Parajmos (Romani Genocide) Resources - Prevent Genocide International

Resources on the Parajmos, the Genocide of Roma-Sinti ()Nazi Occupied Europe 1941-1945, DRAFT unorganized

Online Resources

A Brief Romani Holocaust Chronology by Ian Hancock http://www.osi.hu/rpp/holocaust.html
from the RPP Reporter, Vol. 1, No. 1, May 1998 Roma Participation Program (RPP) http://www.osi.hu/rpp/

"SINTI & ROMA" The text of a booklet originally published by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum http://www.holocaust-trc.org/sinti.htm

Books and articles:

Karola Fings, Herbert Heuss, Frank Sparing (Translator), Donald Kenrick (Translator), The Gypsies during the Second World War; Volume 1: From Race Science to the Camps (Interface Collection, Volume 12)

Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann. The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945 (New York, 1991). See especially pp.113-27.

Ward Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1997). Includes a long chapter to the unfair treatment of Romanies by Holocaust scholars.

Alan S. Rosenbaum, editor, Is the Holocaust Unique? Boulder & Oxford: The Westview Press, 1996.

State Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Memorial Book: The Gypsies at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Munich: Saur Verlag, 1993.

Hancock, Ian, 1989. "Gypsy history in Germany and neighboring lands: A chronology leading to the Holocaust and beyond," in David Crowe and John Kolsti, eds., The Gypsies of Eastern Europe, Armonk: E.C. Sharpe, pp. 11-30.

Kenrick, Donald, and Grattan Puxon, 1972. The Destiny of Europe's Gypsies. London: Sussex University Press.

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Excerpted from Encyclopedia of Genocide (1997) by Israel W. Charny (ed.)
Reprinted by the Patrin Web Journal with permission of the author, Ian Hancock.
Posted 1 March 1997.

Crow, David, and John Koisti. The Gypsies of Eastern Europe (Armonk, N.Y, 1991).

Fraser, Angus. The Gypsies (Cambridge, MA, 1992).

Hancock, Ian. The Pariah Syndrome: An Account of Gypsy Slavery and Persecution (Ann Arbor,1987).

Kenrick, Donald, and Grattan Puxon. The Destiny of Europe's Gypsies (New York, 1972).

Klamper, Elisabeth. "Persecution and Annihilation of Roma and
Sinti in Austria, 1938-1945," Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society 5, Vol. 3, No. 2 (1993), 55-65.

Some of the survivors of Auschwitz, such as Kulka and Kraus in their book The Death Factory, describe a terrible massacre of Gypsies which took place on the night of 31 July 1944.

Milton, Sybil. "The Holocaust: The Gypsies," in William S. Parsons,
Israel Chamy, and Samuel Totten, eds., Genocide in the Twentieth Century: An Anthology of Critical Essays and Oral History (New York, 1995), pp. 209-64.

Müller-Hill, Benno. Murderous Science: Elimination by Scientific Selection of Jews, Gypsies, and Others: Germany, 1933-1945, translated by George Fraser (Oxford, 1988).

Tyrnauer, Gabrielle. Gypsies and the Holocaust: A Bibliography and Introductory Essay (Montreal, 1989).

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The Story of Karl Stolka: A Childhood in Birkenau (Washington, D.C., 1992).

Yoors, Jan. Crossing: A Journal of Survival and Resistance in World War II (NewYork, 1971).

Black Silence : The Lety Survivors Speak
by Paul Polansky

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Hardcover: 270 pages
Publisher: G Plus G; ISBN: 0893042412; 1 edition (September 1, 1998)

Holocaust Studies. In 1994 the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Office of the President engaged in a cover-up trying to convince American writer Paul Polansky that there were no longer any living survivors of Lety, the World War II Romany (Gypsy) death camp in southern Bohemia. Polansky found more than a hundred Lety survivors still living today in the Czech Republic. The stories collected here are the result of his interviews with those survivors. Reading the survivors' own words shows why the President's Office in Prague does not want the world to know what really happened to the Czech Romany during WWII - because it is still happening today. "Many romany died in Lety. Every day. Every day there were deaths. I was walking around the camp because I was working in the kitchen and in the laundry, so I saw many dead bodies. Every day dead bodies. They were all murdered. Murdered every day" ("J.S.").

