The Romani Holocaust, also known as the Porajmos, was the genocide of European Roma and Sinti people during World War II. Beginning in 1933, Nazi Germany systematically persecuted the European Roma, Sinti and other peoples through forcible internment and compulsory sterilization. German authorities summarily and arbitrarily subjected Romani people to incarceration, forced labor, deportation and mass murder in concentration and extermination camps.
Under Adolf Hitler, a supplementary decree to the Nuremberg Laws was issued on 26 November 1935, classifying the Romani people (or Roma) as "enemies of the race-based state", thereby placing them in the same category as the Jews. Thus, the fate of the Sinti and Roma in Europe paralleled that of the Jews in the Holocaust. Historians estimate that at least 250,000 Romani and Sinti were killed during the Holocaust, although this could be as high as 500,000.
In 1982, West Germany formally recognized that Nazi Germany had committed genocide against Sinti and Roma people. In 2011, Poland officially declared August 2nd as day of commemoration of the Romani genocide.
Within the Nazi German state, first persecution, then extermination, was aimed primarily at sedentary "Gypsy mongrels". In December 1942, Heinrich Himmler ordered the deportation of all Sinti and Roma from the Greater Germanic Reich, and most were sent to the specially established Gypsy concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Other Sinti and Roma were deported there from the Nazi-occupied Western European territories. Approximately 21,000 of the 23,000 European Roma and Sinti sent there did not survive. In areas outside the reach of systematic registration, e.g., in the German-occupied areas of Eastern and Southeastern Europe, the Roma who were most threatened were those who, in the German judgment, were "vagabonds", though some were actually refugees or displaced persons. Here, they were killed mainly in massacres perpetrated by the German military and police formations as well as by the Schutzstaffel (SS) task forces, and in armed resistance against the Nazi German occupation of Europe.
Pre-Nazi discrimination
Prior to Nazi persecution, Romani people were stereotyped as dishonest, wandering criminals who were likely to steal.
Anti-Romani discrimination before 1933
Emergence of scientific racism
In the late 19th century, the emergence of scientific racism and Social Darwinism, linking social differences with racial differences, provided the German public with pseudoscientific justifications for prejudices against Jews and Roma. During this period, "the concept of race was systematically employed in order to explain social phenomena." Proponents of this approach attempted to validate the belief that races were not variations of a single species of man because they had distinctly different biological origins. Proponents of this approach established a purportedly scientifically based racial hierarchy, which they believed defined certain minority groups as the other on the basis of biology.
In addition to being a period in which racial pseudoscience was widely promoted, the end of the 19th century was a period of state-sponsored modernization in Germany. Industrial development altered many aspects of society. Most notably, the changes which occurred during this period caused the social norms of work and life to shift. For the Roma, this shift in the social norms of work and life led to the denial of their traditional way of life as craftsmen and artisans. János Bársony notes that "industrial development devalued their services as craftsmen, resulting in the disintegration of their communities and social marginalization."
Persecution by the German Empire and the Weimar Republic
The developments of racial pseudoscience and modernization resulted in anti-Romani state interventions, carried out by both the German Empire and the Weimar Republic. In 1899, the Imperial Police Headquarters in Munich established the Information Services on Romani by the Security Police. Its purpose was to keep records (identification cards, fingerprints, photographs, etc.) and continuous surveillance on the Roma community. In 1904, Prussia adopted a resolution calling for regulation of Gypsy movement. In 1911, the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior organized a conference in Munich to discuss the "Gypsy problem" and to coordinate efforts against Gypsies. Roma in the Weimar Republic were forbidden from entering public swimming pools, parks, and other recreational areas, and depicted throughout Germany and Europe as criminals and spies.
The 1926 "Law for the Fight Against Gypsies, Vagrants and the Workshy" was enforced in Bavaria, and became the national norm by 1929. It stipulated that groups identifying as 'Gypsies' avoid all travel to the region. Those already living in the area were to "be kept under control so that there [was] no longer anything to fear from them with regard to safety in the land." They were forbidden from "roam[ing] about or camp[ing] in bands", and those "unable to prove regular employment" risked being sent to forced labor for up to two years.
Herbet Heuss notes that "[t]his Bavarian law became the model for other German states and even for neighbouring countries."
The demand for Roma to give up their nomadic ways and settle in a specific region was often the focus of anti-Romani policy both in the German Empire and the Weimar Republic. Once settled, communities were concentrated and isolated in a single area of a town or city. This segregation facilitated state-run surveillance practices and 'crime prevention.'
Following the passage of the Law for the Fight Against Gypsies, Vagrants, and the Workshy, public policy increasingly targeted the Roma on the explicit basis of race. In 1927, Prussia passed a law that required all Roma to carry identity cards. Eight thousand Roma were processed this way and subjected to mandatory fingerprinting and photographing. Two years later, the focus became more explicit. In 1929, the German state of Hessen proposed the "Law for the Fight Against the Gypsy Menace". The same year, the Centre for the Fight Against Gypsies in Germany was opened. This body enforced restrictions on travel for undocumented Roma and "allowed for the arbitrary arrest and detention of gypsies as a means of crime prevention."
Early Nazi persecution
For centuries, Romani tribes had been subject to antiziganist persecution and humiliation in Europe. They were stigmatized as habitual criminals, social misfits, and vagabonds. When Hitler came to national power in 1933, anti-Gypsy laws in Germany remained in effect. Under the "Law against Dangerous Habitual Criminals" of November 1933, the police arrested many Roma, along with others the Nazis viewed as "asocial"—prostitutes, beggars, homeless vagrants, and alcoholics—and imprisoned them in internment camps.
