review
of a newly published book on Romanies in the New Europe, with the words “[t]he
Jews are tragically conspicuous by their absence, the [G]ypsies are all to often
maddeningly present” (Morris, 1995:4).
Working to alter attitudes of this kind is a mighty task indeed, and was one
reason behind my co-founding the Romani-Jewish Alliance some years ago,
which works to dispel anti-Jewish and anti-Romani stereotypes, and to educate
both populations about the other’s experience. I should say here, incidentally, in
answer to an often-asked question, that there are many Romanies who are Jewish,
and many more Romani-Jewish marriages. During the war such “marriages”
characterized one concentration camp in eastern Serbia in particular, where
Romanies and Jews were held before transportation. Even popular attempts to
document our story can do more harm than good; an example is the film version
of Ramati’s And the Violins Stopped Playing (1988), which is so full of
misrepresentation and distortions of the truth that it would have been better left
undone; among other things it suggests that Romanies were murdered in
Auschwitz, for example, lest they survive as witnesses to the fate of the Jewish
prisoners.
165
It might also be acknowledged that some resistance is grounded simply in
disbelief, in the assumption that “if this is true, why haven’t we heard about it
before?” I must admit that, for a very long time, as I’d search through the
“shelves tightly packed,” through the innumerable books on the Holocaust
looking for references to Romanies, I would skim right over those sections
dealing with the non-Romani victims; I am ashamed to say that they just were not
as important to me, so consumed was I with my search. It was only later that I
began to take the time to learn about what happened to other groups, and to be
appalled and aggrieved by what I read. When the existence of one’s entire people
is threatened so barbarously, anything else simply gets in the way. But others
have come to do as I did, and are examining the cases of those besides their own
without prejudgment, and I am encouraged by the responses forthcoming from
those who have made the effort, with an open mind, to examine the details of
what Romanies suffered at the hands of the Nazis. I have said many times that
only Jews can really come close to understanding the impact the Porrajmos has
had on the Romani population, and I venture to think that only Romanies can
come close, on an emotional level, to understanding the Jewish tragedy. The
Holocaust, sadly, just doesn’t seem to mean as much for anyone else. But neither
Jew nor Rom can fully understand the other’s experience, then or now, nor should
either begin to presume to interpret for the other. For this reason I would like to
see the individual “uniquenesses,” if you like, emphasized by a greater use of the
ethnic terminology: Shoah or Khurbn for the Jewish Holocaust, Porrajmos for the
Romani. The word “Holocaust,” I feel, is used too casually to have the meaning
intended for it.
I have been deliberately critical of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council
and the Museum in this essay, and make no apology for that, for our relationship
over the past decade has been a stormy one, and one which has caused me
considerable personal frustration. It is, after all, the national memorial to the
victims of Nazism, and an international educational resource. The 1987
Conference on other victims, for example, included a panel on Romanies, but no
Romanies were invited to speak or even participate in its planning. And on April
23rd, 1996, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum organized a public panel
discussion entitled “Sinti and Roma during the Holocaust and Today,” again in
which no Romanies were invited to participate. The promotional wording in the
calendar announcing the discussion stated merely that “Sinti and Roma suffered
greatly as victims of Nazi persecution and genocide,” making no mention at all of
their being, like Jews, specific targets of the Final Solution. In 1995, the
Education Committee of the Holocaust Council prepared a brochure on the
Romani victims of the Holocaust, which it distributed in its education package at
the 23rd Scholars’ Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches in March,
1996; this was the first time that William Duna, the former and only Romani
166
representative on the Council and member of the education committee, learned of
the existence of the new publication. It is this assumption that we can be
“discussed” in our absence, and having non-Romani scholars talk about us rather
than to us, which is the most hurtful and demeaning. I could not imagine that the
Jewish academic establishment would tolerate for one moment a “panel
discussion” on the fate of Jews in the Holocaust conducted with no Jewish
presence or input. I cannot imagine a Holocaust Memorial center with no Jewish
participation. But we must bear this indignity, as though we are incapable of
representing ourselves, of being in charge of our own history. On 21 September
2000, the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial
Museum held a symposium entitled Roma and Sinti: Under-Studied Victims of
Nazism. Not of the Holocaust, notice. I was asked to find the invited speakers—
which I did—but the organizers insisted, against my very strenuous protests, that
Guenther Lewy also be included on the program. Lewy is a revisionist who not
only denies that Romanies were a part of the Holocaust, but that they were not
even the victims of genocide (see Hancock, 2001 for my review of his book). He
said as much in Washington, but the closing speaker at the same symposium was
Raul Hilberg, generally considered to be the preeminent scholar of the Holocaust.
In his talk he not only pointed out the weakness of Lewy’s position, he also
emphasized the special relationship which exists between Jews and Romanies and
their shared experience in the Holocaust. I sat on the stage and wept at his words.
But when the Proceedings were published (Shapiro & Ehrenreich, 2002), Lewy’s
paper was included but Hilberg’s was left out.
Many factors, many personalities, have been involved in the
misunderstandings and anger generated by the dialogue between Romanies and
the Council (see e.g. Wiesenthal, 1989:218-220 and Linnenthal, 1995:228-247).
Speaking at the Council’s 1987 conference on non-Jewish victims in Washington
mentioned above, Erika Thurner drew attention to the evident lack of concern for
the Holocaust’s Romani victims:
Gypsies have generally been forgotten or been reserved for the footnotes
of historical investigation. . . this very position, as a fringe social group
with negligible social status, is responsible for the fact that, after 1945, the
Gypsy Holocaust was not acknowledged for so many years, and continues
to be neglected to a certain degree to this very day. Ignorance as to the
fate of the Sinti and Roma in the Third Reich has made historical
reconstruction especially difficult. It has led to further discrimination
against Gypsies, and to the refusal to recognize their right to restitution of
both a material and ideal nature (1987:7).
167
In the years since Erika Thurner made those observations, there has been a
steadily growing acknowledgement of the Romani tragedy, and an acceptance of
the fact that the Jews and the Romanies were equally victim to the techniques and
policies of the Nazi death machine. But along with this recognition at the
academic and historical level, so efforts to singularize the Jewish experience have
gained, at least for some of its champions, an almost desperate impetus (for
example Katz, 1994). Perhaps we should be examining not what the challenges
are to the procedural and historical details with which scholars attempt to make
their case, but why it is so vitally important to some of them to privatize the
Holocaust--why they strive so passionately to do so.
This is beginning to attract the attention of the outside world. There is a
growing reaction in print to the Jewish exclusivist position (Fox, 1995, and
Rosen, 1995), and in an essay in Z Magazine in which he makes the case that
uniquist scholars such as Deborah Lipstadt and Stephen Katz are as guilty of reworking the historical record by failing to acknowledge Roma, as revisionists are
in denying that the Holocaust even happened, Ward Churchill goes so far as to
suggest that Jews are directly responsible for keeping the details of the Romani
Holocaust away from the public:
Nothing at all was done to save the Gypsies from their identical fate, and
in this connection international Jewish organizations have no better record
than do the governments of the United States, Great Britain and Canada.
To the contrary, it was arguably Jewish organizations that served as the
vanguard in obscuring what was happening to the Gypsies even as it
happened, a posture they’ve never abandoned (1997a:44).
These words were edited out of the same essay reprinted in A Little Matter of
Genocide (Churchill, 1997b), and the original title of the present chapter, “Jewish
Responses to the Romani Holocaust” was similarly modified to its present
wording.
I said in the earlier published version of this paper that I was confident that
open recognition of the Romani position will continue to grow in Washington. I
said that we have gone from having no representation at all on the Council, to
having one member; but I spoke too soon. That member’s term has expired, and
the President has declined to reappoint him--or any Rom. This decision came in
the same week that Mr. Clinton assured the nation of his commitment to bring
non-white minorities into the American mainstream, and to deal with issues of
racial inequality in society. The Council did formally protested against
antigypsyism in Europe at the administrative level (Meyerhoff, 1992), but it will
be a long time before my hope that we will eventually be moved out of the
category of “other victims,” and be fully recognised as the only population,
168
together with Jews, which was slated for its eventual complete eradication, will be
realized. Now, without even representation, we are back to square one.
I want to be able to thumb through any of the many published treatments
of the Holocaust at my local bookstore and find comprehensive information in
them about what happened to my people--at present, we’re usually not listed in
their indexes at all. One of my most recent purchases was Louis Snyder’s
Encyclopedia of the Third Reich, but not only does it contain not one single
reference to Romanies, neither do Robert Ritter or Eva Justin or Gerhard Stein or
Sophie Erhardt find a place in its list of entries. This is true also for Wheal, Pope
& Taylor’s Encyclopedia of the Second World War, Wistrich’s Who’s Who in
Nazi Germany, and Keegan’s Who Was Who in World War II, as well as for most
other books on the Holocaust. On the same page that he writes of Himmler’s
“conclusive solution to the Gypsy question” (the sole mention of Romanies in the
book), Lang discusses the Endlösung only in terms of its being “the term by
which the Nazis chose designate their genocidal war against the Jews” (Lang,
1990). It is an eerie and disheartening feeling to pick up such books, and find the
attempted genocide of one’s people written completely out of the historical
record. Perhaps worse, in the English-language translation of at least one book,
that by Lucjan Dobroszycki of The Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto, the entire
reference to the liquidation of the Romani camp there (entry No. 22 for April 29th
and 30th, 1942, in the original work), has been deleted deliberately. Such
deliberate omission has been remarked upon by Sybil Milton, who says (1990:2)
Analyses of the concentration camps by Martin Broszat and others ignore
the pre-1939 Zigeunerlager (special internment camps for Romanies) as
well as the simultaneous presence of Romanies in virtually the entire
expanded concentration camp system after 1939. The most blatant
example is Eberhard Kolb’s deletion of any reference to Romanies in his
history of Bergen-Belsen. Parallel lacunae are evident in current literature
about the ghettos in Poland, the Baltic, and the occupied parts of the
Soviet Union, although memoir literature does include Contempor- aneous
accounts of the simultaneous incar-ceration of Romanies. One example
suffices to illustrate this point: although Adam Czerniakow’s diary records
the presence of both German and Polish Romanies in the Warsaw ghetto
in April and June 1942, Yisrael Gutman’s study avoids even passing
mention of them.
Similarly, the preoccupation with antisemitism as a central
motivation in Nazi policy has resulted in Michael Marrus’s failure to
include Romanies in his recent analyses of the historiography of the
Holocaust, although literature is available. This oversight is also found in
such new studies as Robert Gellately’s analysis of the patterns of racial
169
denunciation, which unfortunately does not mention relevant Romani
cases.
I have been told, but have not yet verified, that translations of other works on the
Holocaust have also had entries on Romanies removed. Furthermore, I do not
want to read references to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in the national
press and learn only that it is a monument to “the plight of European Jews,” as the
New York Times told its readers in its December 23rd, 1993, issue. I want to be
able to watch epics such as Schindler’s List and learn that Romanies were a
central part of the Holocaust too; or other films, such as Escape from Sobibor, a
Polish camp where, according to its Kommandant Franz Stangl in his memoirs
thousands of Romanies were murdered, and not to hear the word “Gypsy” except
once, and then as the name of somebody’s dog. This latter example is not merely
offensive, it is cruel and callous. Camp survivor B. Stawska (in Fickowski,
1989:43) is one who has described the transportation of Romanies to Sobibor:
In November, 1942, the pogrom against the Jews and Gypsies began, and
they were shot on a mass scale in street executions. The Gypsies were
driven into the square at the fore of the crowd, and after them the Jews. It
was cold, and the Gypsy women were weeping loudly. They had all their
possessions on their backs, including eiderdowns; everything that they
had, but all of that was taken away from them later. The Jews behaved
very calmly, but the Gypsies cried a lot—you could hear one loud
sobbing. They were taken to the station and loaded into goods wagons,
which were sealed and taken to stations beyond Chelm, to Sobibór, where
they were burnt in the ovens.
National Public Radio in Washington, DC, covered the 50th anniversary
of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau on January 26th, 1995, extensively,
though Romanies were never once mentioned, despite being well represented at
the commemoration, at least outside the camp. In his closing report on NPR’s
Weekend Edition on January 28th, Michael Goldfarb described how “candles
were placed along the tracks that delivered Jews and Poles to their death.” But it
is little wonder that Romanies weren’t mentioned; they were not allowed to
participate. An article on the Auschwitz commemoration in the British (but not
the American) press dated January 28th included a photograph of a group of
Romanies staring mournfully through a wire fence, with a caption reading “Coldshouldered: Gipsies, whose ancestors were among Auschwitz victims, are forced
to watch the ceremony from outside the compound” (Stapinska, 1995:5). In a
speech given at that ceremony, Elie Wiesel said that the Jewish people “were
singled out for destruction during the Holocaust.” Nor was that the first time; in a
170
New York Times article five years before that entitled “At a death camp, Gypsies
confront indifference,” writer Marlise Simons wrote of the Romani victims at
Mauthausen being treated as a “dismissive afterthought” in a commemorative
ceremony that year (Simons, 1990), quoting one Holocaust historian who said that
“prejudice against Gypsies has permeated all levels of our society, the academic
world, the bureaucracy.” British coverage of the present volume in the Times
Higher Education Supplement focused entirely upon the Romani issue (Cornwell,
1996), while the three-page review in the U.S. equivalent, the Chronicle of Higher
Education, Romanies are referred to just once in a nine-line paragraph (Shea,
1996). In a CNN news feature on the Romani suit against the Swiss banks
televised on June 9th, 1997, based upon numerous information-seeking phone
calls to the Romani Union office, the number of Romanies murdered in the
Holocaust was announced as “two hundred and fifty thousand,” despite the U.S.
Holocaust Research Institute’s current estimate of “between a half and one and a
half million” being provided to them. The BBC’s World at War segment entitled
“Genocide” mentions the 1935 law forbidding Aryans from marrying Jews, but
fails to say that the very same law also referred to Romanies; it mentions the
Polish victims repeatedly, but remains completely silent about Romanies, against
whom—unlike Poles—the Final Solution did operate. The first group of
concentration camp inmates pictured in that documentary is of Sinti prisoners at
Buchenwald, but the viewer isn’t told this. But as Reimer & Reimer point out,
“considering that the Gypsies are still discriminated against throughout Europe,
including Germany, it is perhaps not surprising that they have been virtually
excluded from films on the Holocaust” (1992:165). And in Germany, where it all
began, Romanies have even yet to be included in the national Holocaust
memorial, an omission which attracted the international media (Anon., 1992),
even though the Chairman of the Jewish community in Berlin, Heinz Galinski,
speaking at a ceremony commemorating the Romani victims of the Porrajmos
fifteen years ago, acknowledged publicly that “Jews and Gypsies were both
singled out as ‘lives unworthy of life’” (1980:77). Surely genocide of the
magnitude suffered by the Romani people deserves acknowledgement far beyond
that which it now receives.
