Roma in Auschwitz
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.
A Gypsy couple at the Belzec concentration camp |
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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