Living Through It Twice: Poems of the Romany Holocaust
by Paul J. Polansky

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Hardcover: 121 pages
Publisher: G Plus G; ISBN: 8086103110; 1 edition (January 1, 1998)

The Nazi genocide of the Sinti and Roma

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189 pages
Publisher: Documentary and Cultural Centre of German Sinti and Roma; ISBN: 3929446065; 2nd, rev. and amended ed. edition

Sinti und Roma : die Vernichtung eines Volkes im NS-Staat
by Donald Kenrick

The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies is a dangerous book. It is another title in the antiquated tradition of an expert treatise on a people whom the author has never met nor has made any effort to meet. How can you feel compassion for a people you don’t know? We are an abstraction, to be discussed in our absence and, worse, even in our presence, as though we don’t really exist, with no thought for our feelings or our dignity. It will, I am sorry to say, be widely read, and is already being quoted as “evidence” to argue for the exclusion of the Romani people from their rightful place in Holocaust history. Lewy unfairly dismisses Kenrick & Puxon’s groundbreaking 1972 Destiny of Europe’s Gypsies, the first full-length book of the subject in English, as “short of [being] a satisfactory treatment.”

192 pages
Publisher: Gesellschaft fèur Bedrohte Vèolker; ISBN: 3922197086; Deutsche, von den Autoren aktualisierte Erstaus. edition

Gypsies Under the Swastika
by Donald Kenrick, Grattan Puxon157 pages
Publisher: University of Hertfordshire Press; ISBN: 0900458658; 1 edition (November 1995)

The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies -- by Guenter Lewy; Hardcover
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1. The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies
by Guenter Lewy

A distinguished historian explores the fate of the Gypsies during the Third Reich. The Gypsies had been a reviled and often persecuted minority for many centuries, wandering from place to place, often accused of witchcraft and theft, but they were initially of not much interest to the Nazis. When Hitler became chancellor in 1933, they numbered no more than 26,000. Yet by the end of the war, according to varying (and, Lewy notes, not verifiable) estimates, the total number of Gypsy victims in... read more

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An Unfortunate Read, May 14, 2002
Reviewer: A reader from Houston, TX United States
This book was riddled with historical inaccuracies and a desire to blame the victim for the horrors that took place. It is an interesting read, but please do not let it be your only read. For further investigation into the subject please read works by Dr. Ian Hancock or Donlad Kenrick. They

National Socialism and Gypsies in Austria
by Erika Thurner, Gilya Gerda Schmidt (Editor) (Hardcover - August 1998)

Memorial Book: The Gypsies at Auschwitz-Birkenau

List Price: $313.00

Hardcover: 1674 pages ; Dimensions (in inches): 8.34 x 10.75 x 13.84
Publisher: K G Saur; ISBN: 3598111622; (November 1993)

Memorial Book. The Gypsies at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Ksiega Pamiece. Cyganie w obozie koncentracyjnym Auschwitz-Birkenau
Gedenkbuch. Die Sinti und Roma im Konzentrationslager Auschwitz-Birkenau
Ed. by the State Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau in cooperation with the Documentary and Cultural Centre of German Sintis and Roms, Heidelberg

Editorial Director Jan Parcer
Preface by Romani Rose
1992. 2 vols. c. 1,800 pp. HB.
? 204.00. ISBN 3-598-11162-2

http://www.saur.de/jewish/je11162.htm

This at least is specific to the fate of Jews, as Porrajmos (“paw-rye-mawss”)

Zigeunerplage or Zigeunerbedrohung or Zigeunergeschmeiss as the Nazis referred to us (“Gypsy plague,” “Gypsy menace,” “Gypsy scum”).

During the years leading up to Hitler's taking office as Chancellor of the Third Reich on January 30, 1933, the Roma suffered under other actions. For example, in 1926, they faced two new laws, one "to combat Gypsy nomads and idlers" and the other to control the "Gypsy Plague." In 1927, the Germans passed a law demanding that Gypsies be fingerprinted and photographed. That same year, another one forbade them to travel in family groups. By 1928, Gypsies in Germany were under police surveillance. They lost their civil rights in 1933, and during that same time, legalized clubbing of Gypsies became the rule.

