Wolfgang Wippermann
ON DECEMBER 8, 1938, the Reichsführer Schutzstaffel (SS) and Chief of the German Police in the Reich Ministry of the Interior, Heinrich Himmler, announced the “definitive solution to the Gypsy question” (endgültige Lösung der Zigeunerfrage). This solution was supposed to be achieved “on the basis of the character of this race” (aus dem Wesen dieser Rasse heraus). In the process, “the racially pure Gypsies and the half-castes” were “to be dealt with separately” (die rassereinen Zigeuner und die Mischlinge gesondert zu behandeln). This was justified with reference to the “findings” of “racial-biological research.”1 The research in question was that carried out by Robert Ritter. He claimed to have proven with his “racial-biological research” that the Roma belonged to an “inferior race.” Ritter furthermore argued that the “half-castes” possessed an even more inferior character to the “racially pure Gypsies.” They had emerged, after all, from sexual relations between Roma and antisocial, criminal members of the German nation. The “half-castes” possessed, therefore, not only inferior “Gypsy” blood but also likewise inferior “antisocial and criminal blood.”2
All those people were regarded as “Gypsy half-castes” (Zigeuner-Mischlinge) whose parents, grandparents, or even great-grandparents included a woman or a man who, for whatever reason, had been identified as a “Gypsy.” This classification was by no means carried out exclusively by the notoriously antiziganist “Gypsy police” but also via many other stuffy officials and pious pastors, who had handed their relevant files and church registers over to the “Gypsy researchers” surrounding Robert Ritter. With their help, Ritter and his colleagues succeeded in recording all thirty thousand German Sinti and Roma and classifying them according to racist criteria in the corresponding half-caste gradation. This affected not only the racially pure Roma but also the half-, quarter-, and eighth-part “Gypsies.” They all fell victim to the “definitive solution to the Gypsy question . . . on the basis of the character of this race.”3
The National Socialists commenced their preparations for this “definitive solution” immediately after coming to power. From 1933, the German Sinti and Roma were discriminated against and persecuted for racist reasons. This approach was legitimated by pointing to various racial laws and regulations. The legislation was applied to the Sinti and Roma in a very arbitrary fashion. This can be seen from the example of the Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases (Gesetz zur Verhütung erbkranken Nachwuchses) from July 14, 1933, which envisaged the forced sterilization of people suffering from so-called hereditary diseases. Blindness, deafness, schizophrenia, and feeble-mindedness were counted among these diseases. However, it was incumbent on physicians to prove the occurrence of these medical conditions. These findings were then examined by the specially created Hereditary Health Courts (Erbgesundheitsgerichte). In the case of German Sinti and Roma, however, this did not happen. Instead, they were subjected to forced sterilization on the grounds of their allegedly inherent antisocial behavior. This reasoning is to be regarded as racist. Nonetheless, not one of the forcibly sterilized Sinti and Roma has been indemnified for the suffering they were subjected to during the Nazi era. The application of racist forced sterilization laws to the Sinti and Roma has not been viewed as a racially motivated injustice for the simple reason that the entire forced sterilization law of the National Socialist state has not been interpreted by today’s German state as racist and thus unjust.
From late 1935 onward, the Nuremberg race laws, which were actually directed against German Jews, were also extended to German Sinti and Roma. Sinti and Roma were counted among those who were designated in several decrees of the Reich Minister of the Interior as “carriers of non-German or non-related blood” (Träger nicht deutschen oder nicht artverwandten Blutes).4 For this reason, they were prohibited from marrying or engaging in sexual intercourse with people of German or related blood. Whoever violated this ban was convicted of “race defilement” (Rassenschande) and sentenced to a lengthy term of penal servitude. This illegal and racially motivated practice was authorized in the Commentary on the German Race Laws. In this commentary, published in 1936 and written by Dr. Hans Globke and Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart, the following sentence can be found: “In Europe, it is generally only Jews and Gypsies who are of alien blood.”5
Sinti and Roma were also affected by the decree of the Reich and Prussian Minister of the Interior from December 14, 1937, on the “preventive suppression of crime by the police” (Erlass über die vorbeugende Verbrechensbekämpfung durch die Polizei).6 Thousands of Sinti and Roma were labeled as antisocials for racial reasons and taken into “preventive police custody” (polizeiliche Vorbeugungshaft) or sent to various concentration camps in April and June 1938. Hardly any of them survived internment in a camp. Their murder was willful. The racially motivated and clearly illegal abduction of alleged antisocial Sinti and Roma and their incarceration in concentration camps was already an integral component of the “definitive solution to the Gypsy question . . . on the basis of the character of this race.”7
On September 21, 1939, the participants of a “Gypsy conference” (Zigeunerkonferenz) in Berlin discussed other and more radical methods to bring about the “definitive solution to the Gypsy question.”8 Some of the ministerial officials and “Gypsy researchers” proposed the sterilization of all those German Sinti and Roma still incarcerated. This suggestion was abandoned, however, as too laborious and too expensive. Instead, it was decided that the German Sinti and Roma, as well as those from Austria, which had been annexed to the German Reich a year earlier, would be deported eastward. In order to facilitate the deportation of the Sinti and Roma, they were ordered on October 17, 1939, to no longer leave their places of residence. This was in any case no longer possible for those Sinti and Roma who were interned in the “Gypsy camps” (Zigeunerlager) that had existed in various large German cities since 1935.
