Copyright
Dan Stone (ed.)
The Historiography of the Holocaust
Palgrave-Macmillan, New York 2004, pp. 383-396
ROMANIES
AND THE HOLOCAUST:
A REEVALUATION AND AN OVERVIEW
by
Ian Hancock, Ph.D
"It was the wish of
the all-powerful Reichsfhhrer Adolf Hitler to have the
Gypsies disappear from the face of the earth"
(SS Officer Percy
Broad, Auschwitz Political Division)1
"The motives
invoked to justify the death of the Gypsies were the same
as those ordering the murder of the Jews, and the methods
employed for the one were identical with those employed
for the other" (Miriam Novitch, Ghetto Fighters' House,
Israel)2
"The genocide of
the Sinti and Roma was carried out from the same motive
of racial mania, with the same premeditation, with the
same wish for the systematic and total extermination as
the genocide of the Jews. Complete families from the very
young to the very old were systematically murdered within
the entire sphere of influence of the National
Socialists" (Roman
Herzog, Federal President of Germany, 16 March
1997)
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
gene-pool of the German Herrenvolk or "Master Race;" but
while the Jews were considered a threat on a number of
other grounds as well, political, philosophical and
economic, the Romanies were only ever a "racial" threat.
Earlier writings on
the Holocaust, however, either did not recognise this at
all, or else failed to understand that the "criminality"
associated with our people was attributed by the Nazis to
a genetically transmitted and incurable disease, and was
therefore ideologically racial; instead, writers focused
only on the "antisocial" label resulting from it and
failed to acknowledge the genetic connection made by the
Nazi race scientists themselves. In 1950 the
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 observe, however, that "everyone despises
Gypsies, so why exercise restraint? Who will avenge them?
Who will complain? Who will bear witness?"3 .
The past two or
three decades have seen a tremendous increase in
Holocaust-focused activities, in the establishment of
museums and memorials, and in the creation of educational
programs for the schools. Hand in hand with this has
emerged an increasingly strident debate over how the
Holocaust is to be defined, and who does or does not
qualify for inclusion in it. The Anti-Defamation League's
website defines Holocaust as "the systematic persecution
and annihilation of more than six million Jews as a
central act of state by Nazi Germany and its
collaborators between 1933 and 1945." The program for the
33rd Annual Scholars' Conference on the Holocaust and the
Churches defines it as "the Nazi attempt to annihilate
European Jewry," and makes no mention in its pages of
Romanies. In February 1987, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial
Museum organized a conference entitled Other Victims that
included a panel on Romanies, but it included no Romanies
either in its organization or among its presenters; at
this time (Summer 2003) there is no Romani representation
on the Holocaust Council at all. An international
conference entitled The Roma, a Minority in Europe:
Historical, Social and Cultural Perspectives held at Tel
Aviv University in December, 2002 similarly had no
Romanies among its organizers or speakers. Yet it would
be unthinkable to have a conference on the fate of Jews
in the Holocaust that had no Jewish involvement. We
cannot be treated any differently.
Guenther Lewy4 has
attempted to argue that not only were our people not a
part of the Holocaust, but that our fate at the hands of
the Nazis did not even qualify as an attempted genocidal
action; a similar position has been taken more recently
by Margalit5. Already during the question and answer
session at a talk I gave in 20016, a member of the
audience called out--following my statement that the
Romanies were only ever a racial threat--"and nothing
more!" It is this competitive--and I must say meanly
motivated and defensive--attitude which I want to
question and challenge. It is unscholarly and
unprofessional in the context of the Holocaust
especially, and it serves no purpose to diminish the fate
of the Romanies; instead it must only reflect badly upon
those who attempt to do so. If the Holocaust is to teach
us anything, it is concern for the treatment of human
beings at the hands of other human beings, and the wicked
senselessness of hating others for being different. The
present-day relevance of this is clear from a recent
editorial in The Economist which stated that the Romanies
in Europe were "at the bottom of every socio-economic
indicator: the poorest, the most unemployed, the least
educated, the shortest-lived, the most welfare dependent,
the most imprisoned and the most segregated"7. More
energy is expended on making their case by those seeking
to distance Romanies from the Holocaust than on examining
the relevance of the Holocaust to the Romanies'
present-day condition.