That attitudes are beginning to change and that awareness is beginning to
grow, was evidenced at the 26th Scholars’ Conference on the Holocaust and the
Churches held in Minneapolis in March, 1996, entitled “A Mandate for the 21st
Century.” Here, Yehuda Bauer initiated a public statement in the name of the
Conference, issued to the media accompanied by twelve pages of signatures
supporting it, and officially deploring the antigypsyism which is escalating
throughout Europe. It read:
171
Fifty years after the end of World War II, one of the most terrible
genocide acts of the Nazi regime, the mass destruction of the Romani
(Gypsy) people, is still being ignored. Their continued victification,
discrimination and persecution on racist grounds, reminiscent of Nazi
attitudes, has not ceased, especially in the countries of Europe. It is the
sense of the following scholars who participated at the 26th Annual
Scholars’ Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches, that it is
appropriate for democratic governments, religious organizations, academic
and civil bodies, to call upon governments and political parties in the
countries mentioned to act forcefully against anti-Romani policies which,
if continued, may well create another political genocidal situation.
Notes
1First
presented at the Remembering for the Future International Conference on
the Holocaust, Berlin, 13th-17th March, 1994. I have been told that this essay is
probably what caused me to be dropped, sar tati kolompiri, from the Project on
Ethnic Relations’ Romani Advisory Council and to be similarly distanced from a
number of other Roma Rights organizations [see essay No. 12 in the present
collection]. This is a somewhat updated version of the essay first published in
1995.
2Earlier
references to the situation of Romanies in Nazi Germany are Sultzberger
(1939), Max (1946), Kochanowski (1946), Maximoff (1946) and Molitor (1947).
3Timothy
Luke has discussed this issue in connection with the construction of the
U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the exhibits throughout which “stress the
plight of Jews under Nazi persecution as well as reemphasize the necessity for
Israel’s sovreign autonomy as a nation State after World War II” (1996:125).
172
References cited
Alexander, Edward. “Review of Lopate,” Congress Monthly, May/June, 1990, p.
13.
Anon., 1950. “How the Gipsies were persecuted,” The Wiener Library Bulletin,
4(3/4):18.
Anon., 1956. “Romanies in the Third Reich,” The Wiener Library Bulletin,
10(1/2):11.
Anon., 1964. “At Auschwitz, Romanies fought Gestapo killers,” The Lubbock
Avalanch Journal, March 20th, p. B5.
Anon., 1992. “Holocaust memorial omits Romanies,” The Atlanta Constitution,
Wednesday, July 15th, p. A-5.
Balogh Sandor. “Following in the footsteps of the Ku Klux Klan: Anti-Gypsy
organization in Romania.” Nemzetközi Cigány Szövetség Bulletin No. 5, New
York, 1993.
Bamberger, Edgar, (ed.). Der Völkermord an den Sinti und Roma in der
Gedenkstättenarbeit. Heidelberg: Dokumentations- und Kulturzentrum Deutscher
Sinti und Roma, 1994.
Bamberger, Edgar, & Annegret Ehmann, (eds.). Kinder und Jugendlicher als
Opfer des Holocaust. Heidelberg: Dokumentations- und Kulturzentrum Deutscher
Sinti und Roma. 1995.
Bauer, Yehuda. “Whose Holocaust?” Midstream, November, 1980, pp. 42-46.
Bauer, Yehuda, 1994. [Response to Papazian (1994) in] “Was the Holocaust
unique?,” Midstream, 30(4):19-25.
Bauer, Yehuda. “Continuing ferment in eastern Europe,” SICSA Report,
4(1/2):1,1990, p. 4.
Bauer, Yehuda. “Romanies.” In Gutman & Berenbaum (eds.), 1994:441-455.
Bauer, Yehuda. “The trauma of the Holocaust: Some historical perspectives.”
Keynote address, 26th Annual Scholars’ Conference on the Holocaust and the
Churches, University of St. Thomas, March 3rd, 1996.
Bauman, Zygmunt. Modernity and the Holocaust. Cambridge: The Polity Press,
1989.
Berenbaum, Michael. The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust as
Told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Little, Brown & Co.:
Boston, Toronto and London, 1993.
Bernadec, Christian. L’Holocaust Oublié. Paris: Editions France-Empire, 1979.
Binding, Karl, & Alfred Hoche. Die Freigabe der Vernichtung Lebensunwerten
Lebens. Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1920.
Block, Martin. Die Zigeuner: Ihr Leben und Ihre Seele. Bibliographisches
Institut: Leipzig, 1936.
173
Braham, Randolph, (ed.). Perspectives on the Holocaust. Kluwer-Nijhoff
Publishers: Boston, 1983.
Branson, Louise. “Romanian Romanies being terrorized,” The San Francisco
Chronicle, Sunday, 19th December, 1993, pp. A1, p.15.
Breitman, Richard. The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution.
Hanover & London: University Press of New England, 1991.
Brenna, Susan. “Housing the memories of genocide,” Newsday, Friday,
September 2nd, 1988, pp. 2-5.
Broad, Percy. “KZ Auschwitz: Erinnerungen eines SS-Mannes,” Hefte von
Auschwitz, 9:7-48, 1966.
Burke, Jacqueline (ed.). Proceedings of the Conference entitled in the Holocaust:
The Nazi Assault on Sinti and Roma. Center for Holocaust Studies, Drew
University, Madison, NJ, 1996.
Burleigh, Michael, & Wolfgang Wippermann. The Racial State: Germany,
1933-1945. Cambridge: The University Press, 1991.
Charmley, John. Churchill: The End of Glory. New York: Harcourt Brace,
1993.
Churchill, Ward, 1996-1997a. “Assaults on truth and memory,” Z Magazine,
December, 1996, pp. 31-37, and February, 1997, pp. 42-47.
Churchill, Ward, 1997b. A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in
the Americas, 1492 to the Present. San Francisco: City Lights Books.
Coon, C.S. “Have the Jews a racial identity?,” in Graeber & Britt, pp. 20-37.
Cornwell, Tim. “Massacre denied a page in history,” The Times Higher
Education Supplement, July 12th, 1996, p. 17.
Crowe, David, & John Kolsti (eds.). The Romanies of Eastern Europe. Armonk:
E.C. Sharpe Publishers, 1991.
DeSmet, Kate. “Comments outrage area Jews,” The Detroit News, December
31st, 1990, p. B-3.
Dillmann, Alfred. Zigeuner-Buch. Munich: Wilsche Verlag, 1905.
Doolittle, Leslie. “Romanies say Holocaust project snubbing them,” The Dallas
Times Herald, June 28th, 1984, p. B6.
Douglas, Lawrence. “Film as witness: Screening ‘Nazi concentration camps’
before the Nuremberg Trials,” The Yale Law Journal, 105(2):449-481, 1985.
Dwork, Debórah, & Robert Jan van Pelt. Auschwitz, 1270 to the Present. New
York & London: Norton, Ltd., 1996.
Ehmann, Annegret. “A short history of the discrimination and persecution of the
European Romanies and their fate under Nazi rule.” Lecture, Institute of
Contemporary Jewry, The Hebrew University, January 27th, 1981.
Eisenberg, Azriel. Witness to the Holocaust. The Pilgrim Press: New York,
1981.
174
Eisner, Jack P. “The genocide bomb: The holocaust through the eyes of a
survivor,” in Braham, (ed.), 1983:149-163.
Fackenheim, Emil. The Jewish Return into History. Syracuse: The University
Press, 1978.
Fackenheim, Emil. To Mend the World. New York: Schocken Books, 1982.
Fickowski, Jerzy. The Romanies in Poland. Warsaw: Interpress, 1989.
Fox, John P. “The Holocaust: A ‘non-unique’ event for all humanity?,”
Remembering for the Future, II:1863-1878. Oxford: The Pergamon Press, 1988.
Fox, John P. The Nazi extermination of the Romanies: Genocide, Holocaust, or a
‘minor irritant’?, paper presented at the Conference of the Association of
Genocide Scholars, Williamsburg, VA, June 14th-16th, 1995.
Fraser, Angus. The Romanies. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993.
Friedlander, Henry. The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the
Final Solution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995.
Friedlander, Henry. “Die Vernichtung der Behinderten, der Juden und der Sinti
und Roma,” in Bamberger & Ehmann, 1995:15-28.
Friedman, Ina. The Other Victims: First-Person Stories of non-Jews Persecuted
by the Nazis. Houghton-Mifflin Co.: Boston, 1990.
Galinski, Heinz. “Dieses Gedenken sei uns Mahnung zum Handeln,” Sinti und
Roma in Ehemaligen KZ Bergen-Belsen am 27 Oktober 1979. Göttingen:
Gesellschaft für Bedröhte Völker, 1980, p. 76-81.
Gilbert, Martin. The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe during the
Second World War. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1985.
Grabitz, Helge, Klaus Bästlein & Johannes Tuchel (eds.). Die Normalität des
Verbrechens. Berlin: Hentrich, 1994.
Graeber, I., & S.H. Britt, (eds.). Jews in a Gentile world. New York, 1942.
Grove, Lloyd. “Lament of the Romanies: 40 years after Auschwitz, petitioning
for a place.” The Washington Post, July 21st, p. C4.
Gutman, Israel, (ed.). Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. New York: Macmillan,
1990.
Gutman, Israel, & Michael Berenbaum, (eds.). Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death
Camp. Bloomington and Indianapolis:
Indiana UP, in association with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council.
Hancock, Ian F. “Romanies, Jews and the Holocaust,” Shmate: A Journal of
Progressive Jewish Thought, 17, 1987, pp. 6-15.
Hancock, Ian. The Pariah Syndrome: An Account of Gypsy Slavery and
Persecution. 2nd. edn., Ann Arbor: Karoma Publishers, 1988.
Hancock, Ian, F. “Uniqueness, Romanies and Jews,” Remembering for the
Future: Jews and Christians During and After the Holocaust. Oxford: The
Pergamon Press, 1988b, pp. 2017-2025.
Hancock, Ian F. “‘Uniqueness’ of the victims: Romanies, Jews and the
175
Holocaust,” Without Prejudice: International Review of Racial Discrimination,
1(2), 1988c, pp. 45-67.
Hancock, Ian F. “Gypsy history in Germany and neighboring lands: A
chronology leading to the Holocaust,” in Crowe & Kolsti, 1991:11-30.
Hancock, Ian F. “The roots of antigypsyism: the the Holocaust and after,” in J.
Burke, (ed.), 1996:23-46.
Hancock, Ian F. “Downplaying the Porrajmos: The trend to minimize the
Romani Holocaust.” Journal of Genocide Research, 2001, 3(1):79-85.
Hase-Mihalik, Eva von, & Doris Kreuzkamp. Du Kriegst Auch einen Schönen
Wohnwagen: Zwangslager für Sinti und Roma Während des Nationalsozialismus
in Frankfurt am Main. Frankfurt: Brandes & Apsel, 1990.
Henderson, Keith. “College students learn the meaning of the Holocaust,”
TheBaltimore Sun, July 27th, 1986, p. 5C.
Hilberg, Raul. The Destruction of the European Jews. Chicago: Quadrangle B
Books, 1961.
Hirschberg, Charles.
“Romanies lobby for representation on Holocaust
Memorial Council,” The Washington Post, Sunday, March 9th, 1986, p. A16.
Holroyd, Michael, 1975. Augustus John: A Biography. London: Heinemann.
Justman, Stuart. The Holocaust for Beginners. New York: Writers and Readers
Publishing, Inc., 1995.
Katz, Katalin. [Letter to N. Trehan dated September 17th, 1995]. Jerusalem.
Katz, Steven. “Quantity and interpretation: Issues in the comparative analysis of
the Holocaust,” Remembering for the Future: Jews and Christians During and
After the Holocaust. Oxford: Pergamon, Vol. 3, 1988, pp. 200-216.
Katz, Steven. The Holocaust in historical context. Oxford: The University Press,
1994. Vol. I: The Holocaust and mass death before the modern age.
Keable, Penelope. Creators, creatures and victim-survivors. Unpublished
doctoral dissertation, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia, 1995.
Keegan, John, (ed.). Who Was Who in World War II. New York: Thomas
Crowell, 1978.
Kenrick, Donald. Romanies Under the Swastika. Hatfield: Hertfordshire
University Press, 1995.
Kenrick, Donald. “The Nazis and the Romanies: A fresh look,” The Jewish
Quarterly, 41(4):46-47, 1994-5.
Kenrick, Donald, & Grattan Puxon. The Destiny of Europe’s Gypsies. Sussex
University Press, Chatto and Heinemann: London, 1972.
Kinzer, Stephen. “Germany cracks down: Romanies come first.” The New York
Times, Sunday, September 27th, 1992, p. 1.
Kochanowski, Jan. “Some notes on the Romanies of Latvia,” Journal of the
Gypsy Lore Society, 3rd. series, 25(1/2):34-39, 25(3/4):112-116, 1946.
Kohn, Marek. The Race Gallery. Jonathan Cape: London, 1995.
176
König, Ulrich. Sinti und Roma unter dem Nationalsozialismus. Bochum:
Brockmeyer Verlag, 1989.
Lagnado, Lucette M., & Sheila Cohn Dekel. Children of the Flames: The
Untold Story of the Twins of Auschwitz. William Morrow: New York, 1991.
Lagrou, Pieter. “Victims of genocide and national memory: Belgium, France and
The Netherlands, 1939-1945,” Past & Present, 154:181-222, 1997.
Lang, Berel. Metaphysical racism, or biological warefare by other means,” in
Zack, ed., pp. 17-27.
Linnenthal, Edward. Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America’s
Holocaust Museum. New York: Viking Press, 1995.
Lopate, Philip. “Resistance to the Holocaust,” in Rosenberg, ed., pp. 285-308.
Luebke, David M. The Nazi Persecution of Sinti and Ròma. United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum Research Brief. April 18th, 1990.
Luke, Timothy W. “Memorializing mass murder: entertainment at the United
States Holocaust Memorial Museum,” Arena, 6:123-143, 1996.
Lutz, Brenda Davis & James M. Lutz. “Romanies as victims of the Holocaust,”
Holocaust and Genocide Studies, :346-359, 1995.
Mais, Yitzchak. [Correspondence with Ian Hancock dated May 11th,1988].
Margalit, Avishai, & Gabriel Motzkin. “The uniqueness of the Holocaust,”
Philosophy and Public Affairs, 25(1):65-83, winter, 1996.
Margalit, Gilad. Antigypsyism in the Political Culture of the Federal Republic of
Germany: A Parallel with Antisemitism?. ACTA (Analysis of Current Trends in
Antisemitism). Monograph No. 9, The Vidal Sassoon International Center for the
Study of Antisemitism, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1996.