In early 1940, the Governor General in occupied Poland, Hans Frank, opposed the expulsion of all German Sinti and Roma to “his” General Government, which comprised the core territories of the vanquished and shattered Polish state, whereupon Frank and Himmler negotiated a compromise.9 Instead of all thirty thousand German Sinti and Roma, only 2,500 were deported to occupied Poland in April 1940, from the western and northern parts of the German Reich.
Himmler did not order the deportation of those Sinti and Roma still in Germany until December 16, 1942. This order was implemented in early 1943. Most of the Sinti and Roma were deported to Auschwitz. Unlike the other prisoners, the Sinti and Roma were not separated according to gender and age. Instead, the Sinti and Roma had to live—or, rather, vegetate—with their wives and children in a “Gypsy camp” separated off from the rest of Auschwitz. Before they were gassed, the adult Sinti and Roma had to watch as their children slowly and tortuously died of starvation and epidemics. On July 31, 1944, the last inhabitants of the “Gypsy camp” in Auschwitz were gassed. Among them were not only German but also many foreign Sinti and Roma.10
The vast majority of the altogether five hundred thousand Roma who fell victim to the genocide were not murdered, however, in Auschwitz and in the other concentration and extermination camps. They were shot to death in the Eastern European countries invaded and occupied by German troops. This was by no means done only by the murder squads of the Einsatzgruppen, who followed in the wake of the regular combat troops, but also by members of the police battalions and the Wehrmacht. After and while they herded together the Jews and shot them on the spot, they did the same with the Roma. This did not take place in stationary or mobile gas vans but rather through the deployment of machine guns and other small arms. The corpses of the Roma (and Jews) shot from close range were not burned in the crematoria of the concentration camps but rather buried in remote forests. However, in order to combat the spread of the dreaded typhus and to remove evidence of Nazi crimes after the war had definitively turned against Germany, the corpses were exhumed, to be then burned in the open and on grates produced from railway tracks.
The murder of Jews and Roma was justified with the same, or at least comparable, racist ideology and prejudices. This can be demonstrated by way of example with reference to an October 26, 1941, letter from the chief of the Military Administration in Serbia, Dr. Harald Turner. In this letter, Turner ordered the taking of Jews and Roma as hostages and then their murder.11 Turner’s letter began with a declaration of hostility: “Jews and Gypsies” constituted “an element of insecurity and thus of endangerment to public order and safety” (ein Element der Unsicherheit und damit der Gefährdung der öffentlichen Ordnung und Sicherheit). Therefore, the Jews had to be annihilated, because “the Jewish intellect has caused the war.” Turner invoked here Hitler’s speech to the Reichstag on January 30, 1939, in which he had effectively declared war on “international Jewry” and threatened it with the “annihilation of the Jewish race” (Vernichtung der jüdischen Rasse). Roma had not been mentioned in the speech. (In general, Hitler rarely commented on “Gypsies.”) Nonetheless, Turner also regarded the Roma as members of an “inferior race.” Picking up where the (unnamed) “Gypsy scholars” (Zigeunerforscher) had left off, Turner declared: “As a result of his internal and external construction, the Gypsy cannot be a useful member of a community of nations” (Der Zigeuner kann aufgrund seiner inneren und äußeren Konstruktion kein brauchbares Mitglied einer Völkergemeinschaft sein). Whereas the “Jewish element play a significant role in leading the gangs,” by which he meant the Serbian partisan formations, “it is especially the Gypsies who are responsible for particular cruelties and for the intelligence service” (gerade Zigeuner für besondere Grausamkeiten und den Nachrichtendienst verantwortlich sind). Turner was unable to present proof of his accusations. Nonetheless, on August 29, 1942—ten months after his aforementioned order—he reported to his superiors with a murderous pride: “Serbia [is the] only country in which the Jewish question and the Gypsy question [have been] solved.”12
In this way, Turner confirmed that the Roma had been handled in the same way as the Jews—murdered. What he did not say, however, was how, with which methods, and according to which criteria the Jews and Roma had been seized. Answers to these questions can be found in the reports that Turner’s colleagues composed about the murder of Polish and Soviet Jews and Roma. In these reports, they freely admitted that they killed all people they regarded as Jews and “Gypsies.” In the case of the Jews, their physical appearance sufficed to condemn them.