In an article
published in 1996 I listed several of the arguments that
have been made for diminishing the Porrajmos, or Romani
Holocaust8, addressing each one in turn. In practically
every case, statements 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. Several writers have written that there was no
Final Solution of the Gypsy Question, for example
Breitman (1991:20) who wrote "whatever its weaknesses,
'Final Solution' at least applies to a single, specific
group defined by descent. The Nazis are not known to have
spoken of the Final Solution of the Polish problem or of
the gypsy problem." Nevertheless the earliest Nazi
document referring to "the introduction of the total
solution to the Gypsy problem on either a national or an
international level" was drafted under the direction of
State Secretary Hans Pfundtner of the Reichs Ministry of
the Interior in March, 1936, and the first specific
reference to "the final solution of the Gypsy question"
was made by Adolf 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, 19389,
signed by Himmler.
Without getting
into what has been cynically called the "Suffering
Olympics," since my more subjective feelings on the
matter have already appeared elsewhere10, I will instead
try to provide an overview of the details and sequence of
Nazi action against Romanies for those for whom this
information is new. I have paid a price for my
outspokenness and have lost friends and support from some
quarters, while certainly gaining it anew in others. I
put it to those who have turned away from me to look deep
into their own hearts and ask themselves why--really
why--they have done so, when nothing I have written has
been fabricated or ever written with malicious intent.
While it is true
that all of the 'minimizing' rhetoric originates with
some Jewish authors, I must hasten to add that most of
the arguments in support of the Romani case originate
with Jewish scholars too; indeed, almost the entire body
of research on the Romani Holocaust is the result of
Jewish scholarship. Despite the naysayers, the Jews are
practically the only friends we have, and we recognize
that.
The reasons for
antigypsyism are complex, and are the result of several
different factors coming together over time. I have
discussed these in more detail in another essay11, but
briefly these are (a) that because the first Romanies to
arrive in Europe did so at the same time as, and because
of, the Ottoman Turkish takeover of the Christian
Byzantine Empire they were therefore perceived to be
equally a threat; (b) the fact that Romanies were a
non-white, non-Christian, alien population (c) the fact
that Romanies have never had claim to a geographical
territory or have had an economy, militia or government,
and (d) the fact that culture itself maintains a strict
social boundary between Romanies and the non-Romani
world. These resulted in excessively barbaric methods of
control from the very time of arrival in Europe at the
end of the 13th century, which included murder and
torture, transportation and enslavement. The greatest
tragedy to befall the European Romani population,
however, even greater than the five and a half centuries
of slavery in Romania, was the attempt to eradicate it as
part of the Nazis' plan to have a 'Gypsy-free' land.
Although it wasn't the first governmental resolution to
exterminate Romanies (German Emperor Karl VI had
previously issued such an order in 1721), it was by far
the most devastating, ultimately destroying over half of
the Romani population in Nazi-occupied Europe. Romanies
were the only other population besides the Jews who were
targeted for extermination on racial/ethnic grounds
following the directives of a Final Solution.