After Hitler's rise to power, legislation against the Romani was increasingly based upon a rhetoric of racism. Policy originally based on the premise of "fighting crime" was redirected to "fighting a people". Targeted groups were no longer determined on juridical grounds, but instead, were victims of racialized policy.
The Department of Racial Hygiene and Population Biology began to experiment on Romani to determine criteria for their racial classification.
The Nazis established the Racial Hygiene and Demographic Biology Research Unit (Rassenhygienische und Bevölkerungsbiologische Forschungsstelle, Department L3 of the Reich Department of Health) in 1936. Headed by Robert Ritter and his assistant Eva Justin, this unit was mandated to conduct an in-depth study of the "Gypsy question (Zigeunerfrage)" and to provide data required for formulating a new Reich "Gypsy law". After extensive fieldwork in the spring of 1936, consisting of interviews and medical examinations to determine the racial classification of the Roma, the unit decided that most Romani, whom they had concluded were not of "pure Gypsy blood", posed a danger to German racial purity and should be deported or eliminated. No decision was made regarding the remainder (about 10 percent of the total Romani population of Europe), primarily Sinti and Lalleri tribes living in Germany. Several suggestions were made. Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler suggested deporting the Romani to a remote reservation, as the United States had done to Native Americans, where "pure Gypsies" could continue their nomadic lifestyle unhindered. According to him:
The aim of measures taken by the State to defend the homogeneity of the German nation must be the physical separation of Gypsydom from the German nation, the prevention of miscegenation, and finally, the regulation of the way of life of pure and part-Gypsies. The necessary legal foundation can only be created through a Gypsy Law, which prevents further intermingling of blood, and which regulates all the most pressing questions which go together with the existences of Roma in the living space of the German nation.
Himmler took special interest in the "Aryan" origins of the Romani and distinguished between "settled" (assimilated) and "unsettled" Romani. In May 1942 an order was issued according to which all "Gypsies" living in the Balkans were to be arrested.
Although the Nazi regime never produced the "Gypsy Law" desired by Himmler, policies and decrees were passed which discriminated against the Romani people. Roma were classified as "asocial" and "criminals" by the Nazi regime. From 1933 on, some Roma were placed in concentration camps, usually categorised as asocials. After 1937, the Nazis started to carry out racial examinations on the Roma living in Germany. From 1935, whole populations of Romani were forcibly interned in Zigeunerlager ("Gypsy Camps"). In 1938, Himmler issued an order regarding the 'Gypsy question' which explicitly mentioned "race", stating that it was "advisable to deal with the Gypsy question on the basis of race." The decree made it law to register all Roma (including Mischlinge – mixed race), as well as those people who "travel around in a Gypsy fashion" over the age of six. Although the Nazis believed that the Roma had originally been Aryan, over time, the Nazis said, they became mixed-race and so were classified as "non-Aryan" and of an "alien race".
Dr. Ritter proposed a theory that Romani people were socially harmful due to a dangerous genetic defect he termed Wandertrieb, meaning a nomadic instinct or an impulse to wander or travel.
Loss of citizenship
The Nuremberg race laws passed on 15 September 1935. The first Nuremberg Law, the "Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor", forbade marriage and extramarital intercourse between Jews and Germans. The second Nuremberg law, "The Reich Citizenship Law", stripped Jews of their German citizenship. On 26 November 1935, Germany expanded the Nuremberg laws to also apply to the Roma. Romani, like Jews, lost their right to vote on 7 March 1936.
Genocide
The Third Reich's government began persecuting the Romani as early as 1935 when they started to transfer the people to municipal internment camps (Zigeunerlager) on the outskirts of cities, a prelude to their deportation to concentration camps. A December 1937 decree on "crime prevention" provided the pretext for major roundups of Roma. Nine representatives of the Romani community in Germany were asked to compile lists of "pure-blooded" Romanis to be saved from deportation. However, the Germans often ignored these lists, and some individuals identified on them were still sent to concentration camps. Notable internment and concentration camps include Dachau, Dieselstrasse, Marzahn (which evolved from a municipal internment camp) and Vennhausen.
Initially, Romani were herded into so-called ghettos, including the Warsaw Ghetto (April–June 1942), where they formed a distinct class in relation to the Jews. Ghetto diarist Emmanuel Ringelblum speculated that Romani were sent to the Warsaw Ghetto because the Germans wanted:
... to toss into the Ghetto everything that is characteristically dirty, shabby, bizarre, of which one ought to be frightened, and which anyway has to be destroyed.
Initially, there was disagreement within the Nazi circles about how to solve the "Gypsy Question". In late 1939 and early 1940, Hans Frank, the General Governor of occupied Poland, refused to accept the 30,000 German and Austrian Roma which were to be deported to his territory. Heinrich Himmler "lobbied to save a handful of pure-blooded Roma", whom he believed to be an ancient Aryan people for his "ethnic reservation", but was opposed by Martin Bormann, who favored deportation for all Roma. The debate ended in 1942 when Himmler signed the order to begin the mass deportations of Roma to Auschwitz concentration camp. During Operation Reinhard (1941–1943), an undetermined number of Roma were killed in the extermination camps, such as Treblinka. The Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing units of the SS, murdered tens of thousands of Roma in the German occupied Soviet territories.
The Nazi persecution of Roma was not regionally consistent. In France, between 3,000 and 6,000 Roma were deported to German concentration camps as Dachau, Ravensbrück, Buchenwald, and other camps. Further east, in the Balkan states and the Soviet Union, the Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing squads, travelled from village to village massacring the inhabitants where they lived and typically leaving few to no records of the number of Roma killed in this way. In a few cases, significant documentary evidence of mass murder was generated. Timothy Snyder notes that in the Soviet Union alone there were 8,000 documented cases of Roma murdered by the Einsatzgruppen in their sweep east.