Not all but many of the Eastern European Jews were recognizable as Jews because of the way they wore their hair and beards and due to their attire. They indeed corresponded to the image that antisemites visualized when it came to “the Jews.” Moreover, most Jews lived in villages, towns, and certain quarters of the larger cities, which were almost exclusively inhabited by Jews. However, none of this applied to the Roma, or at least not in the same way. Some of them did not correspond to the way in which the antiziganists visualized the “Gypsies,” because they did not wander about “like the Gypsies” but had instead become sedentary and had also adapted themselves to their fellow citizens in their other modes of behavior. This applied to a substantial number of Soviet Roma, who had not only been encouraged but indeed forced by the Soviet authorities to settle down and adjust themselves in general to the Soviet social order.
As they could not immediately be identified as “Gypsies,” those Soviet Roma who were sedentary and socially assimilated were not murdered at once. The murder squads of the Einsatzgruppen, police battalions, and specific units of the Wehrmacht initially concentrated on the murder of the Jews as well as those Roma who still roamed around the country, as “the Gypsies” were allegedly accustomed to do; the Roma were identified and stigmatized as “Gypsies” on account of their way of life and their clothing. The fact that it was these itinerant Roma who were shot first and most of all, however, was a cause of irritation to some of the “Gypsy scholars” in the Reich. They argued that these Roma were “racially pure Gypsies,” who were not as dangerous or “racially inferior” as the “half-castes” (Mischlinge). Himmler, of all people, shared this view. In 1942, when the annihilation of the Soviet Roma had already begun and that of the Serbian Roma had already been concluded, Himmler planned in all seriousness to exempt the German and Austrian “racially pure Gypsies” from extermination, because they have “generally not behaved so anti-socially and in their cult valuable German blood has survived, which must be studied.”13 To this end, the Roma were to be brought to a type of “Gypsy reservation” (Zigeuner-Reservat), where they would be subjected to special examinations carried out by the “Gypsy scholars.” This did not come to pass because Hitler put an end to Himmler’s insane plan.
Nevertheless, the German agencies responsible for the murder of the Soviet Roma appear to have been aware of Himmler’s plans for a reservation. This assumption is supported by the documented fact that the murder squads were instructed by their superiors not to murder the “racially pure Gypsies” if their racial purity had been established. Therefore, the orders already issued by different people and different institutions to treat the Roma “like the Jews,” that is, to murder them, were countermanded. This led to a chaotic situation. This situation was overcome, however, because of what the historian Hans Mommsen has called “cumulative radicalisation.”14 The most radical form and variation of the final solution prevailed. All those Jews and Roma who could be seized were murdered.15
In the process, the German murderers also obtained support from members of several Soviet peoples. On the Crimea it was the Tatars, whose representatives were asked by Otto Ohlendorf’s Einsatzgruppe D which of the Roma—who lived among the Tatars, spoke their language, and, like the Tatars, were Muslims—were “Gypsies.” Without necessarily desiring or knowing this, these Tatars became in this way accessories to genocide.16 Yet this was not unique to the Tatars. Various Balts and Ukrainians either volunteered for or were forced to assist in the murder of Jews and Roma. Due to their collaboration in genocide, a number of Tartars, Balts, and Ukrainians were severely punished by the Soviet authorities after 1945. Individual Balts and Ukrainians were sentenced to death and executed. The Crimean Tatars were collectively deported to the Asian parts of the Soviet Union, without their individual guilt or innocence being verified. From the point of view of the Soviet authorities, they had all collaborated with the German fascists. As this did not apply to all Tatars, the Soviets had in this way repaid an old (German) injustice with a new (Soviet) injustice. This should of course be criticized, although it should not lead to the condemnation as unfounded and unjust of all punitive and retaliatory measures taken by the Soviet authorities against actual collaborators.