When the Nazis came
to power in 1933, German laws against Romanies had
already been in effect for hundreds of years. The
persecution of the Romani people began almost as soon as
they first arrived in German-speaking lands because as
outsiders, they were, without knowing it, breaking the
Hanseatic laws which made it a punishable offence not to
have a permanent home or job, and not to be on the
taxpayers' register. They were also accused of being
spies for the Muslims, whom few Germans had ever met, but
about whom they had heard many frightening stories; it
was not illegal to murder a Romani and there were
sometimes 'Gypsy hunts' in which Romanies were tracked
down and killed like wild animals. Forests were set on
fire, to drive out any Romanies who might have been
hiding there..c.When the Nazis came to power in 1933,
German laws against Romanies had already been in effect
for hundreds of years. The persecution of the Romani
people began almost as soon as they first arrived in
German-speaking lands because as outsiders, they were,
without knowing it, breaking the Hanseatic laws which
made it a punishable offence not to have a permanent home
or job, and not to be on the taxpayer's register. They
were also accused of being spies for the Muslims, whom
few Germans had ever met but abo;
By the nineteenth
century, scholars in Germany and elsewhere in Europe were
writing about Romanies and Jews as being inferior beings
and "the excrement of humanity"12; even Darwin, writing
in 1871, singled out our two populations as not being
"culturally advanced" like other "territorially settled"
peoples13. This crystallized into specifically racist
attitudes in the writing of Dohm, Hundt-Radowsky, Knox,
Tetzner, Gobineau, Ploetz, Schallmeyer and others14. By
the 1880s, Chancellor von Bismarck reinforced some of the
discriminatory laws, stating that Romanies were to be
dealt with "especially severely" if apprehended.
In or around 1890,
a conference on 'The Gypsy Scum' (Das Zigeunergeschmei8)
was held in Swabia, at which the military was given full
authority to keep Romanies on the move. In 1899 the
Englishman Houston Chamberlain, who was the composer
Richard Wagner's son-in-law, wrote a book called The
Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, in which he argued
for the building of a "newly shaped . . . and . . .
especially deserving Aryan race"15. It was used to
justify the promotion of ideas about German racial
superiority and for any oppressive action taken against
members of 'inferior' populations. In that same year, the
'Gypsy Information Agency' was set up in Munich under the
direction of Alfred Dillmann, which began cataloguing
data on all Romanies throughout the German lands. The
results of this were published in 1905 in Dillmann's
Zigeuner-Buch16, which laid the foundations for what was
to happen to our people in the Holocaust thirty-five
years later.
The Zigeuner-Buch
is nearly 350 pages long, and consists of three parts:
first, an introduction stating that Romanies were a
"plague" and a "menace" against which the German
population had to defend itself using "ruthless
punishments", and which warned of the dangers of mixing
the Romani and German gene pools. The second part was a
register of all known Romanies, giving genealogical
details and criminal record if any, and the third part
was a collection of photographs of those same people.
Dillmann's ideas about 'race mixing' later became a
central part of the Nuremberg Law in Nazi Germany.
In 1920, a
psychiatrist, Karl Binding and a magistrate, Alfred
Hoche, published a jointly-authored book called The
Eradication of Lives Undeserving of Life17, using a
phrase first coined by Richard Liebich with specific
reference to Romanies nearly sixty years earlier18, and
used shortly after him, again specifically referring to
Romanies, by Rudolf Kulemann19. Among the three groups
that they said were "unworthy of life" were the
"incurably mentally ill", and it was to this group that
Romanies were considered to belong. Euthanasia, and
particularly non-propagation through sterilization, were
topics receiving a good deal of attention at that time in
the United States; Nazi programs were to an extent based
upon American research20. A law incorporating the phrase
lives undeserving of life was put into effect just four
months after Hitler became Chancellor of the Third
Reich.
Perceived Romani
'criminality' was seen as a transmitted genetic disease,
though no account was taken of the centuries of exclusion
of the Romanies from German society, which made
subsistence theft a necessity for survival. The "crimes"
listed in the Zigeunerbuch are almost exclusively
trespassing and the theft of food.
During the 1920s,
the legal oppression of Romanies in Germany intensified
considerably, despite the official statutes of the Weimar
Republic that said that all its citizens were equal. In
1920 they were forbidden to enter parks and public baths;
in 1925 a conference on 'The Gypsy Question' was held
which resulted in the creation of laws requiring
unemployed Romanies to be sent to work camps "for reasons
of public security", and for all Romanies to be
registered with the police. After 1927 everyone, even
Romani children, had to carry identification cards
bearing their fingerprints and photographs. In 1929, The
Central Office for the Fight Against the Gypsies in
Germany was established in Munich, and in 1933, just ten
days before the Nazis came to power, government officials
in Burgenland, Austria, called for the withdrawal of all
civil rights from the Romani people.
