The Gypsies (Roma and Sinti)

Who were the Gypsy victims?

Germany's Gypsy (Romani) population consisted of the Sinti and Roma. The Sinti arrived there in the 15th century via the Middle East, while the Roma came from eastern Europe four centuries later.

In contrast to the Jews, who were fully integrated within German society, Gypsies had long been marginalised and subject to discriminatory laws and practices – laws that were strengthened during the Weimar Republic preceding Hitler's rule.

In 1926 the Bavarian parliament passed a law 'to combat gypsies, nomads and idlers', while Prussian legislation required Gypsies to be photographed and fingerprinted. A national law of 1928 placed innocent Gypsies under police surveillance. So when the Nazis took power, they simply augmented existing anti-Gypsy legislation.

Before the war

Alongside Jews and disabled people, Gypsies were defined as 'racially inferior'. They were also described as an 'asocial' group living outside normal society. Nazi scientists trying to 'explain' their asocial nature said it was caused by their 'racial inferiority'.

Laws against the propagation of 'lives not worthy of life', which legalised eugenic sterilisation, targeted Gypsies, black Germans and disabled people. In addition, in the Nazis' first year in office, many Gypsies were imprisoned, condemned as 'habitual criminals'.

They were also mentioned in the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, directed primarily against Jews. These laws forbade Germans from marrying 'Jews, Negroes and Gypsies'. A Nazi policy statement that year declared: 'In Europe generally, only Gypsies and Jews come under consideration as members of an alien people.'

These discriminatory laws against Gypsies prepared the ground for more brutal actions. The year 1937 saw several large-scale captures of Gypsies. In 1938, four months before Kristallnacht, hundreds of Roma and Sinti throughout Germany and Austria were rounded up, beaten and imprisoned during a 'Gypsy clean-up week'.

The full weight of the Nuremberg Laws was used against the Gypsies later than it was against the Jews. However, the Nazi racial definition of a Gypsy – someone who had at least two Gypsy (or even part-Gypsy) great-grandparents out of a possible eight – was even more stringent than that applied to people of possible Jewish descent.

During the war

Under cover of war, actions to remove Gypsies from German society morphed into extermination. Dr Johannes Behrendt of the Nazis' Office of Racial Hygiene stated:

All Gypsies should be treated as hereditarily sick; the only solution is elimination without hesitation of this defective element in the population.

Thousands of Gypsies from Germany and from the German-occupied territories were shipped to Jewish ghettoes in Poland.

The Nazis' obsession with 'race' made Gypsies a focus of medical experimentation at Dachau, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen. At this last, 'race scientist' Ludwig Fischer performed experiments on 40 Gypsies attempting to prove that Roma and German blood were different. In January 1941, Zyklon B gas crystals, later used in the death camps, were tested – fatally – on 250 Gypsy children.

In all, 23,000 German Gypsies were sent to Auschwitz; 19,000 perished. Men and women were held together in what was known as the 'Gypsy family camp', but twins and dwarves were removed for experiments by Dr Josef Mengele, known as the 'Angel of Death'.

Gypsies in the Soviet Union suffered in the same way as the Jews. They were victims of mass shooting by mobile killing units, and many were slaughtered alongside Jews at Babi Yar.

The pro-Nazi Ustasa regime in Croatia was particularly zealous in its elimination of Gypsies. A total of about 26,000 perished, between 8,000 and 15,000 of them at Jasenovac concentration camp alongside up to 20,000 Jews and perhaps as many as 52,000 Serbs.

Historians differ in their estimates of both the number of Gypsies (as defined by the Nazis) who were living in Nazi-occupied Europe at the beginning of the Holocaust and the total number who were killed by the Germans and their collaborators. Estimates of these deaths vary from 250,000 to up to one million. The famous Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal wrote to Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel in December 1984 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 Nazis.

Survivors

Gypsy survivors of the Porajmos ('Devouring'), as the Holocaust is called in Romani, have struggled to gain acknowledgement of their persecution, let alone access to restitutions funds.

In Württemberg in 1950, a West German minister of the interior told judges hearing restitution claims to consider that 'Gypsies were persecuted under the National Socialist regime not for any racial reason but because of an asocial and criminal record.' The post-war government stated that all measures taken against the Gypsies before 1943 – including incarceration, sterilisation and deportation – had been legitimate policies of state, not subject to restitution.

It was only in 1982 that the German chancellor Helmut Kohl formally acknowledged the fact of the Nazi genocide against the Gypsies. By then, however, most of those would have been eligible for restitution had already died.

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