It is rather the far too mild treatment of Western European collaborators in the genocide of Jews and Roma that was unfounded and unjust. Only very few Dutch, Belgian, and French police officials who arrested Jews and Roma and handed them over to the German murderers were punished for their criminal acts. This was intentional. These European countries simply did not want to acknowledge that many of their citizens had been involved in one way or another in the murder of Jews and Roma. Some of them had even taken part voluntarily, without being forced to do so by the Germans.17
Worth mentioning here is the French collaborationist regime based in Vichy. It delivered not only Jews and Roma to the German murderers but also arrested thousands of foreign Jews and French Roma on its own account and interned them in camps in unoccupied France, where many of them died.18 The camp for Jews in the southern French municipality of Gurs is notorious. Less well known are the various “Gypsy camps,” known as camps aux nomades. They were located in the immediate vicinity of the Gurs camp, and the treatment of the Roma incarcerated there appears to have been little different from the treatment of the Jews in the Gurs camp. However, whereas the Gurs camp was dissolved immediately after the liberation of France in 1944, the inmates of the “Gypsy camps” were not liberated for another two years, until 1946.
Fascist Italy also participated in the genocide of the European Roma (and Jews).19 Immediately after promulgating racial laws directed against the Africans in the Italian colonies in 1937, Italy extended them to include Italian Jews and Roma. Jews and Roma were discriminated against for racial reasons and incarcerated in camps during the war, of which several were designated campi di concentramento—concentration camps. These camps existed in all parts of Italy and in the Croatian and Slovenian territories of Yugoslavia conquered by Italian troops. Toward the end of the war, the authorities of the fascist Republic of Salò handed over to the Germans a not insignificant number of Jews and Roma, who were then deported to German concentration and extermination camps.
This also applies to Tiso’s clerical fascist regime in Slovakia, which permitted not only the seven thousand Slovakian Jews but also an unknown number of Roma to be deported to German extermination camps.20 In neighboring Hungary, Ferenc Szálasi’s Arrow Cross movement delivered five hundred thousand Hungarian Jews and an unknown number of Roma to Adolf Eichmann, who had traveled to Hungary especially for this purpose. Eichmann then had the Jews and the Roma deported to German extermination camps. A further fifty thousand Jews and an unknown number of Roma were moreover massacred on the spot by the Hungarian fascists.21
The crimes of the Hungarian fascists were eclipsed, however, by those committed by the Croatian fascists. The Ustaša regime led by Ante Pavelić murdered hundreds of thousands of Jews, Roma, and Serbs. These murders were carried out in the notorious Jasenovac concentration camp, in which Roma composed by far the largest group of prisoners, and also in all parts of the formally independent state of Croatia, where the fascists of the Ustaša shot Jews, Roma, and Serbs. This took place with the knowledge, and indeed the approval, of members of the Catholic Church.22
The campaign of annihilation pursued by the so-called Iron Guard, the Romanian fascist party, against Romanian Jews even before the outbreak of World War II was at least tacitly condoned by the Romanian Orthodox Church.23 During the war it made no effort to prevent the deportation of Romanian Roma to those Soviet territories conquered by the Romanian army (or, rather, reconquered, because they had previously belonged to Romania).24 To this day, it is not known how many Roma died as a result. Romanian historians do not even really want to know. Some even dispute the fact that Romania played any part in the genocide of the Roma (and the Jews).
In this, they are not on their own. Many Eastern and Western European historians and politicians simply do not want to accept that their countries were involved in the genocide of the Jews and the Roma in one way or another. The European collaboration in the pan-European genocide of the European Roma (and Jews) constitutes a taboo topic for European historical scholarship. Why is that the case? And how did it come about?
In order to answer these questions, we must know and criticize the fact that not only the European collaboration with Nazi Germany but also the pan-European genocide of the European Roma itself was for a long time concealed and denied. This concealment and denial was started by the contemporaries to the genocide. Although the genocide of the Roma was public knowledge, hardly anyone criticized it. No one helped the persecuted Roma. Not one of the European resistance movements took a stand for the Roma. All the European and non-European states refused to grant Roma refugees asylum. There simply was no Romani migration.