Months later, to quote Hancock from his "Responses to the Romani Holocaust," the "Ministry of the Interior, which partially funded the Research Unit, circulated an order forbidding marriages between Germans and 'Gypsies, Negroes, and their bastard offspring.'" Hence, it comes as no surprise that the Roma, in addition to the Jews, came under the restrictions of the Nuremberg Law for the Protection of Blood and Honor, which forbade the intermarriage or sexual relationships between Aryan and non-Aryan peoples. A more strict definition of "Gypsy" came about in 1938. A person could be judged as having too much "Gypsy blood" to be allowed to live if two of the individual's eight great-grandparents were even part Gypsy.
in 1933, Gypsies throughout Germany were arrested under "The Law Against Habitual Criminals." Many found themselves doing labor in a concentration camp where some were forced to undergo sterilization. In 1938, during "Gypsy Clean-Up Week," hundreds of Roma in Germany and Austria were gathered together, beaten, and put into prison.

By September 1939, the German government forced the Roma onto a different road--one made of tracks on which trains stuffed with Gypsies traveled eastward to Poland and the concentration camps. It was at the concentration camp at Buchenwald that, to quote Hancock, 250 Gypsy children were "used as guinea pigs for testing the gas Zyklon B..."

Final Solution" to the "Gypsy Question" began with Heinrich Himmler's Auschwitz decree of December 16, 1942. All Gypsies in Germany and the Nazi-controlled European territories were to be deported to Auschwitz for extermination. Once there, they were housed in a special Gypsy Family Camp, where they were kept in family units. Why this was done is not certain. Perhaps, because "medical research" was to be performed on both adults and children, it was easier to house them together, or maybe, as the Rom are very family oriented, they were easier to manage when kept together.

At Auschwitz, Gypsy prisoners wore a "Z" for Zigeuner (Gypsy) tattooed on their left arm and a black triangle, for "asocial," was sewn into their clothes.

http://www.historywiz.com/roma.htm

A BRIEF ROMANI HOLOCAUST CHRONOLOGY

Ian Hancock

. 1899 In that same year, the "Gypsy Information Agency" was set up in Munich under the direction of Alfred Dillmann, which began cataloguing information on all Roma throughout the German lands. The results of this were published in 1905 in Dillmann's Zigeuner-Buch, which laid the foundations for what was to befall Roma in the Holocaust 35 years later.

The Zigeuner-Buch, nearly 350 pages long, consisted of three parts: first, an introduction stating that Roma were a "plague" and a "menace" which the German population had to defend itself against using "ruthless punishments," and which warned of the dangers of mixing the Romani and German gene pools. The second part was a register of known Roma, giving genealogical details and criminal record if any, and the third part was a collection of photographs of those same people. Dillmann's "race mixing" later became a central part of the Nuremberg Law in Nazi Germany.

In 1920, Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche published their book The Eradication of Lives Undeserving of Life, using a phrase first coined by Richard Liebich with specific reference to Roma nearly sixty years earlier.

1890 Conference organized in Germany on the Zigeunergeschmeiss ("Gypsy scum"). Military empowered to regulate movements of Gypsies.
1899 The Central Office for Fighting the Gypsy Nuisance is established, and documents begin to be collected on Romani history, and on the Gypsy population in Germany. The Bavarian police create a special "Gypsy Affairs Unit" in the same year.
1909 A policy conference on "The Gypsy Question" is held, and the recommendation made that all Gypsies be branded with easy identification.
1920 Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche, introduce the notion of "lives unworthy of life," suggesting that Gypsies should be sterilized and eliminated as a people. This notion, with the same name, is incorporated into Nazi race theory in 1933.
1922 (And throughout the 1920s): All Gypsies in German territories are to be photographed and fingerprinted.
1926 A July 16 law is directed at controlling the "Gypsy plague." This treatment is in direct violation of the terms of the Weimar Constitution.
1927 In Bavaria, special camps are built to incarcerate Gypsies. Eight thousand Gypsies are processed in this way.
1928 All Gypsies are placed under permanent police surveillance. Professor Hans Gunther publishes a document in which he claims that "it was the Gypsies who introduced foreign blood into Europe." More camps are built to contain Gypsies.

A Bavarian law of July 16, 1926, outlined measures for "Combatting Gypsies, Vagabonds, and the Work Shy" and required the systematic registration of all Sinti and Roma. The law prohibited Gypsies from "roam[ing] about or camp[ing] in bands," and those "[Gypsies] unable to prove regular employment" risked being sent to forced labor for up to two years. This law became the national norm in 1929.