In September 1935,
Romanies became subject to the restrictions of the
Nuremberg Law for the Protection of German Blood and
Honour, which forbade intermarriage between Germans and
'non-Aryans', specifically Jews, Romanies and people of
African descent. In 1937, the National Citizenship Law
relegated Romanies and Jews to the status of second-class
citizens, depriving them of their civil rights. Also in
1937, Heinrich Himmler issued a decree entitled "The
Struggle Against the Gypsy Plague" which reiterated that
Romanies of mixed blood were the most likely to engage in
criminal activity, and which required that all
information on Romanies be sent from the regional police
departments to the Reich Central Office. In their book
published in 1943, the Danish sociologists Erik Bartels
and Gudrun Brun echoed this position, evidently unaware
that the sterilization of Romanies had already been in
effect for a decade:
The pure Gypsies
present no great problem, if only we realise that their
mentality does not allow of their admittance to the
well-ordered general society . . . the mixed Gypsies
cause considerably greater difficulties (. . . nothing
good has) come from a crossing between a Gipsy and a
white person . . . Germany is at present contemplating
the introduction of provisions of sterilization in the
case of such families21 .
Calling a
population vermin, or a disease, rather than recognising
them as being part of the human family is a technique
used to dehumanize it and to distance it from society.
Such terms were constantly used to refer to Jews and
Romanies in the Third Reich in an effort to desensitize
the general population to the increasingly harsh
treatment being meted out against them; after all, vermin
and diseases need to be eradicated. Disturbingly, this
language is still with us--in 1992 the Badische Zeitung
carried the headline "A pure disease, these
Gypsies!"22
Between June 13-18
1938 'Gypsy Clean-Up
Week'(Zigeunerauf-räumungswoche, 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 considered strong enough to outweigh
seven-eighths of German blood--so dangerous were the
Gypsies considered24.
These was
twice as strict as the criteria determining who was
Jewish; had the same also applied to Romanies, nearly
20,000 would have escaped death. On 16 December 1941
Himmler issued the order to have Romanies throughout
western Europe deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau for
extermination.
In 1939 Johannes
Behrendt of the Office of Racial Hygiene issued a brief
stating that "[a]ll Gypsies should be treated as
hereditarily sick; the only solution is elimination. The
aim should therefore be the elimination without
hesitation of this defective element in the
population"25. In January 1940 the first mass genocidal
action of the Holocaust took place when 250 Romani
children from Brno were murdered in Buchenwald, where
they were used as guinea-pigs to test the efficacy of the
Zyklon-B cyanide gas crystals that were later used in the
gas chambers26. In June 1941 Hitler ordered the
extermination of all Jews, Romanies and communist
political functionaries in the entire Soviet Union.
Reinhard Heydrich, who was Head of the Reich Main
Security Office and the leading organizational architect
of the Nazi Final Solution, ordered the Einsaztkommandos
to kill all Jews, Romanies and mental patients, although
not all of the documentation regarding its complete
details, relating to both Jews and Romanies, has so far
been found. 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 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 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 Gypsies,
irrespective of their racial mix, were to be assigned to
concentration camps. The concentration camp for Gypsy
families at Auschwitz-Birkenau was foreseen as their
final destination . . . opposed to the fact that the
decision to seek a final solution for the Gypsy Question
came at a later date than that of the Jewish Question,
the first steps taken to exterminate the Gypsies were
initiated prior to this policy decision.
This order
appears to have been the result of a direct decision from
Hitler himself30. Breitman reproduced the statement
issued by Security Police Commander Bruno Streckenbach
following a policy meeting with Hitler and Heydrich held
in Pretsch in June, 1941, viz. that "[t]he
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
card-indexes or camp files; most of the Gypsies died in
eastern or southern Europe, shot by execution troops or
fascist gang members"34. Much of the Nazi documentation
still remains to be analyzed and, as Streck intimates,
many murders were not recorded since they took place in
the fields and forests where Romanies were arrested.