While not all of the mistakes and failures made before 1945 could be corrected or rectified after the war, some of them could have been. Yet this did not happen. The victorious powers of World War II even failed to punish the German perpetrators for their crimes and indemnify the surviving Roma for their suffering. In 1945–1946, they refrained from addressing the genocide of the European Roma at the trials of the major German war criminals in Nuremberg. This was the case although numerous documents had been collected during the trial preparations with which the racist intentions and motivations of the genocide could have been proven. Yet the Allies did not do so and evidently did not want to do so. Why was this?
It is tempting at first glance to assume that the Allies failed to do so because they would have had to admit that they made no effort to prevent the genocide, and instead stood by and watched while the Germans and other European nations participated in the genocide of the European Roma. However, Allied inaction against the mass murder of the Jews was similar, and yet this genocide was addressed at Nuremberg. It is more likely, therefore, that the Allies failed to address the genocide of the Roma because it would have meant them having to safeguard the rights of the surviving Roma in obtaining some kind of restitution for their suffering. The Allies wanted to avoid this at all costs. The Roma were not supposed to receive compensation. The Allies only very reluctantly allowed the Jews to—partially—force through their claims for restitution against Germany. This took place in 1952, when representatives of Jewish organizations and the Israeli state negotiated an agreement in Luxembourg with the chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, in which the Federal Republic committed itself to “making amends” (Wiedergutmachung) to the surviving Jews.
To this day, the Roma have not succeeded in obtaining this.25 No agreement has been signed with their representatives comparable to the Luxembourg agreement of 1952. The German authorities have justified their refusal to sign a restitution agreement with the Roma by claiming that the European Roma, unlike the Jews, do not have their own state and have no universally recognized representatives who are authorized to conclude an agreement equivalent to that of Luxembourg. This argument is formally correct but is to be regarded from a moral perspective as reprehensible.
Also worthy of condemnation is the fact that the German authorities refused for a long time to make restitution payments to individual Roma who survived the genocide. This refusal was justified with the historically false claim that Sinti and Roma were not persecuted and murdered for racial reasons, as the Jews had been. In 1956, the Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe established a precedent when it ruled that the Sinti and Roma were persecuted because of their “anti-social characteristics” (asoziale Eigenschaften) and subjected to “particular restrictions” (besondere Beschränkungen).26 In the eyes of the Federal Court of Justice, only the deportation of the German Sinti and Roma to Auschwitz extermination camp in spring 1943 had been illegal. In issuing this ruling, the highest German court of law denied the racially motivated persecution of the Sinti and Roma. This was an unspeakable scandal but one that was scarcely criticized by the German and European publics of the time. The Federal Court of Justice at least felt compelled on December 18, 1963, to partially revise its judgment of 1956.27 The judges admitted that racial political motives may have contributed to the enactment of measures taken after Himmler’s decree of December 8, 1938. Sinti and Roma were therefore now permitted to apply for indemnification for persecution that took place after December 8, 1938. Some German Sinti and Roma then indeed did this. Aside from a very few exceptions, foreign Roma, on the other hand, have not had the questionable pleasure of obtaining restitution.
This is well-known in all European countries, but it is not criticized by any of them. Political reasons, on the one hand, are the cause of this silence. The individual European countries evidently do not want to spoil things with the politically and economically powerful Germany. They, therefore, refrain from exhorting that nation to pay reparations to the Roma persecuted by it. Added to this is evidently the fear that the other European countries will themselves be prosecuted for their part in the pan-European genocide of the European Roma and thus be obliged to pay reparations to the survivors.
Those countries who refuse to do so are above all the same ones that not only persecuted Roma in the past but also discriminate against and persecute them in the present. The Roma in France and Italy are subjected to discrimination. The Roma in Croatia, Romania, Hungary, and several other former Communist states are persecuted. This is well known in the other European countries. Nonetheless, most of them refuse to grant asylum to the Roma, who are discriminated against and persecuted.
