Nazi persecution of Romani people during World War II

¶ … Gypsies during World War II [...] treatment of the Gypsies by the Nazi in World War II, concentrating on pre-war treatment, and treatment during the war, including the round up of the Gypsies as compared to the Jews. It will also describe what made a Gypsy and how they were rounded up and transferred to the concentration camps. The Gypsies of Europe lost thousands during the war in the concentration camps, but their history is full of persecution and hatred. Even today, many Europeans look down on the Gypsies. These people have suffered as much as the Jews at the hands of Hitler's Nazis, but their story is far less known.

Who were the Gypsies in Europe? The gypsies, broken into different tribes or bands, first appeared in Europe sometime in the fifteenth century. After studying their language, made up of dialects of Sanskrit, Persian, Kurdish, and Greek and called "Romani," many experts believe they migrated from southern Asia in "waves" over one thousand years ago, and settled in many areas of Europe, but centrally in Germany (Lewy 1). The Gypsies have always been nomads, subsisting on many portable skills such as telling fortunes, training animals, sharpening implements, and others. However, their mobile lifestyle frightened many sedentary town dwellers, and they came to be regarded as "noisy, dirty, immoral, deceitful, and generally asocial. Their self-proclaimed ability to see into the future both attracted and terrified" (Lewy 2). As society rejected them, they tended to turn to stealing, begging, and other crimes to live. This convinced many of their detractors that they were indeed a threat to organized society. Thus, from earliest times, the Gypsies of Europe were shunned, outlawed, and persecuted. In the nineteenth century, another wave of Gypsies migrated to Europe, settling mainly in central Europe and speaking a Romani dialect made up largely of Rumanian descent. The original Gypsies now called themselves "Sinti," while the newcomers called themselves "Rom" (Lewy 4). During this time, the first stirrings of racial superiority were also occurring in Germany, and the whites began to look at the darker-skinned Gypsies as inferior and suspect. One Gypsy historian writes that even during this time, Protestants and Catholics distrusted the Gypsies, and felt their presence threatened "the spiritual values of Christian society, were a security threat to the various German states, and affected the physical health of the general population" (Crowe 33). During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, countries with large populations of Gypsies, such as Germany and Bulgaria, began to enact legislation limiting their freedoms and sometimes banning them from areas altogether. Often, they were forbidden to travel, which created great hardships for a nomad people used to traveling for their livelihood and their lifestyle. Thus, the Gypsies of Europe faced persecution and prejudice throughout their history, but it only got worse as the Nazis took over Germany on the eve of World War II.

What it is Like to be a Gypsy

Many Gypsies assimilated into European life, and gave up their nomadic ways. They took jobs, raised families, and were productive members of society. However, most Europeans still believed in the stereotypes, that gypsies were lazy, thieving beggars who had little place in normal society. To be a Gypsy in Europe was to live outside the "norm." Gypsies also had many different traditions and beliefs that set them apart. Gypsies had long engaged in trades that required them to move from town to town, such as fortune telling and animal training. In addition, their family structure is more far-reaching than traditional society. They see all Gypsies as their brothers, and they have many superstitions and beliefs that guide their lives, that often did not mesh with other residents. They have strict gender rules that separate the men from the women, and strict rules of conduct for each. Perhaps one of the biggest differences in Gypsy society is that they consider each member of the group equal, and do not look to one leader for advice or leadership, and so, they have difficulty following the directions of one leader or group in society (Stewart 58). It has always been difficult to be a Gypsy in Europe, but the time during the Nazi regime may have been the worst. One young German girl who grew up as a Nazi remembers her teacher pointing out a young Gypsy girl in the classroom, and calling attention to her untidiness and dirty hair. She instructed the entire class to shun her and laugh at her. She writes, "The little girl cowered in her corner. For the rest of the school year she looked tidy enough, but kept her eyes down and never spoke to anyone again" ("Growing Up" 41). This is what it is like to be a Gypsy, for even today, the most important aspect of being a Gypsy is persecution. While there are still thousands of Gypsies in Europe, most have given up the old ways, and no longer travel in caravans during the summer months, plying their wares. Gypsies still fight for their identity and their culture, as they struggle to prove their worth in an often disapproving society.

Before the War

Even before the advent of war, the Gypsies were persecuted and shunned by society. As early as 1929, the city of Frankfurt Germany set up a "concentration camp for Gypsies" outside the city limits because of complaints by citizens (Lewy 9). Therefore, the persecution of Gypsies began long before the Nazi regime took power, and in fact, historian Lewy notes, "When the Nazis intensified the harassment and persecution practiced by earlier regimes, most of their neighbors remained superbly indifferent" (Lewy 14). Adolph Hitler took power in Germany in 1933, and his regime initially had many other people to consider than the Gypsies. There were the Jews, whom Hitler despised and hoped to eradicate from Germany. However, the Gypsies soon became a priority in Hitler's administration for a variety of reasons. The Nazis began to refer to it as the "Gypsy Problem," and gave increasing attention to removing the Gypsies, thereby continuing the "pure" "Aryan" race of white Germany.