Max, Frédéric. “Le sort des Tsiganes dans les prisons et les camps de
concentration de l’Allemagne Hitlérienne,” Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society,3rd
series, 25(1/2):24-34, 1946.
Maximoff, Matéo. “Germany and the Romanies,” Journal of the Gypsy Lore
Society, 3rd series, 25(3/4):104-108, 1946.
Meier, Charles S. The Unmasterable Past. Harvard University Press: Cambridge
& London, 1988.
Meyerhoff, Harvey. “Council decries Germany’s treatment of Romanies,” U.S.
Holocaust Memorial Council Newsletter, Winter issue, 1992-3, p. 8.
Milton, Sybil, “Reassessing the racial context of the Holocaust.” Paper presented
at the 1990 meeting of The American Historical Association, New York,1990a.
Milton, Sybil. “The context of the Holocaust,” German Studies Review, 13(2),
1990b, 269-283.
Milton, Sybil. “Romanies and the Holocaust,” The History Teacher, 24(4), 1991a,
pp.375-217.
Milton, Sybil. “The racial context of the Holocaust,” Social Education, February,
1991b, pp. 106-110.
177
Milton, Sybil. “Nazi policies towards Roma and Sinti, 1933-1945,” Journal of
the Gypsy Lore Society, 5th series, 2(1), 1992, pp. 1-18.
Milton, Sybil. “Antechamber to Birkenau: The Zigeunerlager after 1933,” in
Grabitz et al., eds., pp. 241-259. 1994a.
Milton, Sybil.
“Sinti und Roma als ‘vergessene Opfergruppe’ in der
Gedenkstättenarbeit,” in Bamberger, pp. 53-62. 1994b.
Milton, Sybil. “Der Weg zur ‘Endlösung der Zigeunerfrage’: Von der
Ausgrenzung zur Ermordung der Sinti und Roma,” in Bamberger & Ehmann,
1995:29-52.
Molitor, Jan. “The fate of a German Gypsy,” Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society,
n.s., 26:49, 1947.
Morris, Jan. “The lost tribes of Europe,” (book section: anthropology), The
Sunday Times (London), October 15th, 1995. P. 4.
Müller-Hill, Benno. Murderous Science: Elimination by Scientific Selection of
Jews, Romanies and Others, 1933-1945. Oxford: The University Press, 1988.
Nemeth, David. “Contrasting realities and the Gypsy Holocaust,” Newsletter of
the Gypsy Lore Society, 17(3):3-4, August, 1994.
Papazian, Pierre. “A ‘unique uniqueness’?,” Midstream, 30(4):14-18, 1984.
Pape, Markus. A Nikdovám Nebude Vidit: Dokument o Koncentratním Tabore
Lety u Pisku. Prague: GplusG, 1997.
Patai, R., & J. Patai-Wing. The myth of the Jewish race. Detroit, 1989.
Pauwels, Louis, & J. Bergier. Le Matin des Magiciens. Gallimard: Paris, 1960.
Perlez, Jane. “In Auschwitz, snow faintly falls on the living dead,” The New York
Times, January 28th, 1995, p. 5.
Petersen, William. “Jews as a race.” Midstream, Feb.-March, 1988, pp. 35-37.
Peukert, Detlev. The Weimar Republic. Hill & Wang: New York, 1987.
Pischel, Richard. “Der Heimath der Zigeuner,” Deutsche Rundschau, 36:353375, 1883.
Pollack, Robert. “The fallacy of biological Judaism,” The Jewish Daily Forward,
March 7th, p. 9, 2003.
Proctor, Robert.
“From Anthropologie to Rassenkunde in the German
anthropological tradition,” in Stocking (ed.), 1988:138-179.
Proester, F. Nacistická okupace: Vrazdeni Cs. Cikán v Buchenwaldu. Report for
Miriam Novitch, Document No. ÚV CSPB K-135 on deposit in the Archives othe
Museum of the Fighters Against Nazism, Prague, 1968.
Ramati, Alexander. And the Violins Stopped Playing. Screenplay distributed by
Odyssey Films and based upon his documentary novel of the same name (Hodder
& Stoughton, New York, 1985). 1988.
Reimer, Robert C., & Carol J. Reimer. Nazi Retro-Film: How German Narrative
Cinema Remembers the Past. Twayne Publishers: New York, 1992.
178
Rosen, Philip. “A Broader Holocaust curriculum,” The Genocide Forum, 1(8):1,
1995.
Rosenbaum, Alan S. & Israel Charney, eds., Is the Holocaust Unique? New
York: Westview Press, 1996, 163-208.
Rosenberg, David, ed. Testimony: Contemporary Writers Make the Holocaust
Personal. Random House: New York, 1989.
Roth, John K., & Michael Berenbaum, (eds.), Holocaust: Religious and
Philosophical Implications. New York: Paragon House, 1989.
Safire, William. “On language: Long time no see.” The New York Times
Magazine, September 20th 1983, p. 12.
Schiffer, Sydney, The Far Side of Enough. Unpublished ms., New York, 1986.
Sengupta, Somini. “A rift opens over ‘other victims’ at Holocaust memorial,”
The New York Times, Section 13, p. 1, Sunday, August 18th, 1996.
Shapiro, Paul & Robert Ehrenreich, eds. Roma and Sinti: Under-Studied
Victims of Nazism. Washington: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Center for
Advanced Holocaust Studies. 2002.
Shea, Christopher. “Debating the uniqueness of the Holocaust,” The Chronicle of
Higher Education, May 31st, 1996, pp. A6-8.
Shermer, Michael. “Proving the Holocaust,” Skeptic, 2(4):32-57, 1994.
Simons, Marlise. “At a death camp, Romanies confront indifference,” The New
York Times, Tuesday, August 7th, 1990.
Smelser, Ronald. “The ‘Final Solution’ and the War in 1944.” Unpublished ms.,
University of Utah, Salt Lake City, 1991. Pp. 65.
Snyder, Louis L. Encyclopedia of the Third Reich. Paragon: New York, 1989.
Stannard, David E.
“Uniqueness as denial: The politics of genocide
scholarship,” in Rosenbaum & Charney, pp.163-208.
Stannard, David E. “The dangers of calling the Holocaust unique,” The
Chronicle of Higher Education, August 2nd, 1996b, pp. B1-2.
Stapinska, Margaret. “Faceless, stateless, endless victims,” The Yorkshire Post,
Saturday, January 28th, 1995, p. 5.
State Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Memorial Book: The Romanies at
Auschwitz-Birkenau. Documentary and Cultural Centre of German Sintis and
Roma. K.G. Saur: Munich, 1993.
Steinmetz, Selma. Oesterreichs Zigeuner im NS-Staat. Monographien zur
Zeitgeschichte. Europa Verlag: Frankfurt, 1966.
Stocking, George W. (ed.). Bones, bodies, Behaviors. The University of
Wisconsin Press: Madison, 1989.
Strandberg, Susan. “Researcher claims thousands of Romanies exterminated by
Czechs,” The Decorah Journal, Thursday, May 5th, 1994, pp. 1-2.
Sultzberger, C.L. “Nobody wants these wandering Romanies,” The Evening
Standard (London), August 23rd, 1939, p. 1.
179
Supple, Carrie. From Prejudice to Genocide: Learning About the Holocaust.
Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books, 1993a.
Thomas, J.D., et al. “Disease, lifestyle and consanguinity in 58 American
Romanies.” The Lancet, 8555:377-379 (August 15th), 1977.
Thurner, Erika. “Nazi policy against the Romanies.” Paper delivered at the U.S.
HMC Conference on Other Victims, Washington, March, 1987.
Trumpener, Katie. “The time of the Romanies: A ‘people without history’ in the
narratives of the West,” Critical Enquiry, 18(4), 1992, pp. 843-884.
Tyler, C., 1994. “Gypsy president,” The Financial Times, March 26th, pp. 3-4.
Tyrnauer, Gabrielle. The Fate of Romanies During the Holocaust. SpeciaReport
prepared for The United States Holocaust Memorial Council. Washington, 1985.
Restricted access document, pp. 115.
Voss, Kurt, & Marc Rocco, 1992. Where the Day Takes You. Cinetel Films, Inc.,
Hollywood.
Wagenaar, Aad. Settela: Het Meisje Heeft Haar Naam Terug. Amsterdam: De
Arbeiderspers, 1995.
Wheal, Elizabeth-Anne, Stephen Pope & James Taylor. Encyclopedia of the
Second World War. Secaucus: Castle Books, 1989.
Wiesenthal, Simon. Justice, Not Vengeance. New York: Grove Wiedenfeld,
1989.
Wilson, Stephen. Ideology and Experience: Anti-Semitism in France at the Time
of the Dreyfuss Affair. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press: London & Toronto,
1982. Ch. 13, “Racial anti-Semitism: A race apart,” pp. 456-495.
Wistrich, Robert. Who’s Who in Nazi Germany. New York: Bonanza, 1982.
Yates, Dora. “Hitler and the Romanies,” Commentary, 8, 1949, pp. 455459.Reprinted in Daniela Gioseffi, ed., On Prejudice: A Global Perspective,
Anchor Books, New York & London, 1993, pp. 103-110.
Young, David. A Mulano Place: Paradox and Ambivalence in the Romani
Holocaust. BA (Hons.) Thesis, Macquarie University, Sydney, 1994.
Zack, Naomi, ed. Race/Sex: Their Sameness, Difference and Interplay. New
York: Routledge, 1977.
Zimmermann, Michael.
“From discrimination to the ‘family camp’ at
Auschwitz: National Socialist persecution of the Romanies,” Dachau Review,
2:87-113, 1990.
180
12
ELIE WIESEL, SIMON WIESENTHAL, ROMANIES
AND THE U.S. HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL COUNCIL
E Aušvicate meras bokhatar, phanden amen ande
baraki bare. And’o Aušvic bengesko si o kapo.
Kathende šaj rakhas manrro. O dživipen si kade
dur, o meripen paše … (“In Auschwitz we are dying
from hunger, they imprison us in huge barracks; in
Auschwitz the kapo is cruel, and nowhere can we
find bread. Life seems so far away and death so
near . . .”)
Romani prison song.
The Other is not my enemy.
Elie Wiesel.
Jews and Roma have stood as perpetual outsiders for as long as they have been
a presence in the West. Both populations came into Europe from Asia, for
centuries neither inhabited a homeland or possessed a national government,
economy or militia, both maintained social and religious barriers that kept the
outside world at a distance, both were shunned by Christendom and both
employed an “alien” language for what were considered suspicious and dangerous
purposes. And both have been the prime targets of scapegoating and horrific
efforts to eradicate them. It is not surprising, therefore, that the Europeans
perceived a close connection between the two, some even suggesting that Roma
181
were in fact Jews, who had finally emerged from hiding in the forests where they
had taken refuge following the medieval pogroms1. The actual relationship
between our two peoples is a close and complicated one, a complication that has
been greatly exacerbated by the post-1945 approaches to placing the Holocaust
into the historical record.
In my own writings I have consistently interpreted capital-H-Holocaust to
mean the implementation of the directive of the “Final Solution,” viz. genocidal
action intended to eradicate “contaminants” from the Nordic gene pool in the
creation of an intended master race. There were only two such directives: The
Final Solution of the Jewish Question and The Final Solution of the Gypsy
Question2. Not one other group targeted in the Third Reich was slated for
extermination, nor was the focus of a genocidal “final solution.” This was
recognized over fifty years ago by Joseph Tenenbaum, who defined the Final
Solution as the “physical extermination of Jews and Gypsies in the great death
camps” (1956:373) and called the German persecution of Romanies “one of the
major mysteries of Nazi racialism” (1956: 399).
While almost all of what we know about the fate of the Romani victims of
the Holocaust (called the Porrajmos “the devouring” in the Romani language) is
the result of Jewish scholarship, the way in which it has been interpreted has
differed widely. Some researchers, such as the late Sybil Milton, have argued
forcefully for its inclusion in the definition (1995); others such as Gunther Lewy
have gone so far as to maintain that not only were Romanies not a part of the
Holocaust, but that their treatment by the Nazis did not even qualify as genocide
(2000). Nowhere has this polarization become more publicly apparent than with
the creation of The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
The Romani people lost perhaps its greatest champion with the passing of
Simon Wiesenthal in 2005. Keenly aware of the fate of the Romanies in Hitler’s
Third Reich, he was the driving force in getting the first Romani representative
appointed to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council. For that he must be
remembered. That fate was simply yet eloquently described by Roman Herzog,
Federal President of Germany in a public address on March 16, 1997:
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,
and as Miriam Novitch of the Ghetto Fighters’ House in Israel put it, “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
182
those employed for the other.” Despite these facts of history, it took seven years
after its creation for the sixty-five member Holocaust Council to appoint even one
Romani representative.
In the late 1970s, the advisory board responsible for detailing the mission
of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum stated that “This museum belongs at the
center of American life because America, as a democratic civilization, is the
enemy of racism and its ultimate expression, genocide.” Raphael Lemkin
(1944:249-251), who originally coined the term, had referred to the genocide of
the “gypsies” even before the Second World War was over, though the
incongruity of this has not resonated with Washington. We still have no place on
the Council.
The Council was established in 1979 by President Jimmy Carter to
commemorate the victims of the Holocaust, and to raise funds to build the
Museum in our nation’s capital; Elie Wiesel was appointed to chair it. At that
time no Romani representation was considered for inclusion, although as a federal
institution supported in part by the American taxpayers, the new Council’s policy
of selectivity was unconstitutional.
Wiesel has steadfastly maintained an exclusivist position regarding the
definition of the word Holocaust, interpreting it as referring to the fate of the
Jewish victims alone; the word has never once been used in the Council’s or the
Museum’s documentation in connection with Roma, not even in the program for
the Romani Day of Remembrance, which took place on 16 September 1986. The
U.S. Government Printing Office lists the booklet produced following that event
In Memory of the Gypsy Victims of Nazi Genocide under the Library of Congress
subject heading “Holocaust: Jewish,” and the Council’s circular announcing its
national writing contest on the Holocaust refers to “The six million Jews who
perished in the Holocaust, and the millions of others.” It was only following Elie
Wiesel’s resignation as its chairman that Romani representation became a reality,
and that happened because of Simon Wiesenthal’s intervention.
At the beginning of January, 2007, an article appeared in the New York
Observer by Philip Weiss entitled “Forgiving Elie Wiesel, somewhat, on his
opposition to Gypsies in Holocaust Museum.” Weiss was moved to write this
after reading a passage in Elie Wiesel’s book Night; it was quickly followed by a
number of responses most—though not all—of which were generally critical of
Wiesel, and one of which queried Mr. Weiss’ presumption as a non-Romani in
taking it upon himself to “forgive” Wiesel on behalf of the Romani people.
