A Gypsy
couple at the Belzec concentration camp
It
is extremely difficult to locate sources about the Roma people (otherwise known
as Gypsies) in the Holocaust like those widely available about Jewish victims,
which may reflect the difference between a literate culture and a largely
illiterate one. It is known that perhaps 250,000 Roma were killed and that,
proportionately, they suffered greater losses than any other group of victims
except Jews.
Roma
Gypsies are an ethnic group originating from India which for unknown reasons
took to a wandering lifestyle in the late middle ages. Eventually, the Romas
they reached Europe and became part of the ethnic mix of many countries,
contributing in areas such a music and the arts.
Although
they were "Aryan" according to the Nazi racial typology, they were
pursued relentlessly for persecution.
Gypsies
in Auschwitz: Part 1
For
Nazi Germany, the Roma became a racist dilemma. The Roma were Aryans, but in
the Nazi mind there were contradictions between what they regarded as the
superiority of the Aryan race and their image of the Roma people.
At
a conference held in Berlin on January 30, 1940, a decision was taken to expel
30,000 Roma from Germany to the territories of occupied Poland.
The
reports of the SS Einsatzgruppen which operated in the occupied territories of
the Soviet Union mention the murder of thousands of Romas along with the
massive extermination of the Jews in these areas.
The
deportations and executions of the Roma came under Himmler's authority. On
December 16, 1942, Himmler issued an order to send all "Gypsies" to
the concentration camps, with a few exceptions...
The
deported Romas were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where a special Gypsy camp was
erected. Over 20,000 Romas from Germany and some other parts of Europe were
sent to this camp, and most of them were gassed there...
Wiernik
described the arrival of the largest Roma group brought to Treblinka, in the
spring of 1943:
One
day, while I was working near the gate, I noticed the Germans and Ukrainians
making special preparations...meanwhile the gate opened, and about 1,000
Gypsies were brought in (this was the third transport of Gypsies). About 200 of
them were men, and the rest women and children...all the Gypsies were taken to
the gas chambers and then burned...
Roma
from the General Government [Poland] who were not sent to Auschwitz and to the
operation Reinhard camps were shot on spot by the local police or gendarmes. In
the eastern region of the Cracow district, in the counties of Sanok, Jaslo, and
Rzeszow, close to 1,000 Roma were shot.
According
to The Institut Fuer Zeitgeschicthe in Munich, at least 4,000 Roma people were
murdered by gas at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Gypsies
in Auschwitz: Part 2
Like
the Jews, Roma were singled out by the Nazis for racial persecution and
annihilation. They were 'nonpersons,' of 'foreign blood,' 'labor-shy,' and as
such were termed asocials. To a degree, they shared the fate of the Jews in their
ghettos, in the extermination camps, before firing squads, as medical guinea
pigs, and being injected with lethal substances.
Ironically,
the German writer Johann Christof Wagenseil claimed in 1697 that Romas stemmed
from German Jews. A more contemporary Nazi theorist believed that "the
Gypsy cannot, by reason of his inner and outer makeup (Konstruktion), be a
useful member of the human community." 1
The
Nuremberg Laws of 1935 aimed at the Jews were soon amended to include the Roma.
In 1937, they were classified as asocials, second-class citizens, subject to
concentration camp imprisonment.2 As early as 1936, some had been sent to
camps. After 1939, Roma from Germany and from the German-occupied territories
were shipped by the thousands first to Jewish ghettos in Poland at Warsaw,
Lublin, Kielce, Rabka, Zary, Siedlce and others.3 It is not known how many were
killed by the Einsatzgruppen charged with speedy extermination by shooting. For
the sake of efficiency Roma were also shot naked, facing their pre-dug graves.
According to the Nazi experts, shooting Jews was easier, they stood still,
'while the Gypsies cry out, howl, and move constantly, even when they are
already standing on the shooting ground. Some of them even jumped into the
ditch before the volley and pretended to be dead.' 4 The first to go were the
German Roma; 30,000 were deported East in three waves in 1939, 1941 and 1943.
Those married to Germans were exempted but were sterilized, as were their
children after the age of twelve. 5
How
were the Roma of Europe 'expedited'?
Adolf
Eichmann, chief strategist of these diabolical logistics, supplied the answer
in a telegram from Vienna to the Gestapo:
Regarding
transport of Gypsies be informed that on Friday, October 20, 1939, the first
transport of Jews will depart Vienna. To this transport 34 cars of Gypsies are
to be attached. Subsequent trains will depart from Vienna, Mahrisch-Ostrau and
Katowice [Poland]. The simplest method is to attach some carloads of Gypsies to
each transport. Because these transports must follow schedule, a smooth
execution of this matter is expected. Concerning a start in the Altreich
[Germany proper] be informed that this will be coming in 34 weeks. 6
Open
season was declared on the Roma, too. For a while Himmler wished to exempt two
tribes and 'only' sterilize them, but by 1942 he signed the decree for all
"Gypsies" to be shipped to Auschwitz. 7 There they were subjected to
all that Auschwitz meant, including the medical experiments, before they were
exterminated.
