1. Gypsies and the Holocaust

2. Roma and Sinti
In 1939, about a million Roma lived in Europe. About half of all European Roma lived in Eastern Europe. In Greater Germany there were about 30,000 Roma, most of whom held German citizenship. Relatively few Roma lived in Western Europe.
It is very difficult to be accurate as Roma and Sinti had learned not to be counted or photographed, as classification had previously brought about persecution.

3. For centuries Roma and Gypsies had been badly treated in Europe – a people judged to be of foreign appearance, language and customs.
A Bavarian law of July 16, 1926, outlined measures for ‘Combating Gypsies, Vagabonds, and the Work Shy’ and required the systematic registration of all Sinti and Roma. The law prohibited Gypsies from ‘roaming about or camping in bands,’ and those ‘Gypsies unable to prove regular employment’ risked being sent to forced labour for up to two years. This law became the norm in 1929.

4. The situation in Germany following World War One
Following the First World War, the terms of the treaty of Versailles created a drain on the resources of Germany. The grinding poverty, which resulted in Germany, produced anger and resentment.
Hitler offered scapegoats to blame; the non-Aryan people or the ‘enemies within.’
The people included were primarily Jewish people and Roma and Sinti.

5. The philosophy of the Nazi Party
This went beyond racism to the total destruction of ‘alien races’.
Adolf Hitler underpinned his beliefs in Mein Kampf (My Struggle), He linked racial purity to the laws of nature: in that only the strongest survived.
‘No more than Nature desires the mating of weaker with stronger individuals, even less does she desire the blending of a higher with a lower race, since, if she did, her whole work of higher breeding, over perhaps hundreds of thousands of years, might be ruined with one blow.’
Furthermore, Hitler not only called for racial discrimination but for the total destruction of inferior races and the consequences of equality.
‘Historical experience offers countless proofs of this. It shows with terrifying clarity that in every mingling of Aryan blood with that of lower peoples the result was the end of the cultured people.’
Volume One, Chapter XI, Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler
Extracts from Mein Kampf, A. Hilter (1925). Used with kind permission of The Random House Group Ltd.

6. How did the Holocaust happen?
Once Hitler and the Nazi party had seized power in Germany, a series of laws were introduced which made life difficult for the Jewish and Roma communities.
Many of these laws built upon existing anti-Roma legislation which had been in existence since the Middle Ages. These laws eventually sent the Roma/Sinti communities into the death camps.

7. The laws which led to the holocaust
1933: ‘Lebensunwertesleben’ (lives not deserving life) establishes sterilisation for specific ethnic groups.
18th–25th September: The Reich minister calls for the arrest of all Roma Travellers.
1934: January: The first Roma are sent to concentration camps for processing and sterilisation. July: German nationals are forbidden to marry ‘Jews, Negroes and Roma’. September 8th: Travellers are refused the right to trade in Dusseldorf. September 17th: National citizenship Law relegates Jews and Roma Travellers to second class citizens with no civil rights.
1936: March 17th: Roma lose their right to vote.
1941: Roma children are banned from schools.
1944: Himmler orders the execution of all Roma in concentration camps.
1942: Roma are removed from the jurisdiction of German courts.

8. Citizenship Law
By 1943 the Citizenship Law omitted any mention of Roma, as the Nazis believed that they would not exist for much longer. The order to send Roma to Auschwitz was passed on December 16th 1942 and Himmler ordered their extermination in 1944.

9. Life in the concentration camps
At Auschwitz – Birkenau there was a separate camp set up for Roma. In this camp the majority of inhabitants died. Those who were not gassed died as a result of poor conditions and hard labour.
Children were used in medical experiments by the SS physicians.
Travellers had to wear black triangles on their uniforms
The camp closed on August 2–3,1944 when around 3000 Roma men were gassed.

10. Resistance in the concentration camps
In May 1944, over 100 Roma men were ordered out of the barracks at the Auschwitz family camp by the SS guards, probably with the gas chamber as their final destination.
They refused and armed themselves with knives and axes, following a stand-off the SS guards withdrew.

11. Porrajmos – The Gypsy Holocaust
Roma have named the Holocaust, Porrajmos, which translates as the Great Devouring.
The total number of Roma killed by the Nazis will never be known due to the destruction of records and the chaos in the formerly occupied countries at the end of the war. Estimates range from 25,000 to 1.5 million or 50% of all European Roma.*
In Auschwitz a recorded 16,000 Roma were reduced to 4,000 by August 1944.*
Indeed, by 1941, Nazi documentation omitted Roma from legislation because the Nazis thought the group would soon be wiped out.
* The Roma Persecution. Harold Tanner Patrin Web Journal. p4
A group of Gypsy prisoners, awaiting instructions from their German captors, sit in an open area near the fence in the Belzec concentration camp – United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Archiwum Dokumentacji Mechanicznej. "The views or opinions expressed in this guided resource, and the context in which the images are used, do not necessarily reflect the views or policy of, nor imply approval or endorsement by, The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.“

12. After the Holocaust
Roma were absent from the Nuremberg trials and it is only relatively recently that the genocide of Roma in the Holocaust has been truly recognised. Some writers feel that the genocide of Roma was forgotten after the war.
In 1995 on the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of the Buchenwald camp, a monument and a museum were established on the site.

13. Porrajmos The great devouring of our people,
Can be sometimes be overlooked,
Because the Nazis kept no records,
No figures in their books.
They brought the people from their homes,
And bundled them into trains;
men, women and children,
Never to be seen again.
They walked into camps
And were separated,
From kin and from friends.
Walking to their deaths,
Only ashes remain.
They made us wear black triangles,
And made us separate.
But some of us survived
To tell the dreadful tale.
The Nazis hated our ways,
Our culture and our history.
They tried to destroy us,
But we still remain.
York Pupils, KS3 and KS4.

14. Final thoughts from an Auschwitz survivor
‘Other people suffered in the war. Soldiers (sic) had weapons and were free. We in the camps were forced to accept everything; we were completely powerless…(sic) because of our so-called “racial origin.”
Is this my fault? Is this the fault of my parents?
No Sinto, no individual, should ever had to suffer what we suffered.’
Walter Winter
Winter Time, Memoirs of a German Sinto who survived Auschwitz. University of Hertfordshire Press
Extract from Winter Time: Memoirs of a German Sinto who survived Auschwitz by Walter Winter (2004). © University of Hertfordshire Press. Used with kind permission.

15. Acknowledgements
Extracts from Mein Kampf, A. Hilter (1925). Used with kind permission of The Random House Group Ltd.
A group of Gypsy prisoners, awaiting instructions from their German captors, sit in an open area near the fence in the Belzec concentration camp – United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Archiwum Dokumentacji Mechanicznej. "The views or opinions expressed in this guided resource, and the context in which the images are used, do not necessarily reflect the views or policy of, nor imply approval or endorsement by, The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.“
Extract from Winter Time: Memoirs of a German Sinto who survived Auschwitz by Walter Winter (2004). © University of Hertfordshire Press. Used with kind permission. 15

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