There is reason to believe that Professor Wiesel did have a particular and
very personal motive for not promoting the representation of the Romani victims
during his own term of office on the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, stemming
from the painful experience of seeing his own father knocked to the ground in an
encounter with a Romani kapo at Auschwitz-Birkenau and the animosity towards
183
Romanies it engendered in him. The passage in Night that Philip Weiss refers to,
describes that exchange in some detail:
A gypsy deportee was in charge of us.
My father was suddenly taken with colic. He got up and went
towards the gypsy, asking politely in German “Excuse me, can you tell me
where the lavatories are?”
The gypsy looked him up and down slowly, from head to foot. As if
he wanted to convince himself that this man was really a creature of flesh
and bone, a living being with a body and a belly. Then, as if he had
suddenly woken up from a heavy doze, he dealt my father such a clout that
he fell to the ground, crawling back to his place on all fours . . . Yesterday,
I should have sunk my nails into the criminal’s flesh. Had I changed so
much then? So quickly! I thought only, I shall never forgive them for that.
Whether it involved “such a clout” and “beating up,” or—as he said in
recounting the same incident later—“simply a slap,” them here refers to Gypsies
and not to the Germans, as he made clear thirty years later in an interview with
Bill Moyers entitled “Facing Hate,” which was televised over PBS in December
1991. In response to Moyers’ question “Did you feel hated when you arrived at
Auschwitz? Did you think ‘they hate me – why do they hate me’?” he replied
“Not from the Germans so much. The Germans didn’t even hate
us, because you hate human beings. We weren’t human, in their eyes. I
felt hated by the anti-Semites in the camp.”
“Other prisoners?”
“I think I write about it; the night we arrived I have seen a
prisoner beating up my father, the first time it happened. And later on, I
was beaten mainly by prisoners, not by Germans. Germans arranged the
killing, the murder, and so I hate, because there were anti-Semites even
there.”
“Your father was beaten because he was Jewish?”
“Naturally.”
“Just . . . ”
“Just because he was Jewish.”
“And what did you . . . can you remember what you were thinking
as you saw your father being . . . “
“It plagues me to this day. I remember, I felt like running to that
man, to that kapo who beat him up. I should have done that, but it was
two hours after our arrival and I remember, I write about it in Night, was
a kapo, so he went to the kapo, saying ‘can I go to the toilet?’ and all of
184
us, there were hundreds and hundreds of people there, lined up, and the
kapo measured him up with his look, and gave him simply a slap in the
face, only one, and my father fell to the ground. It lasted a second; my
father got up and came back.”
Elie Wiesel’s reaction was quite understandable at a human level, but
totally unsupportable and unacceptable in his policy-making capacity. It hasn’t
been edited out of the most recent (2003) edition of his book, a book that is
required reading in very many of our high schools.
Having by now learnt that there was to be no reaching out to the Romani
community with any offer of recognition on the part of the Council—which
nevertheless had both African American and Armenian representation among its
members for, as Michael Berenbaum has said, “The United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum [ . . . is] not a Jewish institution, but a government institution”
(2009:1)—a concerted effort was made by some Romani leaders to initiate a
dialogue with the Council’s administrators. Their general attitude was either
mocking—its chairman Seymour Siegel told The Washington Post that Romani
efforts to obtain representation were “cockamamie,” and also told a reporter from
the Dallas Times Herald that Romani spokespersons were “cranks” and
“eccentrics”—or else patronizing: acting executive director Micah Naftalin told
The Washington Post “the problem with Gypsies is that they’re not well schooled.
They’re quite naïve and, to some extent, distrustful.” All of these statements are
reproduced in the relevant newspaper articles (Leslie Doolittle who wrote the
Dallas Times Herald piece told me she was warned by a Council staff member to
be careful when talking to me, because I was a “wild man”).
In 1984 a group of Romani Americans staged a demonstration in
Washington, wearing concentration-camp uniforms and carrying placards
claiming racism; this protest was covered—with a photograph—by The
Washington Post3. It took this protest, and a threatened discrimination suit, finally
to get media attention. It was in this same year that Wiesenthal wrote a letter to
the Council (dated December 14th) criticizing the omission of Romanies from its
program, in which he stated “The Gypsies had been murdered in a proportion
similar to the Jews, about 80% of them in the area of the countries which were
occupied by the Nazis.”
On September 16th, 1986, five years before the Moyers interview, we were
allowed an official Romani Holocaust remembrance ceremony in Washington.
Elie Wiesel made a very brief appearance at that event, where he told us “I
couldn’t be here today, and yet I couldn’t not be here . . . we have not done
enough to listen to your voice of anguish. We have not done enough to make
other people listen to your voice of sadness. I can promise you we shall do
whatever we can from now on to listen better” (“I had to go, I had to stay, in
185
Rio . . . ”). Despite this assurance, Romani efforts to have even just one
permanent representative appointed to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council
continued to be frustrated. Instead, I was given a window-dressing position as
“special advisor on Romani issues to the chairman,” though my advice was never
sought nor did we ever once meet.
Apart from one brief public encounter, we never in fact spoke at all. That
happened in July, 1988, when I was invited to present a paper entitled
“Uniqueness of the victims” at the Remembering for the Future: Responses to the
Holocaust conference at Oxford University. I was accompanied by a gentleman
named Leland Robison who recently reminded me of a startling confrontation I
had with Professor Wiesel at that event—though I’d scarcely forgotten it; it
remains very clear in my mind to this day. Professor Wiesel, surrounded by
cameras and journalists, was being interviewed on the university grounds. During
a break between questioning, I approached him and said “Professor Wiesel, please
don’t forget the Gypsies!” He turned aggressively towards me, glared, and barked
“Mister Hancock! I have read what you have written! And I don’t like it! I don’t
like it at all!!” and turned away. He never did mention the Gypsies. He was
presumably referring to my piece on “uniqueness” in Shmate: A Journal of
Progressive Jewish Thought, the only article on the Holocaust I had in print at
that time, and the one in which my correspondence with him was reproduced [it is
the first essay in the present collection].
Nineteen eighty-six was also the year that Romani activist groups
stepped up their effort to gain recognition. Simon Wiesenthal drew attention to
this in an article published at that time entitled “Tragedy of the Gypsies.”
Wiesel’s response was that “it’s not my prerogative; it’s the White House’s
prerogative,” although it is well known that to a large extent the Office of
Presidential Appointments takes its recommendations directly from the various
agencies it serves. The Washington Post article also reported that
The most likely Gypsy candidate now would appear to be Dr. Ian
Hancock, an English professor at The University of Texas. “He is the
only Gypsy I know of with an academic background,” Wiesel said,
“although there must be more.”
I was not a U.S. citizen at that time, however, and was therefore ineligible for the
position.
The situation changed in 1987 when, thanks to our efforts together with
California congressman the late Tom Lantos, William A. Duna became the first
Romani representative to be appointed to the Council, later to be replaced by
myself once I had acquired American citizenship.
186
The possibility that during his term as its president Professor Elie Wiesel
himself may have been actively blocking attempts to gain representation comes to
light in the pages of Simon Wiesenthal’s book Justice Not Vengeance, where he
expresses his dismay at the Council’s attitude towards Romanies:
On this council sat voting representatives not only of the Jews but of Poles,
Russians and Ukrainians—but not Gypsies. Efforts in that connection by the
International Romani Union were in vain. To help them, I wrote a lengthy
letter to Elie Wiesel the president of the Council. A few months later I
received an answer from his secretary that the appointment of members
depended on President Reagan. The International Romani Union and The
Society for Threatened Peoples thereupon wrote long letters to President
Reagan—which ended up with Elie Wiesel. In the end, I turned to Wiesel
again, this time with the suggestion that one of the more than thirty Jewish
members of the Memorial Council might be replaced by a Gypsy. To this
letter I received no answer at all.
When I subsequently published this ‘correspondence’ in our annual
report, because I felt the attitude of the Holocaust Memorial Council to be
unjust, I received a number of copies of other letters in which all kinds of
people had approached Wiesel with the request that he should support the
claims of the Gypsies. But the only thing that the Holocaust Memorial Council
ever did for the Gypsies was a kind of memorial hour in September, 1986.
Only after Elie Wiesel had given up his presidency were we informed that the
newly-formed board had invited a Gypsy representative . . . onto the Council.
One of the documents forwarded to Simon Wiesenthal was a copy of a
four page letter from myself to Elie Wiesel, which I wrote in my capacity as
Representative for the Romani people on the UN Social and Economic Council
and in the Department of Public Information and to UNICEF, a position I held
until 2009. It was reproduced in Shmate, mentioned above, and was dated 25
November 1987. The three-line reply from Professor Wiesel, dated the following
10 January 1988 is included in the same magazine, and read in its entirety
Please forgive the delay. I have been overwhelmed with work. Thank
you for your letter. I hope you know how much your words mean to me.
During the period in which I served the Council, Elie Wiesel was not a
member. He returned during the last year of my four-year term, at which time I
was not reappointed. In 2011 we still have no representation on the Council.
187
Many writers on the death camps have described the atrocities committed
by the kapos. In her book Return to Auschwitz Kitty Hart describes the kapos in
the concentration camps:
The vast majority of prisoners were under supervision at all times, but not
always by the people you expected. Everywhere, all the time, prisoners
were to be found aping our oppressors . . . every work party had its Kapo
(from the Italian capo, or head), quite possibly a fellow Pole or Jew, who
showed admiration for German discipline by whipping and kicking you.
Anybody might attack you and beat you up, and indeed it was expected of
the prisoner officials.
There were no doubt the Romani kapos Wiesel describes, who brutalized Jews,
Romanies, homosexuals and everybody else indiscriminately (but contrast this
with Heger’s (1994: 66) description of a Gypsy prisoner as “a good fellow
prisoner and Capo”). There were likewise Jewish and Polish kapos who inflicted
the same terrible cruelties upon those in their charge, including their fellow Jews
and Poles and Romanies. But we know too of Jewish inmates who were
physicians, and who as a result were forced to participate in deadly medical
experiments upon prisoners. These were people caught in the jaws of hell, whose
own lives and the lives of their families would have been forfeited had they
refused. As Kitty Hart said, among the inmates “nobody was to be trusted;
anyone could be a thief, a traitor, a spy.” The controversial nationalist party
president of Croatia, Franjo Tudjman (1989)4 writes of the “participation of Jews
in the liquidation of Gypsies” in Uštica in 1942, a containment camp for Romani,
Serb and Jewish prisoners south-east of Jasenovac in Yugoslavia. Should
Romanies, then, “never forgive”? The histories of both our peoples and the
situations each has had to confront and deal with are too tightly intertwined to
separate. Simon Wiesenthal has himself written on the theme of forgiveness
(1997), and a humbling lesson may be learnt from Eva Mozes-Kor, who wrote
that she “forgives Mengele and all the other doctors that conducted appalling
experiments on me and my twin sister Miriam” in Auschwitz. “I forgive those
who killed my parents,” she said, “[the ones] who stole my family from me, who
took away my childhood and turned my life into hell. I exonerate those who did
the things that have been with me, night after night, for the past 60 years.” The
French say that to understand is to forgive, and understanding—and accepting—
the true details of the fate of Romanies in the Holocaust yet remains to be
achieved.
Resistance to this dates from the time of the Nuremberg War
Crimes Trials, when not one Romani was called to testify in his own behalf. The
United Nations too did nothing then to assist Romanies nor, sadly, were Romanies
188
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, the files of which 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 best (USGPO, 1946: 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. Mr. Ferencz never replied to several requests
for clarification, and together with Elie Wiesel, whose Foundation for Humanity
offers the Elie Wiesel Prize in Ethics, and it is too late now to call upon him to
explain his motives regarding Romanies.
During my four years as a Council member, I was invisible. William
Duna would call me after each of his own visits to Washington, always shaken
and hurt. “I thought I was a decent person” he told me once; “but I come back
from these meetings feeling completely degraded.” On one occasion, at a January
1991 meeting of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council’s Annual Days of
Remembrance planning committee, when asked by Bill Duna when Romanies
would ever be included as well, chairman Benjamin Meed replied “ask me again
in about twenty years.” Romani leader John Megel, who lived in Washington DC
and who would frequently visit the Council offices to try to speak with the staff
there told me three weeks before he died of a heart attack “those people are killing
me.”
My own experience matched Duna’s—members were for the most part
distant; some were even openly hostile. During the coffee breaks I stood alone.
A couple of fellow members would tell me privately that it was shameful the way
I was being treated, but they would never speak up publicly in my behalf. I was
put onto two committees, Holocaust Education and Acquisitions, but was never
invited to a single meeting of the latter, and was not once consulted at the former.
When I spoke up about school curricula, I was completely ignored. Instead, a nonRomani historian, David Crowe of Elon College, was their go-to person for
matters concerning Romanies. A film of the Council’s Days of Remembrance
189
ceremony held annually in the Capitol Rotunda and distributed commercially had
the section deleted which showed a young Romani girl lighting a commemorative
candle on a menorah for the Romanies who perished in the Holocaust. Our own
privately-filmed version provides evidence of the deletion.
Eleven Clinton appointees were replaced by the Bush administration, but
no new Romanies were selected to fill any seats. We have a rightful place in
Holocaust history, but are being excluded. While new administrations routinely
replace government personnel with members from their own party, the prevailing
policy is to appoint anyone, regardless of political affiliation, if a party member
cannot be found and a need remains. During the entire Bush administration, no
effort was made to appoint a Romani American to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial
Council. After protesting this for the n-th time, I received an e-mail from
Chairman Fred Zeidman (dated April 5th, 2007) telling me that they were relying
on me to find them someone, though I myself was not invited back. The Council
and Museum are not even clear about what to call us, referring on occasion to
“Sinti and Romani”.5
In my capacity as a former Council appointee I wrote to President Obama
urging an appointment, but received a form-letter reply dated 20 May 2010
thanking me for “contacting me and providing your thoughtful suggestions.” A
letter to the Director of The Office of Presidential Appointments sent in March,
2011, received no reply at all.
In 1993 I was invited to be a member of the Roma Advisory Council of
the Princeton-based Project on Ethnic Relations, a position I gladly accepted. In
this capacity I went to Europe a number of times, including attendance and
presentation at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s Office
for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights meetings in Warsaw. I wrote a
report on Roma and the Media at the request of the Project, which was published
in 1996. I asked Livia Plaks, who is Director of the Project on Ethnic Relations,
to intervene with her uncle Elie Wiesel to try to resolve our differences. Whether
because of this or not, I was dropped as a member of the PER board very shortly
afterwards.
On 27 January 2009 the United Nations held its annual observance of the
International Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust
in the General Assembly Hall in New York. No Romani representation was
sought or included. Requests asking why from a number of Romani agencies,
including the Union Romani and the IRU to both Ms. Mona Gillet of the
Department of Public Information (with which it is affiliated) and to Ms.