As the Nazis looked at removing the Gypsies from society, they developed a three-track program. First, they left the harassment and legislation of the Gypsies to the local states, who increased measures from previous years. After about 1937, the Nazis watched the Gypsies even more closely, and began to incarcerate them or move them to concentration camps. Finally, after about 1938 or so, the Nazis began to lump the "racial inferiority" of the Jews and Gypsies together, seeing them as a "Plague" affecting the country (Lewy 15-16). These steps sometimes overlapped each other, creating difficulty with the policies, but they were all meant to ultimately remove the Gypsies from German society.

Track Number One. During this early track in the Nazi regime, the laws of the earlier Weimar Republic did not alter much. Several German states continued to enact their own laws to regulate the Gypsies, including fingerprinting them, or banning them from certain cities and towns. During this time, Gypsies faced increasing scrutiny, including unannounced searches of their homes, fingerprinting and identity cards, special licenses for their trade, and laws against their traveling in "hordes." Gypsies were not recognized as real members of society, and if they broke any of the laws governing them, they could face automatic sterilization (Lewy 17-18). One of the problems with this initial track was that the Gypsies were still being handled locally, and one community could simply banish a band to another location, which would then have to deal with them again. By 1936, The Nazis had increased their efforts against the Gypsies. They banned additional Gypsies from entering the country, and German Gypsies were banned from travel throughout the country. Before the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, police swept through the city and removed all the Gypsies to a camp outside the city (Friedlander 255). Many of the German people considered Gypsies to be little more than beggars, and so, these measures did not seem harsh or even particularly restrictive to them. During this time, one German official noted, "With the help of such measures, employed with determination, it should be possible to stop the Gypsy plague, the ultimate aim being the extermination of these parasites'" (Lewy 19). Continued sweeps of Gypsy camps continued during this time, and many wintertime Gypsy encampments were closed down or removed from cities and towns. Many locations began to create municipal Gypsy camps, banishing Gypsies from the cities because often their encampments lacked sanitation and water. In fact, one author notes that the Germans even contacted the League of Nations about the feasibility of shipping all their Gypsies to an island in Polynesia (Crowe 31). Often the Gypsy camps were called "concentration camps," but many of them bore little resemblance to the notorious camps in use during the war. Often, police officers accompanied the Gypsies during relocation, and they were told not to say where they had come from or who had relocated them (Thurner 21). Often the camps had no electricity, and little or no sanitary facilities. One of the largest of the camps was located in Salzburg, Austria, and employed the Gypsies in forced labor, such as working in a quarry or building state highways.

During this time, many of the Gypsies forced out of the cities to these camps had no way to support themselves, and ended up receiving welfare or government unemployment money. These funds were always less than were paid to German citizens, even though most of these Gypsies considered themselves German. Even if they did not receive welfare money, they had to pay rent to live in these camps. Many Gypsies also lived in private homes and apartments, and were not a part of these camps at all. These camps continued throughout the war, but they changed, and the Gypsies living in them had much more supervision and control.

Track Number Two. When the Nazis rose to power in Germany, many of the people were concerned about a growing crime rate and public safety. The Nazis tended to blame non-Aryan members of society for these ills, including the Gypsies. Because the Gypsies had a reputation of robbers and petty thieves, they were a natural target. During Track Two, preventative policing became the order of the day, and many German police officers regularly targeted Gypsies. These members of society became known as "asocials," and they were branded just as Jews were branded, and fell under many of the same regulations by police and increasingly by the state. While Track Two overlapped Track One at times, it is clear by Track Two, the regulations facing Gypsies were even more stringent, and their lives were spiraling further out of control (Lewy 25). Many Gypsies who did not hold down regular jobs were also denoted "work-shy," and they too would face increased scrutiny by the police and retribution as Track Two continued Lewy 28). As the Nazis rose in power, local policing agencies gradually gave way to enforcement by the Hitler's secret police (SS), and the Gestapo. These two agencies began to sweep through the slums of the cities, looking for asocials or any other "lesser" members of society they could remove and send to the camps or to forced labor. Many of these asocials were Gypsies. Historian Lewy continues, "Their stay in the camps was designed to 'educate' them and make them into worthy members of what the Nazis called the German people's community. Many did not survive this schooling, which was accompanied by systematic brutalities" (Lewy 30). These arrests continued throughout Track Two, and after the beginning of the War in 1939. Many of the Gypsies arrested remained in concentration camps until after the war, but even more died in the camps, and most of the Gypsies who disappeared never left a trace for their loved ones to follow.