How is this all possible? How can the members of a people be discriminated against and persecuted in the present, whose people were subjected to genocide in the past? Has Europe forgotten this? Why does the pan-European genocide of the European Roma play such an insignificant role in European memory? These critical questions should be directed not only at European politicians but also at European historians. It is they, namely, who denied well into the 1980s the fact that the Roma were the subject of an intentional and racially motivated genocide. The Romani genocide—or Porajmos—has become a forgotten Holocaust, l’holocauste oublié, as the French historian Christian Bernadec has accurately called it.28
It is, above all, the German historians of National Socialism who are to blame for this state of affairs. For a long time, they refused to even address the genocide of the Roma. In all the handbooks and overviews of the history of the “Third Reich” that were published in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, the genocide of the Roma is mentioned only in passing. The history books written for schoolchildren at the time generally contain the exceedingly laconic remark that “Gypsies were also persecuted.” German (and Israeli) historians energetically disputed the argument that Porajmos and the Shoah are comparable because they were both intentional and racially motivated genocides.
Since the 1980s, the picture has changed. Various foreign historians have noted that the persecution of the Roma was intentional and racially motivated. These historians include Jerzy Ficowsky from Poland; Selma Steinmetz and Erika Thurner from Austria; Bernard Sijes from the Netherlands; and Christian Bernadec from France.29 The biggest credit, however, for preventing the genocide of the Roma from falling into oblivion, goes to the Brits Donald Kenrick and Grattan Puxon, whose book The Destiny of Europe’s Gypsies has become something of a standard work because it has been translated into several European languages and has also found an echo in various European countries.30 Inspired by the demonstrations and historical-political activities of the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma, chaired by Romani Rose, several younger German historians have since published regional studies and overviews of the persecution of—especially—German Sinti and Roma.
Since the 1990s, however, there has been something of a countermovement. Some German and foreign historians claim to have established that the genocide of the Roma was not so intentional, racially motivated, and total as the genocide of the Jews, for which reasons the two genocides are scarcely comparable. Michael Zimmermann is among those who justify their claims in this way.31 The murder of the Roma, he argues, was more improvised than intentional and was motivated in no way by racial considerations but rather sociopolitical ones. Furthermore, far fewer people fell victim to the genocide of the Roma—Zimmermann gives the figure of 96,000—because (and this is where his argumentation really becomes problematic) the “racially pure Gypsies” in Germany and the sedentary Roma in the east were both spared. This is not true. Zimmermann at least recognizes that the Roma were subjected to genocide. This was disputed by the American political science Guenter Lewy, however, in such a way that it can only be described as scandalous.32 I strongly criticized his claims in a book in which I undertook (evidently for the first time) a comparison of the Shoah and the Porajmos.33
It should be pointed out here that research into the genocide of the Roma presented in the works cited earlier is not yet sufficient.34 The murder of the Eastern European Roma and the collaboration of the Western and Eastern European states in the genocide are aspects that have been neglected.35 Finally, it must be more closely examined whether the genocide of the Roma is really comparable with other European and non-European genocides. This is not possible without an intensive examination of research on comparative genocide and its methods. German historians have not yet been prepared to undertake such a task. They fear that the special nature of the genocide carried out by the Germans against the Roma (and against the Jews) might be obliterated by being placed in the context of a general history of genocide.36
More important, however, than all these controversies about the history of the pan-European genocide of the European Roma are the lessons that can be learned from the past and for the present. It is not only politicians but also historians who can learn and apply these lessons. They must address not only the past but also the present, because—unlike the past—the present can indeed be overcome. In regard to the subject of this chapter, overcoming the present involves the following: the pan-European genocide of the European Roma must be reappraised above all in order to assist today’s European Roma to enforce their rights and protect them against new injustices. By “rights” I mean the claim of the Roma to restitution from all those European countries who participated in one way or another in the genocide of the Roma. The European Roma must be protected furthermore against the injustice that is being done to them today in several European countries, where they are once again being subjected to discrimination and persecution.
—Translated from German by Alex J. Kay
WOLFGANG WIPPERMANN is Adjunct Professor for Modern History at the Free University, Berlin. His books include Europäischer Faschismus im Vergleich (1983), The Racial State: Germany 1933–1945 (with Michael Burleigh, 1991), Totalitarismustheorien (1997) and “Auserwählte Opfer?”: Shoah and Porrajmos im Vergleich. Eine Kontroverse (2005).
1. Circular decree issued by the Reichsführer SS and Chief of the German Police in the Reich Ministry of the Interior, Heinrich Himmler, “Combatting the Gypsy plague” (Bekämpfung der Zigeunerplage), in Ministerialblatt des Reichs- und Preußischen Ministers des Innern 99, no. 51 (December 8, 1938): 2105–2110.