Kimberly Mann, manager of the United Nations Holocaust Outreach Programme,
remained unanswered. The one response that was received was a reminder that
the UN had underwritten an exhibit on Roma at the Hungarian Mission, and had
hosted the reception of a Romani delegation earlier in the year. The theme of that
190
memorial ceremony was “An Authentic Basis for Hope: Holocaust Remembrance
and Education” and the keynote speaker was Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, Chairman
of the Yad Vashem Council; Elie Wiesel was among the noted participants. At
the same event one year later, a Romani man from Europe, Andrzej Mirga, was
flown in to say a few words; no American Roma were approached. The same has
been true in 2010 and 2011.
In September 2001, the BBC broadcast a report on the worsening social
and economic condition of Romanies. It repeated the Council of Europe’s
“blistering condemnation of Europe’s treatment of the Roma Gypsy community,
saying they are subject to racism, discrimination and violence,” and included the
United Nations’ statement that Romanies “pose Europe’s most serious human
rights problem.” The concern shown by the United Nations in 2001, however,
seems to have fizzled out by January, 2009, when it held its “Changing Face of
Race” symposium in New York just five days before its Holocaust
commemoration. Its promotional literature read “Racial discrimination and ethnic
violence has, in many places, grown in magnitude as well as complexity. But in
others, hopeful signs begin to emerge that the dangers of discrimination and
intolerance are beginning to be better understood and more assertively
challenged.” No Roma were invited to participate or even attend that event.
Attitudes such as these are very disturbing and hurtful, and the literature is
replete with them. Edward Alexander said that recognizing Romanies as victims
of the Holocaust was both “ignorance and arrogance” (1990:13); William Safire
called it a “mistaken notion” (1983:12), Assemblyman Dov Hikind told the press
that "The Holocaust is a uniquely Jewish event . . . [the other victims] are not in
the same category as Jewish people with regards to the Holocaust . . . it is so
vastly different” (Egbert, 2009:1), while Yehuda Bauer has said that “the whole
Gypsy ‘problem’ was for Himmler and most other Nazis only a minor irritant”
(1994:446), and “the whole Gypsy problem was of marginal importance to the
Nazis” (2001: 62). In his book The World Must Know, Michael Berenbaum wrote
“[a]t the center of the tragedy of the Holocaust is the murder of European Jews.
Near that center is the murder of the Romanies” (1993:2). It is probably because
our own fate comes so uncomfortably close to that of the Jews that we are denied
the representation given to Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, Armenians and
others who have received Council appointments. Wiesel’s distancing of our
experience from that of his own people emerged again in an article entitled “Eli
Wiesel: Gypsies’ deportation from France unlike Jewish WWII case” that
appeared in the Israel News on 29 August 2010:
Jewish author and Nobel Prize laureate Eli Wiesel said that the deportation
of gypsies [sic] from France cannot be compared to the transportation of
Jews to Nazi death camps during WWII.
191
Wiesel called on French President Nicolas Sarkozy to reverse his
decision but stressed that any comparison with the Jewish case was not in
place (AFP).
In August, 2010 The Jewish Chronicle reported that
Elie Wiesel has condemned the French government’s decision to expel
Roma immigrants but cautioned that a comparison with the Nazi roundups was not appropriate.
The Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor described the
repatriation of Roma people from France to Romania and Bulgaria as
unacceptable.
As a former refugee, Mr Wiesel expressed his solidarity with the
Roma and called on French president Nicolas Sarkozy to stop the
crackdown.
But he also said: “It is necessary to be careful with the language.
These Roma are sent to Romania, to Hungary, not to Auschwitz. He
added: “One doesn’t have the right to trivialise events, memories and
souvenirs.”
Robert Le Gall, Archbishop of Toulouse, had likened the situation
to the expulsion of Jews from occupied France during the Holocaust.
This exclusionist position is evidently more American than European.
In April, 2010, JTA, the The Global News Service of the Jewish People, released
the following bulletin from Brno, in the Czech Republic:
BRNO TO ERECT HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL
(JTA) -- A commission has been set up to erect a memorial to Jewish and
Roma Holocaust victims from the city of Brno, in the Czech Republic.
Some 12,000 Jews and Roma, or Gypsies, from the city were killed in
Nazi-run concentration camps during World War II. The commission is
currently being established by representatives of the Jewish and Roma
communities, according to the Czech Press Agency. There is currently no
memorial to victims of the Holocaust in Brno.
But in the same month, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
announced only
WHY WE REMEMBER THE HOLOCAUST
From April 11 through April 18, the Museum is leading the national
annual Days of Remembrance commemorating the six million Jews
192
murdered in the Holocaust as well as the millions of other victims of Nazi
persecution.
Given the indifference that has overwhelmingly typified attitudes towards the
genocide of the Romani people at the hands of the Nazis, Simon Wiesenthal’s
effort becomes all the more significant to us. Had he not brought attention to the
exclusion of Romanies from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, we would not
have won the representation in that organization that we enjoyed for the years
between 1987 and 2000. We have very many Jewish friends and supporters, but
his name stands highest among them.
Notes
1This
is still believed to be true by some; see Sándor, 2004.
2The
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 Würth of the Racial Hygiene
Research Unit in September, 1937. The first official Party statement to refer to
the endgültige Lösung der Zigeunerfrage was issued in March, 1938, signed by
Himmler.
3Reproduced
in Hancock, 2002, p. 50.
4Tudjman
attended the opening of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in
Washington at the very surprising invitation of its directors.
5The
Romani people are divided into many subgroups—the Roma, the Sinti, the
Romungre, the Manush, the Romanichals and so on. All are Romanies. The use
of “Sinti and Roma” as an overarching label originates with the Sinti Romanies
who wish to emphasize their distinctiveness from other groups. If the word Gypsy
is used, it should be written with a proper noun’s capital initial G.
6Adapted
from Hancock, in Karanth (2010), pp. 226-263.
193
Works Cited
Alexander, Edward. “Review of Lopate,” Congress Monthly, May/June, 1990,
p. 13.
Bauer, Yehuda, 1994. “Was the Holocaust unique?,” Midstream, 30(4):19-25.
Bauer, Yehuda, 2001.
Rethinking the Holocaust.
New Haven:
Yale University Press.
Berenbaum, Michael, 1993. The World Must Know: The History of the
Holocaust as Told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Toronto
and London: Little, Brown & Co.
Berenbaum, Michael, 2009. “Holocaust Museum: America at its Best,” Jewish
Daily Forward, June 10th.
Doolittle, Leslie, 1984. Gypsies say holocaust project snubbing them,” The
Dallas Times Herald, June 28th, p. B6.
Egbert, Bill, 2009. “Jews only,” The New York Daily News, p. 1.
Grove, Lloyd, 1984. “Lament of the Gypsies: 40 years after Auschwitz,
petitioning for a place,” The Washington Post, July 21st, p. C4.
Hancock, Ian, 1986. “Gypsies and the Holocaust: falling through the cracks of
history,” Shmate: A Journal of Progressive Jewish Thought, 17:6-12.
Hancock, Ian, 2002. We Are the Romani People: Ame Sam e Rromane Džene.
Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press.
Hart, Kitty, 1979. A Return to Auschwitz. Chicago.
Heger, Heinz, 1994. The Men with the Pink Triangle. Boston: Ayson
Publns.
Karanth, Dileep, (ed.), 2010. Danger! Educated Gypsy: Selected Essays by Ian
Hancock. Hatfield: The University of Hertfordshire Press.
Kenrick, Donald, 1994-5. “The Nazis and the Romanies: A fresh look,” The
Jewish Quarterly, 41(4):46-47.
Kenrick, Donald, 1995. Romanies Under the Swastika. Hatfield: Hertfordshire
University Press
Lemkin, Raphael. Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis
of Government, Proposals for Redress. Washington: Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace. 1944.
Lewy, Gunther, 2000. The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies. Oxford University
Press, 2000.
Milton, Sybil, 1995. “Der Weg zur ‘Endlösung der Zigeunerfrage’: Von der
Ausgrenzung zur Ermordung der Sinti und Roma,” in Edgar Bamberger &
Annegret Ehmann, (eds.), Kinder und Jugendlicher als Opfer des
Holocaust.Heidelberg: Dokumentations- und Kulturzentrum Deutscher Sinti und
Roma, pp. 29-52.
194
Mozes-Kor, Eva, 2005. [On forgiveness], Ynetnews for 26 June (http://
www.ynetnews. com/articles/1,7340,L-090830,00.html).
Novitch, Miriam, 1983. Le Génocide des Tziganes Sous le Régime Nazi. Paris:
AMIF and the Ghetto Fighters’ House, Israel. Originally Rezach haZoanim Bimei
ha’Shilton ha’Nazi, 1969.
Pape, Markus, 1997. A Nikdovám Nebude Vidit: Dokument o Koncentratním
Tabore Lety u Pisku. Prague: GplusG.
Pauwels, Louis, & J. Bergier, 1960. Le Matin des Magiciens. Paris: Gallimard.
Roth, John K., & Michael Berenbaum, (eds.), 1989. Holocaust: Religious and
Philosophical Implications. New York: Paragon House.
Safire, William, 1983. “On language: Long time no see.” The New York Times
Magazine, September 20th, p. 12.
Sándor Avraham (“Im Nin’alu”), 2004. The True Origin of Roma and Sinti.
The Romanestan Webring (http://www.geocities.com /romanestan/).
Steinmetz, Selma, 1996. Oesterreichs Zigeuner im NS-Staat. Monographien zur
Zeitgeschichte. Frankfurt: Europa Verlag.
Strandberg, Susan, 1994. “Researcher claims thousands of Romanies
exterminated by Czechs,” The Decorah Journal, Thursday, May 5th, pp. 1-2.
Tenenbaum, Joseph, 1956. Race and Reich: The Story of an Epoch. New York:
Twayne.
Tudjman, Franjo, 1989. Horrors of War: Historical Reality and Philosophy.
Zagreb.
Tyler, C., 1994. “Gypsy president,” The Financial Times, March 26th, pp. 3-4.
USGPO, 1946. War Crimes Tribunal File No. 682-PS, Volume 3: Nazi
Conspiracy and Aggression, Washington: The U.S. Government Printing Office,
p. 496.
Weiss, Philip, 2007. “Forgiving Elie Wiesel, somewhat, on his opposition to
Gypsies in Holocaust Museum.” The New York Observer, January 2nd.
Wiesel, Elie, 1982. Night. New York: Bantam Books.
Wiesenthal, Simon, 1986. “Tragedy of the Gypsies.” Bulletin of Information
No. 26, Dokumentationszentrum des Bundes Jüdischer Vervolgter des
Naziregimes. Vienna.
Wiesenthal, Simon, 1989.
Justice Not Vengeance. New York: Grove
Weidenfeld.
Wiesenthal, Simon, 1997. The Sunflower: on the Possibilities and Limits of
Forgiveness. New York : Schocken Books.
195
13
ROMANIES AND THE HOLOCAUST:
A REEVALUATION AND AN OVERVIEW
“It was the wish of the all-powerful Reichsführer 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
“One exhibit [at the Holocaust Museum at Buchenwald]
quotes SS chief Heinrich Himmler on December 8th, 1938, as
calling for the ‘Final ‘Solution of the Gypsy Question,’ and cites
his order of December 16th, 1942, to have all Gypsies remaining
in Europe deported to Auschwitz.”
(Sheldon Rantz (1995:11)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, Federal President of Germany,
16 March 1997)
196
Miriam Novitch refers above to the motives put forth to justify the murder of
the Romanies, or “Gypsies,” in the Holocaust, though 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 genepool 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
Württemburg 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 however observe 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 AntiDefamation 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 that included a panel on Romanies, but it
included no Romanies either in its organization or among its presenters; still at
this time (October 2006) there has been no Romani representation on the
Holocaust Council at all since 2002. An international conference entitled The
197
Roma, a Minority in Europe: Historical, Social and Cultural Perspectives held at
Tel Aviv University in that same year 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 Lewy has attempted to argue4 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 have been made which are
simply wrong—the result of assuming a situation to have existed or not existed
without bothering to check the historical record: the pronouncements of nonspecialist academics writing far outside of their area of expertise.
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 (sic) 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 Würth of the Racial Hygiene Research Unit in September, 1937.
198
The first official Party statement to refer to the endgültige Lösung der
Zigeunerfrage was issued in March, 1938, signed by Himmler9.
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 nonRomani 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
199
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
Zigeunergeschmeiß) 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
200
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 eall Roma, 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 March 1936, the earliest Nazi document
referring to “the introduction of the total solution of 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 1937, the
National Citizenship Law relegated Romanies and Jews to the status of secondclass 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
201
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’(Zigeuneraufräumungswoche, 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 endgültige Lösung 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
202
considered strong enough to outweigh seven-eighths of German blood—so
dangerous were the Gypsies considered24.
These were 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. Müller-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
203
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-Erlaß), 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 nonJewish victims of the Holocaust sponsored by the U S Holocaust Memorial
Council (but which has evidently had no impact upon the exclusivist position of
that publicly-funded organization whatsoever), Dr Erika Thurner of the Institut
für 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
204
Heydrich held in Pretsch in June, 1941, viz. that “[t]he Führer 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 Reichsführer 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 cardindexes 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, König 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
Liquidierungsübrigen [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:
205
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 the late Dr Sybil Milton, then senior historian
at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Research Institute in Washington who 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. The same findings were reported in 2009 in the London
Independent. A team led by Father Patrick Desbois interviewing survivors in far
south-eastern Europe found that the
. . . oral histories they have gathered, along with detailed ballistic
evidence, could soon change the face of the study of the Holocaust,
pushing the final death toll upwards by as much as 500,000 victims . . . It
is estimated that a minimum of 1.5 million Jews and Gypsies were killed
in Ukraine during the Second World War . . . But while official records
were kept detailing how many had been shot, it is believed that up to 10
times that number were killed in Ukraine unofficially39.
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.
206
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 Romanía—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 section40.
Martin Clayton has made similar observations:
Unlike the Jews whose Holocaust experience gave birth to a renewed
political militancy and a flurry of angry creativity, the Gypsies were
silenced as the war came to a close. Their circumspection was in no small
measure due to the efficiency of the Nazi death machine. The clearest and
most articulate young writers, orators, performers and dreamers that the
pre-war Roma produced were buried in mass graves across central and
eastern Europe. By the end of the war the European Roma were a
decapitated people searching for someone to help explain to them what
had just happened. Instead they were greeted with a wall of silence and
blank stares from the authorities. No reparations, no apologies, no films
or plays about their plight, no new land to settle and defend41.