Roma
perished in Dachau, Mauthausen, Ravensbruck and other camps. At Sachsenhausen
they were subjected to special experiments that were to prove scientifically
that their blood was different from that of the Germans. The doctors in charge
of this 'research' were the same ones who had practiced previously on black
prisoners of war. Yet, for 'racial reasons' they were found unsuitable for sea
water experiments.8 Roma were often accused of atrocities committed by others;
they were blamed, for instance, for the looting of gold teeth from a hundred
dead Jews abandoned on a Rumanian road. 9
Roma
women were forced to become guinea pigs in the hands of Nazi physicians. They
were sterilized as 'unworthy of human reproduction' (fortpflanzungsunwuerdig)
and ultimately annihilated as not worthy of living.
For
a while there existed a "Gypsy Family Camp" at Auschwitz, but it was
liquidated on August 6, 1944. Some men and women were shipped to German
factories as slave labor while the rest - about 3,000 women, children and old
people - were gassed. 10
No
precise statistics exist about the extermination of European Roma. Some
estimates place the number between 500,000 and 600,000, most of them gassed in
Auschwitz. 11 Others indicated a more conservative 200,000 Roma victims of the
Holocaust. 12
"Gypsies"
in Auschwitz: Part 3
Roma
were officially defined as non-Aryan by the Nuremberg laws of 1935, which also
first defined Jews; both groups were forbidden to marry Germans. Gypsies were
later labeled as asocials by the 1937 Laws against Crime, regardless of whether
they had been charged with any unlawful acts. Two hundred Gypsy men were then
selected by quota and incarcerated in Buchenwald concentration camp. By May
1938, SS Reichsfuehrer Himmler established the Central Office for Fighting the
Gypsy Menace, which defined the question as 'a matter of race,' discriminating
"pure Gypsies" from "part Gypsies" as Jews were
discriminated, and ordering their registration.
In
1939, resettlement of the Roma was put under Eichmann's jurisdiction along with
that of the Jews. Roma were forbidden to move freely and were concentrated in
encampments with Germany in 1939, later (1941) transformed into fenced ghettos,
from which they would be seized for transport by the criminal police (aided by
dogs) and dispatched to Auschwitz in February 1943. During May 1940, about
3,100 were sent to Jewish ghettos in the Government-General: others may have
been added to Jewish transports from Berlin, Vienna, and Prague to Nisko,
Poland (the sight of an aborted reservation to which Jews were deported). These
measures were taken against Roma who had no claim to exemption because of
having an Aryan spouse or having been regularly employed for five years.
Some
evaded the net at first. Despite a 1937 laws excluding gypsies from army
service, many served in the armed forces until demobilized by special orders
between 1940 and 1942. Roma children were also dismissed from schools beginning
in March 1941. Thus, those who were nominally free and not yet concentrated
were stripped systematically of the status of citizens and segregated. The
legal status of Roma and Jews, determined irrevocably by the agreement between
Justice Minister Thierack and SS Reichsfuehrer Himmler on 18 September 1942,
removing both groups from the jurisdiction of any German court, confirmed their
fate. Thierack wrote, 'I envisage transferring all criminal proceedings
concerning [these people] to Himmler. I do this because I realize that the
courts can only feebly contribute to the extermination of these people.
The
Citizenship Law of 1943 omitted any mention of "Gypsies" since they
were not expected to exist much longer. Himmler decreed the transport of
Gypsies to Auschwitz on 16 December 1942, but he did not authorize their
extermination until 1944. Most died there and in other camps of starvation,
diseases, and torture from abuse as live experimental subjects. By the end of
the war, 15,000 of the 20,000 Gypsies who had been in Germany in 1939 had died.
Sources:
Internet Modern History Sourcebook; U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
First section: Yitzhak Arad. Belzec, Sobibor,
Treblinka—The Operation Reinhard Death Camps. IN: Indiana University Press,
1987, pp. 150153.
Second section: Vera Laska, ed. Women in the
Resistance and in the Holocaust: The Voices of Eyewitnesses. CT: Greenwood
Press, 1983.
Third section: Helen Fein. Accounting for
Genocide: Victims and Survivors of the Holocaust. NY: Free Press, 1979.
1Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the
European Jews, (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1961), p.641; quotation by Staatsrat
Turner, chief of the civil administration in Serbia, October 26, 1941, in
ibid., p.438
2 Donald Kenrick and Grattan Puxon, The
Destiny of Europe's Gypsies, (New York: Basic Books, 1972), p.72
3 Jan Yoors, Crossing, A Journal of Survival
and Resistance in World War II, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1971), pp.
3334
4 Hilberg, p. 439
5 Ruzena Bubenickova, et al., "Tabory
utrpeni a smrti" (Camps of Martyrdom and Death), (Prague: Svoboda, 1969),
pp. 189190
6 Simon Wiesenthal, "The Murderers Among
Us," (New York: Bantam, 1967) pp. 237238
7 Kendrick, pp. 8890
8 Hilberg, pp. 602, 608; the doctors were
Hornbeck and Werner Fischer
9 ibid., p.489
10 Ota Kraus and Erich Kulka, "Tovarna
na smrt" (Death Factory) (Prague: Nase vojsko, 1957), p.200
11 Yoors, p.34; Bubenickova, p. 190
12 Gilbert, Martin. "The Holocaust, Maps
and Photographs," (New York : Mayflower Books, 1978. p.22; Kendrick, p.
184
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