2. Robert Ritter, “Zur Frage der Rassenbiologie und Rassenpsychologie der Zigeuner in Deutschland,” in Reichsgesundheitsblatt 13 (1938): 425–426.
3. On the following, see the overviews in: Till Bastian, Sinti und Roma im Dritten Reich. Geschichte einer Verfolgung (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2001); Martin Luchterhandt, Der Weg nach Birkenau. Entstehung und Verlauf der nationalsozialistischen Verfolgung der “Zigeuner” (Lübeck: Schmidt-Römhild, 2000); Wolfgang Wippermann, “Auserwählte Opfer”? Shoah und Porrajmos im Vergleich. Eine Kontroverse (Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2005); Michael Zimmermann, Verfolgt, vertrieben, vernichtet. Die nationalsozialistische Vernichtungspolitik gegen Sinti und Roma (Essen: Klartext, 1989); Michael Zimmermann, Rassenutopie und Genozid. Die nationalsozialistische Lösung der Zigeunerfrage (Hamburg: Christians, 1996).
4. Various decrees are reproduced in Wolfgang Wippermann, Geschichte der Sinti und Roma in Deutschland. Darstellung und Dokumente (Berlin: Pädagogisches Zentrum, 1993), 77 ff.
5. Wilhelm Stuckart and Hans Globke, Kommentar zur deutschen Rassengesetzgebung, vol. 1 (Munich/Berlin: C. H. Beck, 1936), 55: “In Europa sind regelmäßig nur Juden und Zigeuner artfremden Blutes.”
6. Reproduced in: Wippermann, Geschichte der Sinti und Roma in Deutschland, 79.
7. See the circular decree issued by Heinrich Himmler, “Combatting the Gypsy plague” (Bekämpfung der Zigeunerplage), in Ministerialblatt des Reichs- und Preußischen Ministers des Innern 99, no. 51 (December 8, 1938): 2105–2110.
8. The minutes of this conference have not survived. On this and other conferences on the “Gypsy question,” see Zimmermann, Rassenutopie und Genozid, 167–172.
9. Minutes of a discussion between Heydrich and (the representative of the Governor General Hans Frank) Arthur Seyß-Inquart on January 30, 1940, on matters relating to the deportation of Poles, Jews, and “Gypsies,” reproduced in Wippermann, Geschichte der Sinti und Roma in Deutschland, 87–88.
10. Zimmermann, Rassenutopie und Genozid, 293 ff.
11. For this and the following see the circular letter from the Chief of the Military Administration in Serbia (Dr. Harald Turner), dated October 26, 1941, to all field and circuit commanders, reproduced in Wippermann, Geschichte der Sinti und Roma in Deutschland, 96.
12. Ernst Klee and Willy Dressen, eds., “Gott mit uns.” Der deutsche Vernichtungskrieg im Osten 1939–1945 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1989), 114: “Serbien einziges Land, in dem Judenfrage und Zigeunerfrage gelöst.”
13. Letter from Martin Bormann to Heinrich Himmler, dated December 3, 1942, reproduced in Wippermann, Geschichte der Sinti und Rom in Deutschland, 94: “im allgemeinen nicht asozial verhalten hätten und in ihrem Kult wertvolles germanisches Brauchtum überliefert sei, das erforscht werden müsste.”
14. Hans Mommsen, “Der Nationalsozialismus: Kumulative Radikalisierung und Selbstzerstörung des Regimes,” in Bibliographisches Institut, ed., Meyers Enzyklopädisches Lexikon, vol. 16, rev. ed. (Mannheim: Lexikonverlag, 1976), 785–790.
15. Wolfgang Wippermann, “Nur eine Fußnote? Die Verfolgung der sowjetischen Roma. Historiographie, Motive, Verlauf,” in Gegen das Vergessen. Der Vernichtungskrieg gegen die Sowjetunion, ed. Klaus Meyer and Wolfgang Wippermann (Frankfurt am Main: Haag & Herchen, 1992), 75–90; Martin Holler, Der nationalsozialistische Völkermord an den Roma in der besetzten Sowjetunion (1941–1944) (Heidelberg: Dokumentations- und Kulturzentrum Deutscher Sinti und Roma, 2009).
16. Martin Holler, “Extending the Genocidal Program: Did Otto Ohlendorf Initiate the Systematic Extermination of Soviet ‘Gypsies’?,” in Nazi Policy on the Eastern Front, 1941: Total War, Genocide, and Radicalization, ed. Alex J. Kay, Jeff Rutherford, and David Stahel (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2012), 267–288, esp. 272–273.