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 Book42 lists just five
207
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 Victims43,
asks what the “striking differences” were between the treatment of Romanies and
the treatment of Jews (were they in fact “striking”? Should an organization
committed to educating young people influence the students’ responses in this
way?). The 2005 annual Scholars’ Conference on the Holocaust included nothing
in its program on Romanies, though it does have a special session
commemorating the Armenian Genocide. There is Armenian representation on
the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council too, but no Romani member. There was the
Final Solution of the Gypsy Question – but there was no Final Solution of the
Armenian Question. Does it take money to face real history?
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,
as Yehuda Bauer called up, merely a “minor irritant.”44. 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.
An example that comes to mind is the case of author Roald Dahl, who was
roundly condemned as an anti-Semite for saying that Jews are to an extent
themselves responsible for the prejudice against them. Yet in a blame-the-victim
statement Gunther Lewy felt quite at liberty to say “prejudice alone, I submit, is
not sufficient explanation for the hostility directed at the Gypsies . . . certain
characteristics of Gypsy life tend to reinforce or even create hostility” (Fn. 4, p.
11).
Some of the dissuasive arguments discussed here 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 language45.
208
Françoise Sagan observed that “being a Jew under Hitler made you first a
guilty party and then a parcel which the yellow star, itself now become a label,
dispatched to those unknown camps—a process which took a more or less brief
period of time, but a period of time all the same. Being Gypsy, however, made
you an instant target, since the relatively small number of persons of that race
facilitated their individual execution46. To this, and returning to the issue of racebased 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’ problem47.
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 best48.
“Unlike the Jews whose Holocaust experience gave birth to a renewed
political militancy and a flurry of angry creativity, the Gypsies were silenced as
the war came to a close. Their circumspection was in no small measure due to the
efficiency of the Nazi death machine. The clearest and most articulate young
writers, orators, performers and dreamers that the pre-war Roma produced were
buried in mass graves across central and eastern Europe. By the end of the war
the European Roma were a decapitated people searching for someone to help
explain to them what had just happened. Instead they were greeted with a wall of
silence and blank stares from the authorities. No reparations, no apologies, no
films or plays about their plight, no new land to settle and defend”49.
209
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
existed50.
Notes
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 Régime Nazi. Paris: AMIF and the
Ghetto Fighters’ House, Israel (1968:3) and S. Ranz, 1995. “Buchenwald: 50 years
later,” Jewish Currents, October, 1995, pp. 10-13.
3
Christian Bernadec, 1979. L’Holocauste Oubié. Paris: Eds. 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
1
210
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” first appeared on page one of the 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).
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 “Bekämpfung
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’Inégalité des Races Humaines.
Paris (1855). Alfred Ploetz, Grundlinie einer Rassenhygiene: Die Tächtigkeit unsrer
Rasse und der Schutz der Schwachen. Berlin (1895). Wilhelm Schallmeyer, in his
“Einführungen 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 Chamberlain. Die Grundlagen des 19 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.
211
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 UP (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 über die Zigeuner”, NS-Partei
Korrespondenz, 10 (1939), No. 3.
26
Emil Proester, Vraždňí čs. Cikánů v Buchenwaldu. Document No. ÚV
ČSPB-K-135 of the Archives of the Fighters Against Fascism, Prague (1940).
27
Benno Müller-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, 1933Cambridge: 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 König 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 für Unterrich und Bildungsarbeit.
Freiburg im Breisgau (1979).
35
Ulrich König, op. cit., note 33, pp. 87-9.
36
State Museum, op. cit., p. 2
37
Judith Latham, “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).
212
Jonathan Brown, “A holy mission to reveal the truth about Nazi death squads,” the London
Independent, Tuesday, 26th May, 2009.
40
Donald Kenrick, Historical Dictionary of the Gypsies (Romanies). Lanham: The
Scarecrow Press (1998:4).
41
Martyn Clayton, Roma: A People on the Edge. Braiswick: Felixstowe 2002, p. 110.
42
Resource Book: Holocaust and Human Behavior. The Facing History and Ourselves
National Foundation, Brookline, 1994.
43
Ina Friedman, The Other Victims: First-Person Stories of Non-Jews Persecuted by the
Nazis, Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1990.
44
Yehuda Bauer, “Gypsies”, in Israel Gutman and Michael Berenbaum, eds. Anatomy
of the Auschwitz Death Camp. Bloomington: Indiana University Press (1994:441-455).
45
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.
46
Françoise Sagan, Painting In Blood. Nuffield: Aisan Ellis Publishers, pp. 96-97.
47
Erika Thurner, National Socialism and Gypsies in Austria. Chicago: The University
Press (1998), p. xvi.
48
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.
39
213
49
Martyn Clayton, loc. cit. (note 41).
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).
50
14
DOWNPLAYING THE PORRAJMOS:
THE TREND TO MINIMIZE THE ROMANI HOLOCAUST
A review of Guenther Lewy, The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies
Oxford University Press, 2000
When OUP sent me the manuscript of The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies for
evaluation, I returned it in some dudgeon, barely critiqued, saying only that it
represented to me another example of the growing body of literature devoted to
diminishing the place of the Romani people (“Gypsies”) in the Holocaust, and
whatever I had to say in a review of the manuscript would probably go unheeded.
Lewy’s agenda was clearly already in place and the published work has
demonstrated that. This is a book which seeks not only to exclude the Nazis’
Romani victims from the Holocaust—which is not anything new—but goes a step
further to say that they were not even the targets of attempted genocide. Heavily
reliant on Zimmermann (1996), it adds little to that author’s existing
214
documentation but differs considerably in its interpretation.
There are two aspects of this work that must come under scrutiny: firstly
the claims it makes in support of the author’s case against genocide, and secondly,
the biased tone in which those claims are made. I shall summarize the first aspect
first. In short, Lewy states
1) That there was no racially-motivated general plan for a Final Solution of the
Gypsy Question;
2) That the Nazis made a distinction between sedentary and migratory Romanies
in the East and between mixed and unmixed Romanies in Germany, and spared
some from death because of this;
3) That as a consequence the estimated number of half a million Romanies
murdered is a gross exaggeration, and that “perhaps the majority” of them in
Germany actually survived, and weren’t even transported to the East; and
4) Because there was no intent to kill all Romanies, and because policies against
them were not motivated by Nazi race theory, their treatment cannot be compared
with that of the Jews and therefore they do not qualify for inclusion in the
Holocaust—in sum because their treatment did not constitute a genocide and it
was not motivated by a policy based on Nazi race theory.
I shall address these points in turn, though only briefly; my arguments can
be found in more detail in Hancock (1996). Firstly, that there was no “general
plan” is hardly unique to the Romani case; the incarcerations, deportations and
gassings took place nevertheless. We lack numbers of documented “general
plans” for Nazi actions throughout the entire period, for all categories of victims.
In fact “[n]o direct or indirect evidence . . . has been delivered which could prove
the existence of a formal written order by Hitler to start the mass extermination of
the Jews” (Hornshøy-Møller, 1999:I:313); absence of evidence is not evidence of
absence. In any case the disposition of the Romanies had been made the
responsibility of the various Zigeunergeschäftzimmer throughout the Reich.
The statement that Nazi policy towards Romanies was not race-based is
patently absurd. The belief that Romani “criminality” was a genetic defect which
caused “hereditarily diseased offspring” is racist in itself, and was justification for
terminating Romani “lives unworthy of life.” That very term (Lebensunwertesleben) was first used in print by Liebich in 1863 to refer specifically to
Romanies; it was used six years later in an essay by Kulemann—once more solely
to refer to Romanies—and again in the title of Binding & Hoche’s influential
1920 treatise on euthanasia; here, they listed individuals with incurable, inherited
diseases as one of their three categories of those they said should be put to death.
And it was used yet again just one year after Hitler came to power as the title of a
law ordering sterilization that was directed at Romanies. Romanies were
215
classified as possessing “alien” (i.e. non-Aryan) blood along with Jews and
people of African descent following the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, and in November
that year marriage between members of those three groups and Germans was
made illegal. Statements against Romanies referring to their being a “racial”
problem are numerous and well-documented. Criteria for determining who had
Romani ancestry were exactly twice as strict as those determining who was of
Jewish descent; the fact that even Gypsy-like people were targeted demonstrates
that the Nazis were taking no chances with the possibility of undetected Romani
ancestry infecting German citizens. Romanies were never regarded as a political
or economic or religious danger to the Third Reich, as were the Jews: individuals
of mixed Romani and European ancestry posed the greatest threat, and it was
solely a racial one.
Secondly, the fact that some categories of Romanies were exempted from
deportation is true; but the same is also true for some categories of Jews. The six
thousand Karaim who successfully pleaded to be spared, for example, or the Jews
married to non-Jews. Eichmann himself was prepared to spare the lives of one
million Jews in return for ten thousand trucks. This position on Eichmann’s part
may be compared with Himmler’s desire to save some “pure” Roma as
anthropological specimens; neither was acted upon.
Thirdly, of the estimated ca. 20,000 Romanies in Germany in 1939, fully
three quarters had been murdered by 1945. Of the 11,200 in Austria, a half were
murdered. Of the 50,000 in Poland, 35,000; in Croatia, Estonia, the Netherlands,
Lithuania and Luxembourg, almost the entire Romani populations were
eradicated.
Lastly, the claim that the Nazis’ treatment of their Romani victims did not
constitute genocide is bizarre to say the least (“The various deportations of
Gypsies to the East and their deadly consequences do not constitute acts of
genocide”— p. 223). This claim has been made more than once already, most
forcefully by Katz:
The only defensible conclusion, the only adequate encompassing
judgment . . . is that in comparison to the ruthless, monolithic, metapolitical, genocidal design of Nazism vis-à-vis Jews, nothing similar . . .
existed in the case of the Gypsies . . . In the end, it was only Jews and the
Jews alone who were the victims of a total genocidal onslaught in both
intent and practice at the hands of the Nazi murderers (Katz, 1988:213)
But there is no evidence that Jews or any other targeted group were
intended to be eradicated from the face of the earth, however passionate a Nazi
vision that might have been. We find instead numerous statements such as that in
216
a letter from Thierack to Martin Bormann dated October 13th, 1939, in which he
refers to “the intention of liberating the German area from Poles, Russians, Jews
and Gypsies” (emphasis added). Hitler’s own statement, made publicly on
January 30th earlier that same year, envisioned “the annihilation of the Jewish race
in Europe” (emphasis added). Documents such as that issued on August 14th,
1942 by the Central Security Office’s Department VI-D(7b) asking for
information on Romanies living in Britain, and that British POWs be routinely
interrogated about the condition and status of Romanies in that country suggest
that, had the Nazis won, their anti-Romani policies would have been extended
overseas.
Similar fact-finding memos about Jews overseas also existed—but no
document has been identified specifically expressing the intent to exterminate
every Jew or Gypsy on the planet. That being the case, such statements as Katz’
or the Anti-Defamation League’s (below) or Lewy’s are revisionist and
subjective, and cannot be used to distinguish the fate of Jews from the fate of
Romanies. What we have as a result are various interpretations based on
circumstantial evidence (the “intentionalist” approach, the “semiotic” approach
and so on—see Breitman, 1991), and it is his interpretation, not his objective
evidence, upon which Lewy rests his case. It is also interpretation which prompts
the statement in the Auschwitz Memorial Book that “[t]he 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 Sinti and Roma”
(State Museum, 1993:xiv).
Disqualifying Romanies as victims of genocide is Lewy’s major criterion
for also excluding them from the Holocaust itself, for denying, in fact, that there
was a Romani Holocaust. The battle over ownership of that word and who it
applies to is a latter-day phenomenon, yet it has been a part of the English
language for centuries, according to the Oxford English Dictionary first appearing
in print around 1250 AD. Its use in a religious context dates from 1833, in a book
by Leitch Ritchie, in which is described the fate of over a thousand people in 18 th
century France who were locked inside a church and burned to death at the order
of King Louis VII: “Louis VII . . . once made a holocaust of thirteen hundred
persons in a church (p. 104).” It has led to a distinction being made between
Upper-Case Holocaust and lower-case holocaust, or to the abandonment of the
term altogether for Shoah. This at least is specific to the fate of Jews, as
Porrajmos (“paw-rye-mawss”) is to the fate of the Romani people.
A widespread interpretation of its meaning is found at “Holocaust” on the
Anti-Defamation League’s website, where it states:
The Holocaust was the systematic persecution and annihilation of more
217
than six million Jews as a central act of state by Nazi Germany and its
collaborators between 1933 and 1945. Although millions of others, such as
Romani, Sinti (sic), homosexuals, the disabled and political opponents of
the Nazi regime were also victims of persecution and murder, only the
Jews were singled out for total extermination (ADL, 2000).
A more scholarly interpretation, and one which names Romanies
correctly, is found in the German government’s handbook on Holocaust
education:
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 behavior. 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
existed (Milton, 2000:14)
Significantly, the very inventor of the term “genocide,” Raphael Lemkin,
referred to the genocide of the “gypsies” even before the Second World War was
over, in his Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (1944:249-250).
The second aspect of the book—and the one which concerns me most—is
the tone in which it is written. This is a book about Romani people written by
someone who does not know any Romani people, and who admits to deliberately
not seeking their input in its compilation. No Romanies are credited in the
acknowledgments. Lewy has no expertise in Romani Studies, and apart from a
couple of recent articles excerpted from the same book, he has never published
anything on Romanies before this. It reflects one facet of a disturbing trend which
seems to be emerging in Holocaust studies, most recently expressed on an
Australian-based Holocaust website which proclaims that “just mentioning
Gypsies in the same breath as the Jewish victims is an insult to their memory!”
(David, 2000). This statement differs hardly at all from that made by the
Darmstadt city mayor who, in an address to the municipal Sinti and Roma
218
Council, said that their request for recognition “insults the honor of the memory
of the Holocaust victims” by aspiring to be associated with them (Anon., 1986),
evidence that this kind of antigypsyism extends well beyond the confines of
Holocaust scholarship. The motive for writing this book, therefore, was evidently
not to add to our knowledge of Romanies, but to support the Jewish “uniquist”
position, Lewy’s swan-song upon his retirement from The University of
Massachusetts. He has now turned his attention to writing a book on the
Armenian genocide, no doubt with the aim of also distancing it from any
comparison with the Holocaust.