Track Number Three. The first two tracks, put in place before the War, targeted the Gypsies on mostly social grounds. They were unemployed, they were a social burden, they were unclean and unhealthy. However, the Third Track raised the bar. In 1938, Hitler's infamous assistant Heinrick Himmel issued a decree that plainly stated the Gypsies were suspect because of their "inner characteristics," which clearly implied their race (Lewy 36). In addition, during this time and into the war years, many Gypsies were sentenced to death by the local court systems for minor offenses, such as stealing a bicycle or food (Lewy 169). This solved the problem of deportation, and rid the community of "unsavory" Gypsies who where threats to society. It is not known how many Gypsies lost their lives at the hands or the court system during this time. Many Gypsies were tried as "asocials" rather than Gypsies, and many were then transferred to concentration camps, never to be seen again. By the end of Track Three, most Gypsies in areas under German control, including Poland, Austria, Germany, and beyond, were languishing in concentration camps, most notably Auschwitz.

The Nazi Experiments

During World War II, Nazi scientists were not only busy at work inventing and improving rocketry and the jet engine, they were conducting massive scientific experiments on Jews, the handicapped, the mentally ill, and the Gypsies (Harrington 181). They saw these people as useless members of society, or "useless eaters" (Mostert 155), and felt they were furthering the future of mankind by systematically removing them from society. One German researcher noted, "Their [useless eaters] life is absolutely pointless, but they do not regard it as being unbearable. They are a terrible, heavy burden upon their relatives and society as a whole. Their death would not create even the smallest gap -- except perhaps in the feelings of their mothers or loyal nurses" (Mostert 156). This widespread public opinion set the stage for the genocide and mass experimentation on Gypsies and others during the Nazi regime.

One camp notable for experimentation was Dachau, where scientists conducted experiments on Gypsies to research a variety of medical conditions, including malaria and the potability of seawater. Forty Gypsies "volunteered" for the seawater experiments, which included diets made up of no food and water, seawater, seawater with an additive to remove the salty taste, and seawater with silver nitrate as an additive. Scientists expected the tests to last twelve days, but the Gypsies only lasted six to ten days. They exhibited "symptoms of starvation and severe thirst. They rapidly lost weight and became increasingly agitated; those who started to scream and rave were tied to the beds. When they were close to death, they were injected with a preparation that was supposed to prevent their demise" (Lewy 173). A surviving helper in the lab remembers that the only reasons some of the Gypsies survived was that some of their friends and family smuggled food into the lab (Lewy 173). This is only one example of the many experiments the Nazis perpetrated on the Gypsies and other prisoners. There are also stories of injections of typhus to study the disease, and sterilization experiments on many Gypsy women.

After extermination at the camps, studies were often conducted on many of the victims for a wide variety of medical reasons. The eyes of many Gypsies were sent back to the Berlin Institute, where studies were being conducted on heterochromia of the iris, where the eyes are two different colors (Lifton 361). The infamous scientist, Dr. Mengele, also believed that blue-eyed Gypsies were an anomaly, and their eyes contained brown specs, thereby proving they were not of the "superior" Aryan race (Lifton 368). In addition to these medical experiments, the Nazis also persecuted the Gypsies because they felt they were spies against their cause, and this was another reason to justify their experimentation and eradication (Browder 198). Thus, the Gypsies were lumped in with the Jews in many areas, and viewed by the Nazis as nothing more than animals, only good for experimentation and extermination.

One question remains. Why were the Gypsies so tight-lipped about their experiences during the War, and why has so little research been done into the persecution of the Gypsies? The answers may never be known, but many historians speculate it is partially due to the close-knit Gypsy society. Clearly, far fewer Gypsies died than Jews did, and this is one reason their genocide has not created the public outcry that the Jew's did. However, these people also tend to be less educated than others, and so did not record their experiences in writing for posterity, while many Jews did record their experiences. In addition, many of their experiences in the camps and during the War were so totally opposite of their beliefs and culture, that they did not want to discuss them after the liberation of the camps came at the War's end. As historian Lewy states, "Moreover, some of the most basic taboos of Gypsy culture regarding ritual purity and sexual conduct had been violated in the concentration camps, and survivors therefore were reluctant to talk about what had happened. Subjects such as compulsory sterilization could hardly be discussed at all" (Lewy viii). Clearly, the Jews were not the only group to suffer at the hands of the Nazis. Hopefully, historians and researchers will continue to study the effect of the Nazi regime on the Gypsies and others like them, so the world understands just what happened in Germany and throughout Europe under the Nazis.

In conclusion, little study was given to the persecution and genocide of Gypsies during World War II until recently. While their plight echoes the plight of the Jews in Europe during the War, it has been far less known and understood. Part of this is because Gypsies are private people, and have not often discussed their history. Another reason for this silence is the absence of historians in the Gypsy population, and so, their history goes unrelated and often ignored. However, the Gypsies suffered untold atrocities at the hands of the Nazis, and their experience during World War II indicates just how hostile and depraved the Nazi regime could be. It will probably never be known how many Gypsies actually died during the Nazi regime, but estimates put the number as high as 22,000. The Gypsies are making a comeback in Europe, but their lifestyle and ideology still comes under scrutiny today. The Gypsies may always be persecuted because of their nomadic ways and color of their skin, but hopefully, they will never again face the type of persecution they faced during the Nazi regime of World War II.