There are no accurate figures either for the pre-war
Romani population in Europe, though the Nazi Party's
official census of 1939 estimated it to be about two
million, certainly an under-representation. Regarding
numbers, 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:
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 put the number of Romani lives
lost by 1945 at "between a half and one and a half
million"37. Significantly, the same figure appeared again
in a November 2001 report issued by the International
Organization for Migration (the IOM), a body designated
to locate and compensate surviving Romani Holocaust
victims. The brief states that "[r]ecent research
indicates that up to 1.5 million Roma perished during the
Nazi era"38 . It is certainly a fact that interviews in
the past four years by trained Romani personnel who have
obtained testimonials at first-hand from claimants
throughout central and eastern Europe have already shed
startling new light on this issue: the number of Romani
survivors is far in excess of anything previously
estimated. By extrapolation, and from the same eyewitness
accounts documented in recent years, the numbers of
Romanies who perished at the hands of the Nazis has also
been grossly underestimated. Eventually, these revised
figures will find their way into the public
record.
Since the end of
the Second World War, Germany's record regarding the
Romani people has been less than exemplary. Nobody was
called to testify in behalf of the Romani victims at the
Nuremberg Trials, and no war crimes reparations have ever
been paid to Romanies as a people. Today, neo-Nazi
activity in many parts of central and Eastern Europe
makes the Romanies its prime target of racial violence.
Kenrick summarized the situation after 1945 very
well:
In the first
years following the end of the Nazi domination of Europe,
the Gypsy community was in disarray. The small
[Romani] educational and cultural organizations
that had existed before 1939 had been destroyed. The
family structure was broken with the death of the older
people--the guardians of the traditions. While in the
camps, the Gypsies had been unable to keep up their
customs--the 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
section39.
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 defend40.
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 Book41 lists just five pages in the index for
"Sinti and Roma," but eighteen under "Armenians"-- who
weren't victims of the Holocaust, while the question
following the section on the Romanies, which consists
solely of a quote from Ina Friedman's Other Victims42,
asks what the "striking differences" were between the
treatment of Romanies and the treatment of Jews.
The 2005 annual Scholars'Conference on the Holocaust
again includes 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.
An argument which
is sometimes made is that the Romanies simply didn't
preoccupy the Nazis; we have been called an
"afterthought" in Nazi policy, even merely a "minor
irritant."43. This is neither fair nor true, and
statements have been made in print about Romanies which,
had they been made about Jews, would have been
immediately condemned as anti-Semitic. Some of them can
probably be accounted for by the fact that our people
were far fewer in number, were much more easily
identified and disposed of, and had already been the
target of discriminatory policy even before Hitler came
to power. It required no massive effort on the part of
the Nazis to locate and destroy a population that had no
one to take its part. Haberer adds to this:
[Regarding]
the persecution of Gypsies, it should be noted that their
plight equaled that of the Jews. Their liquidation was
part and parcel of the Nazis' agenda to eradicate
'worthless life'. Wrapped up in the Holocaust per se, the
genocide of the Roma in the East is still very much an
untold story. In some ways, their victimization was
practiced even more ruthlessly because they held no
'economic value' and were traditionally considered a
particular asocial and criminally inclined people
[and] more alien in appearance, culture and
language44.
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 execution45. To this, and
returning to the issue of race-based motives for
eradication, we can add the conclusion of Austrian
Holocaust historian Erika Thurner, who
wrote Jews
and Gypsies were equally affected by the racial theories
and measures of the Nazi rulers. The persecution of the
two groups was carried out with the same radical
intensity and cruelty. The Jewish genocide received top
priority in planning and execution--this because of the
different social status of the Jews and also their larger
numbers. Due to their smaller numbers, the Roma and Sinti
were for the Nazis a 'secondary' problem46.
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 best47.
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 existed48.
Notes
1 Percy Broad.
"KZ Auschwitz: Erinnerungen eines SS Mannes". Hefte
von Auschwitz, 9:7-48 (1966), p. 41.
2 Miriam
Novitch, Le Genocide des Tziganes Sous le RJgime Nazi.