His section on history is flawed and anemic; most of it relies heavily on
Fonseca’s journalistic, non-academic book Bury Me Standing. He accepts
negative stereotypes without comment, quoting e.g. Martin Block, whose 1936
book was commissioned by the Nazi Party and served as one of their fundamental
guides to the “Zigeuner,” and who says Romanies “are masters in the art of
lying.” Having made the point once, Lewy then reinforces Block’s statement in a
footnote by repeating Fonseca’s similar racist observation that “Gypsies lie. They
lie a lot. More often and more inventively than other people” [her emphasis]. He
unnecessarily quotes the editor of a Roman Catholic magazine who recently wrote
that Romanies are “with exceptions, a lazy, lying, thieving and extraordinarily
filthy people . . . exceedingly disagreeable people to be around.” Throughout his
opening chapter Lewy seems to take delight in documenting the “nasty” aspects
of Romanies; he doesn’t seem to like us very much at all. In a blame-the-victim
statement (p.11) he says “prejudice alone, I submit, is not sufficient explanation
for the hostility directed at the Gypsies . . . certain characteristics of Gypsy life
tend to reinforce or even create hostility.” Roald Dahl once said something
similar about Jews, and was roundly castigated for it. Lewy even puts himself in
charge of what we should be called, maintaining that “in fact there is nothing
pejorative, per se, about the word ‘Zigeuner’” (p. ix). One suggestion I did make
before returning the original manuscript to OUP was that the author remove the
word “mysterious” in his description of us from his text. The very first sentence
of the dust-jacket notes reads “[r]oaming the countryside in caravans, earning
their living as musicians, pedlars and fortune-tellers, the Gypsies and their elusive
way of life represented an affront to Nazi ideas of social order.”
Accepting uncritically the second-hand opinions of prejudiced nonRomani authors and presenting their statements as fact, and repeating undefended
racist venom while calling it merely “intemperate,” suggests that to Lewy such
statements are not questionable, and that we are not real people at all, but simply
subjects in books written by other non-Romanies. We are not real people with
real sensitivities and real aspirations in the real world, and we were not real
people in the Holocaust.
There are dozens of examples of this kind of insensitivity here and in
219
Lewy’s other writings. He repeats for example Yehuda Bauer’s viciously
insulting statement that my people were nothing more than a “minor irritant” as
far as the Nazis were concerned. The Nazis never called us that; this is Bauer’s
and Lewy’s interpretation. The Nazis called Romanies a plague and a menace
(Zigeunerplage, Zigeunerbedrohung); minor irritants aren’t sent to gas chambers,
and who else, besides Jews and Romanies, were sent to gas chambers? Was the
Bureau of Gypsy Affairs moved from Munich to Hitler’s capital in Berlin in 1936
simply so that the Nazis could keep a closer eye on a “minor irritant?” Bauer’s
latest effort to diminish the details of the Porrajmos are found in his introduction
to the book The Roma, a Minority in Europe (Stauber & Vago, 2008), where he
says
Some [historians] tend to think that about 90,000, out of an estimated one
million Roma in Nazi-controlled Europe, died. I would put the number
much higher, at about 150,000 (op. cit., x).
This apparent magnanimity ignores the figure reported by the late Dr Sybil
Milton, then senior historian at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Research Institute in
Washington who put the number of Romani lives lost by 1945 at “between a half
and one and a half million,” the same estimate reported by the International
Organization for Migration (the IOM), which stated in November 2001 that
“[r]ecent research indicates that up to 1.5 million Roma perished during the Nazi
era.” The book in which Bauer’s statement appears “stems from the first
international conference in Israel on the Roma . . . in December 2002 at Tel Aviv
University. No Roma participated in the presentations or the organization of that
conference.
On 21 September 2000, the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the
U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum held a symposium entitled Roma and Sinti:
Under-Studied Victims of Nazism. Not of the Holocaust, notice. I was asked to
find the invited speakers—which I did—but the organizers insisted, against my
very strenuous protests, that Guenther Lewy also be included on the program, a
revisionist who not only denies that Romanies were a part of the Holocaust, but
that they were not even the victims of genocide. He said as much in Washington,
but the closing speaker at the same symposium was the late Raul Hilberg,
generally considered to be the preeminent scholar of the Holocaust. In his talk he
not only pointed out the weakness of Lewy’s position, he also emphasized the
special relationship which exists between Jews and Romanies and their shared
experience in the Holocaust. I sat on the stage and wept at his words. But when
the Proceedings were published (Shapiro & Ehrenreich, 2002), Lewy’s paper was
included but Hilberg’s was left out. In his paper presented at that symposium
Lewy stated that “Gypsies were fortunate in not being the chosen victims of the
Holocaust,” heedless of the gross insensitivity evident in using a word such as
“fortunate” in the context of the Holocaust. In the same paper Lewy maintained
that Romanies weren’t sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau to be killed, and that in some
camps, they were merely murdered for carrying disease or for taking up space.
He makes much of the fact that Romani prisoners were kept together in families
in Birkenau, as though this somehow made their ultimate destruction less terrible;
220
he doesn’t say why, though—that separating the families made them completely
unmanageable for the guards. It was not because the Nazis wanted to be “kinder”
in any way, though that is his implication. He claims that the other prisoners
“envied” the Romanies because of this, but provides no evidence that this was in
fact true. This doesn’t quite match Lagnado & Dekel’s interpretation, viz. that the
Romani family camp provided “comfort” and was “a vast playground, an ongoing
carnival” (1991:82), but Lewy’s purpose is the same. Zimmerman, however,
writes that keeping families together “reflected efforts to keep the friction and
resulting bureaucratic problems associated with the deportation and internment as
small as possible” (Zimmermann, 1990:107-108). Nor does he mention that there
were concentration camps where it was the Jewish inmates who were kept
together in families. He mentions that Romanies married to Germans were not
transported, but doesn’t add that Jews married to Germans weren’t either, or that
those same Romanies were sterilized, but that policy did not affect those same
Jews. Arguments can be made by what is not said, as much as by what is said,
and this is a common technique of Lewy’s. Throughout his writing, Lewy
tempers his prejudices with the requisite sympathetic lip-service presumably lest
he be accused of bias, yet he includes no discussion of the ongoing persecution of
Romanies since 1945, of how there was no representation at the Nuremberg
Trials, or no war crimes reparations forthcoming, of how neo-Nazi violence is
directed—today—mainly at the Romani people, of how The New York Times and
CNN have both called Romanies “the most persecuted in Europe today.” If the
Holocaust is to mean anything, it must stand as the supreme example of prejudice
gone insane, and the ongoing threat it poses to all people. It cannot be mystified
into a single event left back in history. If it is, it could so easily happen again.
Why doesn’t Lewy examine the situation of the Jews and the Romanies today,
half a century later? Because he doesn’t, in fact, care. The fate of the Jewish
victims of the Holocaust is his obsession, even in a book about its Romani
victims.
As I write, the Greek government is already systematically removing
Romanies by force and demolishing their homes at the site of the next Olympic
Games, just as Hitler did in Berlin in 1936 and the Spanish government did in
1992 in Barcelona. Romani women were being involuntarily sterilized in
Slovakia into the 1980s. Forcible deportations are still a reality for Romanies,
and calls for their use as slave labor, and even for their extermination, have been
heard from various governmental representatives in a number of countries in the
1990s. These facts, in the context of what the Holocaust must teach us, mean
nothing to Mr. Lewy, and it is because he can feel no empathy for a people who
remain complete strangers to him.
Having to deal with the same lack of concern is something that confronts
Romanies constantly. Representatives in the USA wanting to be included in the
disbursement of the Swiss assets looted by the Nazis have certainly been made to
feel like “a minor irritant.” while Ward Churchill devoted a lengthy and critical
chapter to the unfair treatment of Romanies by Holocaust scholars in his book A
Little Matter of Genocide, neither of its two reviewers in a recent issue of this
journal even mention it. In January, 2000, the Swedish government hosted an
221
international conference on the Holocaust in response to the sharp increase in neoNazi activity in eastern Europe. Romanies were not only Holocaust victims, but
they are also the main targets of skinhead violence today—yet not even one
session on Romanies was included in the entire Stockholm forum. The follow-up
conference on Combating Racism and Intolerance which grew out of it and which
took place one year later again included no acknowledgment of the Romani
Holocaust, and just 90 minutes were allowed during the entire event for a
discussion of Romanies and education.
The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies is a dangerous book. It is the one of
sale in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s bookshop, although my own,
containing a chapter on the Romani Holocaust, is not, perhaps because it includes
Himmler’s document calling for the “Final Solution of the Gypsy Question.” It is
another title representing the antiquated tradition of being an expert treatise on a
people whom the author has never met nor has made any effort to meet. How can
you feel compassion for a people you don’t know? We are an abstraction, to be
discussed in our absence and, worse, even in our presence, as though we don’t
really exist, with no thought for our feelings or our dignity. Though stained by its
crass insensitivity it will, I am sorry to say, be widely read, and is already being
quoted as “evidence” to argue for the exclusion of the Romani people from their
rightful place in Holocaust history. It has been listed as one of the two sources on
Romanies in the 1,000-page Special Master’s Proposal in re Holocaust Victim
Assets Litigation released in September, 2000, and which is practically dismissive
of the Romani case (Gribetz, 2000). Lewy’s book has since been superceded by
another in the same vein—Margalit, 2002—less flagrantly written but promoting
the same message. Margalit’s reliance on racist stereotypes has been competently
discussed by Hadziavdic (2006). David Crowe’s new book (2008) takes a step
closer in its references to Romanies in the Holocaust, and will be the subject of a
later review, but still falls far, far short of doing justice to the subject.
Lewy unfairly criticizes Kenrick & Puxon’s groundbreaking 1972 Destiny
of Europe’s Gypsies, the first full-length book of the subject in English, as “short
of [being] a satisfactory treatment.” But his own agenda-driven effort comes
nowhere near replacing it, and my recommendation is that those wanting
scholarly, contemporary sources on the Porrajmos rely on the Interface multivolume series Gypsies During the Second World War from the University of
Hertfordshire Press.
Works cited
ADL, 2000. http://www.adl.org/frames/front_holocaust.html
Anon., 1986. “Tragedy of the Gypsies,” Information Bulletin No. 26. Vienna:
Dokumentationszentrum des Bundes Jüdische Verfolgte des Naziregimes.
Binding, Karl, & Alfred Hoche, 1920. Die Freigabe der Vernichtung lebensunwerten
Lebens. Leipzig: Felix Meiner.
Block, Martin, 1936. Die Zigeuner: Ihr Leben und ihr Seele. Leipzig: Bibliographisches
Institut.
Breitman, Richard, 1991. The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution.
222
New York: Knopf.
Charney, Israel, ed., 1999. Encyclopedia of Genocide, Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO. In
two vols.
Churchill, Ward, 1997. A Little Matter of Genocide. Holocaust and Denial in the
Americas, 1492 to the Present. San Francisco: City Lights Books.
Crowe, David M., 2008. The Holocaust: Roots, History, and Aftermath. Philadelphia:
The Westview Press.
David, L. ,2000. http://member.telpacific.com.au/david1/The_ Holocaust.htm - June 14th.
Fonseca, Isabel, 1995. Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and their Journey. NY: Knopf.
Gribetz, Judah, 2000. Special Master’s Proposal in re Holocaust Victim Assets
Litigation. New York.
Hadziavdic, Habiba, 2006. “Images of Gypsies, a German Case: Gilad Margalit.” Nebula
3(4):51-61.
Hancock, Ian, 1996. “Responses to the Porrajmos: The Romani Holocaust,” in
Rosenbaum, 1996, 39-64.
Heye, Uwe-Karsten, Joachim Sartorius & Ulrich Bopp, eds., 2000. Learning from
History: The Nazi Era and the Holocaust in German Education. Berlin: Press and
Information Office of the Federal Government.
Hornshøy-Møller, Stig, 1999. “Hitler and the Nazi decision-making process to commit
the Holocaust,” in Charney, 1999, vol. I, 313-315.
Katz, Steven, 1988. “Quantity and interpretation: Issues in the comparative historical
analysis of the Holocaust,” Remembering for the Future: Papers to be Presented at the
Scholars’ Conference, Supplementary Volume, Oxford: Pergamon Press, 200-218.
Kenrick, Donald, & Grattan Puxon, 1972. The Destiny of Europe’s Gypsies. New
York: Basic Books.
Lagnado, Lucette M., & Sheila Cohn Dekel, 1991. Children of the Flames: The Untold
Story of the Twins of Auschwitz. New York: Morrow.
Lemkin, Raphael, 1944. Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of
Government, Proposals for Redress. Washington: Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace.
Liebich, Richard, 1863. Die Zigeuner in ihrem Wesen und ihre Sprache. Leipzig:
Brockhaus.
Margalit, Gilad, 2002. Germany and its Gypsies. Madison: Wisconsin UP.
Milton, Sybil, 2000. “Holocaust education in The United States and Germany,” in Heye
et al., 14-20.
Ritchie, Leitch, 1833. Wanderings by the Loire. London: Longman & Co.
Rosenbaum, Alan S., ed., 1996. Is the Holocaust Unique? Boulder & Oxford: The
Westview Press.
Stauber, Roni, & Raphael Vago, eds., 2007. The Roma: A Minority in Europe.
Budapest: Central European University Press.
State Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau, 1993. Memorial Book: The Gypsies at
Auschwitz-Birkenau. Munich: Saur Verlag.
Zimmermann, Michael, 1990. “From discrimination to the ‘family camp’ at Auschwitz:
National Socialist persecution of the Gypsies,” Dachau Review, 2:87-113.
Zimmermann, Michael, 1996. Rassenutopie und Genozid: Die nationalsozialist-ische
‘Lösung der Zigeunerfrage’ Hamburg: Christians Verlag.
223
5
ON THE INTERPRETATION OF A WORD:
PORRAJMOS AS HOLOCAUST
Holocaust scholarship came late to the Romanies, and even now, the Romanies
who died in Hitler’s Europe are usually grouped together in published studies
with those referred to as “other non-Jewish” victims: the Poles, the Jehovah’s
Witnesses, homosexuals and so on. I have always regarded this as a mistaken
categorization, if such must be made at all, because I interpret the word Holocaust
to mean the implementation of the “Final Solution” directive, viz. genocidal
action intended to eradicate entire populations from the sphere of influence of the
Third Reich.
There were only two such directives: The Final solution of the Jewish
Question and The Final Solution of the Gypsy Question1. Not one other targeted
group was slated for extermination, nor was the focus of a “final solution.” That
being the case, this awful chapter in the European Romani experience—an event
that has become part of our very anthem Gelem Gelem—had to be moved away
from the shadow of another people’s history, and the first step towards achieving
that was to give it a name, and the most widely used word for the Romani
Holocaust now is Porrajmos.
It has recently been claimed that this is an interpretation of my own
invention2: it isn’t. It was offered as a possible word for “Holocaust” by a
Kalderash Romani whose name I regrettably haven’t remembered, at an informal
lunchtime gathering in the conference centre bar in Snagov in Romania in 1993.
A number of us were discussing what to call the Holocaust in Romani. The
variant paŗayimos “holocaust” was in fact listed over twenty five years ago in Lee
& Demetro’s Romani dictionary (1983: 117). I thought porrajmos was
particularly appropriate, but have modified it to Baro Porrajmos (“great
devouring”) in my own writings since the word alone could be applied to other
genocides besides the Holocaust.