17. Wolfgang Wippermann, Niemand ist ein Zigeuner. Zur Ächtung eines europäischen Vorurteils (Hamburg: Körber-Stiftung, 2015), 79 ff.
18. See Denis Pechanski, Les Tsiganes en France, 1936–1946 (Paris: Librairie Académique Perrin, 1994).
19. See Amadeo Osti Guerrazzi, “Der italienische Faschismus und die ‘Zigeuner,’” Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung 18 (2009): 139–159.
20. See Karel Vodicka, “Die Zigeuner des Monsignore Tiso. Roma-Verfolgung im ‘Schutzstaat’ Slowakei 1939–1945,” Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung 53 (2004): 46–82.
21. See János Bársony and Agnes Daróczi, Pharrajimos: The Fate of the Roma during the Holocaust (Budapest: International Debate Education Association, 2007); Melanie Barlai and Florian Hartlieb, “Die Roma in Ungarn,” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 29–30/2009 (July 13, 2009): 33–39.
22. Wolfgang Wippermann, Faschismus. Eine Weltgeschichte vom 19. Jahrhundert bis heute (Darmstadt: Primus, 2009), 161 ff.
23. See Viorel Achim, The Roma in Romanian History (New York: Central European University Press, 2004).
24. See Radu Ionid, The Holocaust in Romania: The Destruction of Jews and Gypsies under the Antonescu Regime, 1940–1944 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000); Viorel Achim, “Die Deportation der Roma nach Transnistrien,” in Rumänien und der Holocaust. Zu den Massenverbrechen in Transnistrien 1941–1944, ed. Mariana Hausleitner, Brigitte Mihok, and Juliane Wetzel (Berlin: Metropol, 2001), 101–112.
25. Julia von dem Knesebeck, The Roma Struggle for Compensation in Post-War Germany (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2011).
26. Judgment of the Federal Court of Justice, dated January 7, 1956, reproduced in Tilman Zülch, ed., In Auschwitz vergast, bis heute verfolgt. Zur Situation der Roma (Zigeuner) in Deutschland und Europa (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1979), 168–170.
27. Judgment of the Federal Court of Justice, dated December 18, 1963, reproduced in Rechtsprechung zum Wiedergutmachungsrecht 15 (1964): 209 ff.
28. Christian Bernadec, L´holocauste oublié. Le massacre des Tsiganes (Paris: Editions France-Empire, 1979).
29. Jerzy Ficowsky, Wieviel Trauer und Wege. Zigeuner in Polen (Frankfurt am Main: Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften, 1992); Selma Steinmetz, Österreichs Zigeuner im NS-Staat (Vienna: Europa Verlag, 1966); Erika Thurner, Nationalsozialismus und Zigeuner in Österreich (Vienna: Geyer Edition, 1983); Bernard Sijes, Vervolging van Zigeuneers in Nederland 1940–1945 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1978); Bernadec, L´holocauste oublié.
30. Donald Kenrick and Grattan Puxon, The Destiny of Europe’s Gypsies (London: Basic Books, 1972).
31. Zimmermann, Rassenutopie und Genozid.
32. Guenter Lewy, “Rückkehr nicht erwünscht.” Die Verfolgung der Zigeuner im Dritten Reich (Munich: Propyläen, 2001).
33. See Wippermann, “Auserwählte Opfer”?
34. In this context it is worth mentioning Luchterhandt, Der Weg nach Birkenau.
35. See Karola Fings and Frank Sparing, “einziges Land, in dem Judenfrage und Zigeunerfrage gelöst.” Die Verfolgung der Roma im faschistisch besetzten Jugoslawien 1941–1945 (Cologne: Rom, 1993); Holler, Der nationalsozialistische Völkermord an den Roma; Felicitas Fischer von Weikersthal, ed., Der nationalsozialistische Genozid an den Roma Osteuropas. Geschichte und künstlerische Verarbeitung (Cologne: Böhlau, 2008); Ionid, The Holocaust in Romania; Vodicka, “Die Zigeuner des Monsignore Tiso”; Anton Weiss-Wendt, “Extermination of the Gypsies in Estonia during World War II. Popular Images and Official Policies,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 17 (2003): 31–61; Guerrazzi, Der italienische Faschismus und die “Zigeuner.”
36. Wippermann, “Auserwählte Opfer?,” 125 ff.