Paris: AMIF and the Ghetto Fighters' House, Israel
(1968:3).
3 Christian
Bernadec, 1979. L'Holocauste Oubié. Paris:
Editions France-Empire, p. 44.
4 Guenther Lewy,
2000. The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies. Cambridge:
The University Press.
5 Gilad
Margalit, 2002. Germany's Gypsies. Cambridge: The
University Press. This "competitive" aspect is
particularly explicit in an earlier monograph by Gilad
Margalit, where he states that "Antigypsyism and
antisemitism are two very different phenomena of
ethnic hatred, distinct in their content, dimensions
and appearance (p. 3) . . . antigypsyism . . . is only
a marginal preoccupation of the German extreme Right,
compared to the constant and latent and exposed
preoccupation with Jews and Judaism (1996:
26)."
6 At West
Chester University.
7 Jonathan
Ledgard, "Europe's spectral nation", The Economist,
May 12th (2001:29-31).
8 Ian Hancock,
"Responses to the Porrajmos (the Romani Holocaust),"
in Alan S. Rosenbaum & Israel Charney, eds., Is
the Holocaust Unique? New York: Westview Press (1996),
pp. 39-72 [reproduced on this website]. Some
of the arguments I've received include: the respective
overall numbers of losses cannot be compared; some
Romanies were spared death; there were family camps
for Romanies; the Holocaust was a divine punishment
specifically intended for Jews; 'generalizing' the
Holocaust diminishes its gravity; 'generalizing' the
Holocaust weakens justification for Israel's
existence; Nazi methods of dealing with Romanies were
more humane; Romanies were responsible for their own
mistreatment. In the Romani language, the Holocaust is
referred to as the Baro Porrajmos, or 'great
devouring' of human life.
9
Reichsfuhrer-SS-Dokument S-Kr. 1 Nr. 557/38. The words
"the final solution of the Gypsy question" actually
first appeared on page one of the very first issue of
The Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society in 1888, that
question being what are the origins of the Romani
people, and its resolution the intended aim of that
new organization.
10 "Gypsies,
Jews and the Holocaust," Shmate: A Journal of
Progressive Jewish Thought, 17:6-15:(1987);"Uniqueness
of the victims: Gypsies, Jews and the Holocaust,"
Without Prejudice: International Review of Racial
Discrimination, 1(2):45-67 (1988); "Gypsy history in
Germany and neighboring lands: a chronology," in David
Crowe & John Kolsti, eds., The Gypsies of Eastern
Europe. Armonk: E.C. Sharpe (1989:11-30); "The roots
of antigypsyism: to the Holocaust and after," in Jan
Colijn & Marcia Sachs Littell, eds., Confronting
the Holocaust: A Mandate for the 21st Century. Lanham:
University Press of America (1997:19-49), "Downplaying
the Porrajmos: the trend to minimize the Romani
Holocaust," Journal of Genocide Research, 3(1):56-63
(2000) and op. cit. (note 8).
11 In "The roots
of antigypsyism: to the Holocaust and after," in Jan
Colijn & Marcia Sachs Littell, eds., Confronting
the Holocaust: A Mandate for the 21st Century. Lanham:
University Press of America (1997:19-49).
12 This phrase,
used by Tetzner, is documented in Rainer Hehemann, Die
"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 Thchtigkeit unsrer Rasse und der Schutz der
Schwachen. Berlin (1895). Wilhelm Schallmeyer, in his
"Einfhhrungen in die Rassenhygiene," in Wilhelm
Weichardt, ed., Ergebnisse der Hygiene, Berlin (1917),
argued for the regulated pairing of German men and
women of "suitable genetic quality" and the
euthanizing of those of inferior heredity (vol. 2, p.
455).
15 Houston S.
Chamberlain. Die Grundlagen des Neunzehnten
Jahrhunderts. Leipzig (1899).
16 Alfred
Dillmann. Zigeuner-Buch. Munich: Wildsche
(1905).
17 Karl Binding
& Alfred Hoche. Die Freigabe der Vernichtung
Lebensunwerten Lebens. Leipzig: Felix Meiner
(1920).