Other suggested words for the Holocaust have included (besides
holokausto) maripen which means “killing,” mudaripen which means “murder,”
and samudaripen, a creation by a linguist which translates as “all” (sa-) +
“murder,” but which violates the rules of Romani morphology.3 The similar sa o
mudarimos (“all the murder”) has been proposed by a Swedish activist. In
Horváthová’s 2003 book it has yet another spelling and pronunciation,
murdaripen. If such a word were adopted it would more appropriately refer to any
mass murder, rather than to the Holocaust specifically, and this distinction has
224
become a particular source of discussion in recent years (see for example
Aggrawal (2005) and http://www.preventgenocide. org/genocide/officialtext.htm).
An earlier publication wholly in Romani referred to it metaphorically as the Berša
Bibahtale, the “unhappy years” (Puxon & Kenrick, 1988); Dosoftei (2007: 37)
lists the expressive Kali Traš (“Black Fear”). J. Pathania has called it E Našvali
Yag (1994:20), “the sick [?] fire.” Yet another term that has appeared in print is
Uštavipe (“upheaval”). These too could equally well apply to other instances of
wide-scale killing besides the Baro Porrajmos.
Porrav- is the Romani word for “devour,” and the noun porrajmos means
“devouring.” There is no other word in the language that means “devour”
specifically; there is xa- “eat,” nakhav- “swallow” and parvardjov- “be fed,” but
only porrav- means “devour,” i.e. to eat wolfishly. Like nakhav-, the basic
meaning of which is “make (something) pass,” “devour” is the extended
application of the basic meaning of the verb porrav- which is “open wide.” It
descends from Old Indo-Aryan sputa-, through Middle Indo-Aryan phuta “to
open up,” and its commonest application in the related languages spoken in India
today is to blossoming, as of flowers (Turner, 1966:800), a non-metaphorical
meaning it can also have in Romani.
The root has survived in a number of Romani dialects with various
interpretations, both literal and non-literal. Thus in Kalderash Vlax it means
among other things “open up, rip up, gape, devour, show the teeth, yawn, glare,
stare, scream, cheat, pitch a tent” and “stick out the tongue” (Boretzky & Igla,
1994:222, Gjerdman and Ljungberg 1963:322, et al.). Demeter & Demeter have
only “open wide (the eyes or mouth)” for porravav (1990:122; 263), also the only
meanings provided by Barthélémy (n.d.:116) and Calvet (1993:277). In Bosnian
Vlax porav- means “force open, disjoin, devour, open the eyes, open the mouth,”
while the noun poravipe means “an opening” (Uhlik, 1939: n.p.). Uhlik’s later
dictionary, however, has only nakhavimata for “devouring” (1983:304) and
“rape” as the sole meaning of poravipe (1983:336), although in that same dialect
porradi bešel means “she’s sitting with legs akimbo,” with no allusion to “rape.”
For Macedonian Romani Petrovski & Veličkovcki have poravipe “gape”
(1998:428). Czech Romani has našav- for “devour” and zgvalcin- for “rape”
(Hübschmannová et al., 1991: 189; 288). At their entry for poravav Petrovski &
Cana (2008:207) have “devour” (jedam puno), but no meanings for this word and
its derivatives include “rape.”
Metaphorically it has the extended meanings as dissimilar as “to rape” and
merely “to bother someone.” In Sinti, its derived noun poravipen means “a
widening or opening up,” and by extension “freedom” or “access.”
In various Vlax dialects, derived verbal and adjectival forms include
porradjov- “to stretch, widen, extend,” porrado “spacious,” “roomy,” “gapemouthed,” “legs astride or akimbo,” “engulf” and “stepping.” Derived noun forms
as metaphors include porradi “vagina” (also with the adjectival meaning of
“deflowered”), and porravipe “rape.” It is in the sense of “devour,” however, that
Porrajmos was offered. Gjerdman and Ljungberg (loc. cit.) give the example te
dikhleasas o sap ke prea xantsi xal, poradeasas les atuntši “if the snake should
see that the man ate too little, then he would devour him” (NB not “rape him”!).
225
The word has been objected to by some because of some other possible
meanings, specifically its use as a euphemism for “rape”4. I happen to think this
further interpretation, together with “scream” and “gape” and “tear asunder”
simply adds to the overall force of the word, for what the Romani genocide did to
our people. The two words have been used together in the same context before,
cf. Iris Chang’s book The Rape of Nangking: the Forgotten Holocaust of World
War II. There is in fact a whole website devoted to “holocaust and rape analogies”
(http:// twentysixh.wordpress.com/2006/10/27/on-holocaust-and-rape-analogies/).
My own objection, if I had one, would be that in the Sinti dialect it has quite the
opposite meaning, and the Sinti Romanies suffered especially harshly in the Nazi
genocide.
“Rape” can be expressed in Vlax Romani in a number of other ways;
silov-i- as a verb, silovimos or sìla as a noun (l- pe sìla “take by force, rape” with
the Slavic word sila—also with its Slavic meaning meaning of “force” or
“power” in Romani). The more vulgar expression kurr- pe sìla, is also heard, both
expressions no doubt originating with forced concubinage during the centuries of
slavery. For “to rape” Boretzky & Igla (1994: 237) list phučar- (lit. “make
someone ask”). In Vlax, porrav- can also refer to male sexual arousal.
A more recent rejection of the term is found in Martin Holler’s essay on
the Nazi extermination of Soviet Roma. In it, he “refrain[s] from using
fashionable political expressions like ‘porrajmos’ or ‘Gypsy Holocaust,’ which
are inaccurate and confusing” (2010: 137). The use of either term (Porrajmos or
Holocaust) was also challenged by Bessonov (2007), though it is certainly
presumptuous of non-Roma to decide the appropriateness or inappropriateness of
words in a language not their own.
But these objections from the few lack weight, and it is glaringly obvious
that those making them have little understanding or interest in the Holocaust and
what it actually meant for Romanies. I’m reminded of the humorous Monty
Python “Wankel Rotary Engine” sketch on television many years ago about
“suggestive” words and phrases in English. Those who object to Porrajmos are
either demonstrating the same sort of schoolboy sniggering, or else are objecting
purely in order to object, which is after all a fundamentally Romani response
(although we can expect reaction to the arguments being made here from the nonRomani ethnic police too). The same Romani speakers have no qualms about
using such phrases as xav tj’o kar, xav tj’i mindž, xav tj’e pele for “please,” and
which are not metaphors or euphemisms in any sense. By this reasoning, such
common English words as “pussy,” “cock,” “prick,” “tit,” “bum,” “dick,” “ass,”
and so on should be condemned and replaced by “kitty,” “rooster,” “pierce,”
“parus,” “tramp,” “Ritchie” and “donkey,” etc. Some people actually promote
this kind of word-avoidance; in the USA the shuttlecock used in badminton is
now called a “birdie,” and for marketing purposes rape seed oil is now being sold
as “canola oil”— which should particularly please those worried by the word
Porrajmos.
The same argument would lead us to avoid using the word for “heavy”
(phari) because it is a common euphemism for “pregnant,” and is used to save
one from having to utter the real word for this condition (khamni); likewise,
226
should we never use the proper word for a fig (smòčina), or even the word for
“before” (angluni), since they are also words for vagina? Xutavipe (from xut“jump”) also means “masturbation.” Luludji, “flower,” also refers to a woman’s
monthly period. Do we say than (“place”) to avoid saying pato for “bed”? It
seems that we now need euphemisms for our euphemisms. A modified term,
similar to that found in Lee & Demetro, has been introduced with the word
Pharrajimos in the title of a new book by Barsony & Daroczi, (2007) from the
Central European University Press in Budapest. Like porr- this also stems from a
word meaning “spread apart,” “split,” “burst,” but that too has provided the
source for the Romani words for “achieve orgasm,” “vagina” and “prostitute.” It
might also be pointed out that a recently published grammar and phrasebook of
Romani includes four pages wholly devoted to sexual insults and vocabulary—
including words discussed here—and to using the toilet (Heinschink & Krasa,
2004:153-156).
We have now four different books by four different authors using four
different words for the Romani Holocaust in their respective titles (Puxon &
Kenrick 1988, Auzias 1999, Gabor 2000 and Barsony & Daroczi 2007); this is
quite in keeping with the overall imprecision of materials relating to Roma
generally, a vagueness to which we ourselves contribute.
Nevertheless the
recognition and use of the word Porrajmos is spreading. It turns up in the texts
and titles of numerous articles and chapters, a book, and to date it is the name of
two documentary films. A Google web-search has nearly 58,000 text entries for
Porrajmos/Porraimos/Porraimos/Poraimos, and about one thousand picture
images listed for the word. Amazon.com lists 25 books on the Holocaust that use
the word. It has given an identity and a name to the most tragic event in our entire
history, and moves it from the collective into the particular. Whether the word
will stand the test of time remains to be seen.
Notes
1The
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 Würth of the Racial Hygiene
Research Unit in September, 1937. The first official Party statement to refer to
the endgültige Lösung der Zigeunerfrage was issued in March, 1938, signed by
Himmler.
2Presumably meaning me, gypsilorist Michael Stewart (2004:564) says “an
American Romany intellectual has coined the term Porrajmos, the ‘devouring’,
but one is still more likely to find this term on the internet than on the lips of
Roma in the lands occupied by the Germans during the Second World War.”
Speaking for most of Hungary’s nearly one million Romanies he adds “in fact
since the term porrajmos has also an obscene meaning, it has recently been
rejected by most Hungarian Romani speakers who use the calqued term
holocausto” (op. cit., 578, n. 7. But see also Gábor, 2000 and Barsony & Daroczi,
227
2007). As a correction to these assumptions, (a) I’m not American, (b) I didn’t
invent the word, and (c) holocausto (correctly holokausto in either Hungarian or
Romani orthography) is not a calque but a loanword – a calque is the translation
of an idiomatic use, not a direct lexical adoption.
3Objecting to a proposed victim-specific word for the Holocaust is not just a
Romani issue; a debate over the use of Shoah for the Jewish Holocaust and calls
for its disuse have recently been ongoing in the French press (Meschonnic, 2005).
4Romani does not have prefixing except in some dialects heavily influenced by
non-Romani syntax, e.g. Czech Romani de-našel, “flee,” English Romani for-del
“forgive.” Like samudaripen, the word for “international” (sathemengo) is a
creation by a non-Romani linguist. The one morpheme usually regarded as an
enclitic, viz. bi (“without,” “un-”), is in fact an independent word, and can be
separated from its referent: bi murro mobìli “without my car.”
__________________________________________________________________
I want to thank Ronald Lee and Donald Kenrick for their useful comments during the
preparation of this essay. I am aware that the inclusion of certain words in this essay will
offend some. Te jertin ma, Rromale, rrudjiv tumendar jertimos, trubutno si te sikavav len
ta šaj inkerav murre gundurja pa’l alomaste kadale svatoske.
Works listed
Aggrawal, A., (2005). “Mass Murder,” in J. Payne-James, T. Corey and C.
Henderson (eds.), Encyclopedia of Forensic and Legal Medicine, Vol. 3, Pp.
216-223. London: Elsevier Academic Press.
Auzias, Claire, 1999. Samudaripen: le Génocide des Tsiganes. Paris: L’Esprit
Frappeur.
Barsony Janos & Daroczi Agnes, 2007. Pharrajimos: The Fate of the Roma
During the Holocaust. Budapest: CEU Press.
Barthélémy, André, n.d.. Dictionnaire du Tsigane Kalderash. n.p.
Bessonov, Nikolai, 2007. “Ob ispoljzovanij terminov ‘Porajmos’ i ‘Xolokost’ v
značenij genocid cigan,” Golokost i Sučastnist, 2(1):71-82.
Boretzky N. & B. Igla, 1994. Wörterbuch Romani Deutsch EnglischWiesbaden:
Harrassowitz.
Calvet, Georges, 1993. Dictionnaire Tsigane-Français. Paris: L'Asiathique.
Chang, Iris, 1997. The Rape of Nangking: the Forgotten Holocaust of World
War II. New York: Perseus Books.
Demeter, R.S. & P.S. Demeter, 1990. Gypsy-Russian and Russian-Gypsy
Dictionary (Kalderash Dialect). Moscow: Russky Yazyk.
Dosoftei, Alin, 2007. Romani History. Bucharest: Joomla.
Gábor Bernáth, ed., 2000. Porrajmos: E Roma Seron Kon Perdal Zhuvinde –
Roma Holocaust Túlélők Emlékeznek. Budapest: Royal Dutch Embassy.
Gjerdman, O. & Eric Ljungberg, 1963. The Language of the Swedish
Coppersmith Gipsy Johan Dimitri Taikon. Uppsala: Lundquist.
Heinschink, Mozes & Daniel Krasa, 2004. Romani Wort für Wort. Bielefeld:
Peter Rump GmbH.
228
Holler, Martin, 2010. “’Like Jews?’ The Nazi persecution and extermination of
Soviet Roma under the German military administration: a new interpretation,
based on Soviet sources.” Dapim: Studies on the Shoah, 24: 137-176.
Horváthová, Jana, ed., 2003. Le Romengro Murdaripen andro Dujto Baro
Mariben. Prague: Slovo 21.
Hübschmannová, M., Hana Šebková & Anna Žigová, 1991. Romsko-Český a
Česko-Romský Slovník. Prague: SPN.
Lee, Ronald & Waso Russell Demetro, 1983. English-Romani Dictionary:
International Kalderash Dialect. Toronto: Privately circulated.
Meschonnic, Henri, 2005. “Pour en finir avec le mot «Shoah»,” Le Monde, Feb.
20th.
Pathania, J.S., 1994. “E Našvali Yag” (the Holocaust),” Roma, 41: 20-21.
Petrovski, T. & B. Veličkovcki, 1998. Makedonsko-Romski i RomskoMakedonski Rečnik. Skopje: Vorldbuk.
Petrovski, T., & Kasum Cana, 2008. Rječnik Hrvatsko-Romski RomskoHrvatski. Zagreb: Bitola.
Puxon, Grattan & Donald Kenrick, 1988. Berša Bibahtale. London:
Romanestan Publications.
Stewart, Michael, 2004.
“Remembering without commemoration: the
mnemonics and politics of Holocaust memories among European Roma,” Journal
of the Royal Anthropological Institute, n.s., 10:561-582.
Turner, Ralph, 1966. A Comparative Dictionary of the Indo-Aryan Languages.
London: Oxford University Press.
Uhlik, Rade, 1939. [A Bosnian Romani Dictionary], ms. Edited and translated
into English by Frederick George Ackerly, Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society,
1941-3.
Uhlik, Rade, 1983. Srpskohrvatsko-Romsko-Engelski Rečnik. Sarajevo:Svjetlost.
229