18 Richard
Liebich, Die Zigeuner in ihrem Wesen und ihre Sprache.
Leipzig: Brockhaus (1863).
19 Rudolf
Kulemann, "Die Zigeuner", Unserer Zeit, 5(1):843-871
(1869).
20 An excellent
overview of this is found in Daniel Stone's Breeding
Superman: Nietsche, Race and Eugenics in Interwar
Britain. Liverpool: The University Press
(2002).
21 Erik Bartels
& Gudrun Brun. The Gipsies in Denmark. Copenhagen:
Munksgaard (1943:5).
22 Issue for
August 28th.
23 SMAB (State
Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau). Memorial Book: the
Gypsies at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Munich: K.G. Saur.
(1993:xiv, emphasis added).
24 Donald
Kenrick. Historical Dictionary of the Gypsies
(Romanies). Lanham: The Scarecrow Press.
(1998:74-5).
25 Johannes
Behrendt, "Die Wahrheit über die Zigeuner",
NS-Partei Korrespondenz, 10 (1939), No. 3.
26 Proester,
Emil, Vra_d_í _s. Cikán_ v Buchenwaldu.
Document No. ÚV _SPB-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).
28Michael
Burleigh & Wolfgang Wippermann. The Racial State:
Germany, 1933-Cambridge: The University Press.
(1991:121-25)
29 State Museum,
op. cit. (note 23), p. 3.
30 Sybil Milton,
"Nazi policies towards Roma and Sinti 1933-1945",
Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, 5th series,
2(1):1-18. (1992:10).
31 Richard
Breitman, The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the
Final Solution. Hanover and London: University Press
of New England. (1991:164)
32 Broad, loc.
cit., note 2.
33
Danuta Czech &
Walter Laqueur, Auschwitz Chronicle, 1939-1945. New
York: Holt (1979). A Jewish Auschwitz survivor now
living in Los Angeles Remembered Zigeunernacht, and
revealed recently that the Nazis told the Romani men
that if they would agree to fight for Germany on the
Russian front their lives, and the lives of their
families, would be spared. The men agreed and were
separated from the women and children, and shot.
Nearly all of those who were subsequently gassed were
Romani women and children. The purpose in doing this
was that, as Ulrich 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 Latham,
Judith, "First US Conference on Gypsies in the
Holocaust." Current
Affairs Bulletin No. 3-23928. Washington: Voice of
America (1995).
38
Marie-Agnes Heine,
Roma Victims of the Nazi Regime May Be Entitled to
Compensation. Geneva: International Organization for
Migration, Office of Public Information (2001:1).
39
Donald Kenrick,
Historical Dictionary of the Gypsies (Romanies).
Lanham: The Scarecrow Press (1998:4).
40 Martyn
Clayton, Roma: A People on the Edge. Braiswick:
Felixstowe 2002, p. 110.
41Resource Book:
Holocaust and Human Behavior. The Facing History
and Ourselves National Foundation, Brookline, 1994.
42 Ina
Friedman, The Other Victims: First-Person Stories of
Non-Jews Persecuted by the Nazis, Boston:
Houghton-Mifflin, 1990.
43
Yehuda Bauer,
"Gypsies", in Israel Gutman and Michael Berenbaum,
eds. Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press (1994:441-455).
44
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.
45
Françoise
Sagan, Painting In Blood. Nuffield: Aisan Ellis
Publishers, pp. 96-97.
46 Erika
Thurner, National Socialism and Gypsies in Austria.
Chicago: The University Press (1998), p.
xvi.
47
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.
48 Uwe-Karsten
Heye, Joachim Sartorius and Ulrich Bopp, eds, Learning
from History: The Nazi Era and the Holocaust in German
Education. Berlin: Press and Information Office of the
Federal Government. (2000:14).
Dr. Ian F. Hancock,
Director
The Romani Archives and Documentation Center
http://www/radoc.net,
radoc@radoc.net
Calhoun Hall, The University of Texas, Austin TX 78712
USA
August
2003