1930 Recommendation made that all Gypsies be sterilized.

1933 Nazis introduce a law to legalize eugenic sterilization. This is specifically named as written to control "Gypsies and most of the Germans of black color," these latter the descendants of the unions between African soldiers and Europeans from the period of the 1914-1918 War.
1934 Gypsies are being selected from January onwards for sterilization by injection and castration, and being sent to camps at Dachau, Dieselstrasse, Sachsenhausen and elsewhere. Two laws issued in this year forbid Germans from marrying "Jews, Gypsies and Negroes."
1935 Gypsies become subject to the restriction of the Nuremberg Law for the Protection of Blood and Honor. Marriage with white people is forbidden. Criteria defining who is Gypsy are exactly twice as strict as those defining any other group.

In 1936 Dr. Hans Globke, one of the drafters of the Nuremberg Laws, declared that "Gypsies are of alien blood" (Artfremdes Blut). Unable to deny that they were of Aryan origin, Professor Hans F. Guenther categorized them as Rassengemische, an indeterminate mixture of races.

1938 Between June 12th and 18th, Zigeuneraaufraumungswoche ("Gypsy clean-up week") takes place, when hundreds of Gypsies throughout Germany and Austria are arrested, beaten, and imprisoned. Gypsies are first targeted population to be forbidden to attend school. Himmler’s recommendation that certain Roma be kept alive in a compound under the Law for the Protection of Historic Monuments for anthropologists to study, is ridiculed and never implemented.

http://www.holocaust-trc.org/nuisance.htm

HIMMLER'S CIRCULAR OF DECEMBER 8, 1938:
"COMBATTING THE GYPSY NUISANCE"Translated in Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wipperman, The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945 (New York, 1991), pp. 120-21.

n 1938 Himmler intervened personally, ordering the transfer of the Gypsy Affairs Centre from Munich to Berlin. In the same year 300 sedentary Gypsies, the owners of fields and vineyards, where arrested in the village of Mannworth.

Himmler stipulated that Gypsies should be classified as follows: pure Gypsies (Z); mixed race Gypsies of predominantly Gypsy blood (ZM+); mixed race Gypsies of predominantly Aryan blood (ZM-); and mixed-race Gypsies with half-Gypsy, half-Aryan blood (ZM).

Between June 12th and June 18th 1938, Gypsy Clean-Up Week took place throughout Germany which, like Kristallnacht for the Jewish people that same year, marked the beginning of the end. Also in 1938, the first reference to "The Final Solution of the Gypsy Question" appeared, in a document signed by Himmler on December 8th that year.

Gypsy women married to non-Gypsies were sterilized in the hospital at Dusseldorf-Lierenfeld. Some died as a result of being sterilized while pregnant. In Ravensbruck camp 120 Gypsy girls were sterilized by SS doctors.

The deportation of 5,000 Gypsies from Germany to the ghetto at Lodz in Poland was an example of genocide by deportation. The living conditions in the ghetto were so inhuman that no community could have survived.

In January, 1940, the. first mass genocidal action of the Holocaust took place when 250 Romani children were murdered in Buchenwald, where they were used as guinea-pigs to test the efficacy of the Zyklon-B crystals, later used in the gas chambers. In June, 1940, Hitler ordered the liquidation of "all Jews, Gypsies and communist political functionaries in the entire Soviet Union."

On July, 31st 1941, Heydrich, chief architect of the details of the Final Solution, issued his directive to the Einsatzkommandos to "kill all Jews, Gypsies and mental patients."

1939 Nazi party decree states that "the aim of the measures taken by the state must be the racial separation once and for all of the Gypsy race from the German nation, then the prevention of racial mixing." The Office of Racial Hygiene issues a statement saying "All Gypsies should be treated as hereditarily sick; the only solution is elimination. The aim should therefore be the elimination without hesitation of this defective element in the population."
1940 The first mass genocidal action of the Holocaust takes place in January of this year, when 250 Romani children are used as guinea pigs to test the cyanide gas crystal, at the concentration camp at Buchenwald. Employment of any kind is forbidden to Gypsies in this same year.
1941 Gypsies are the first targeted population to be forbidden to serve in the army. Eight hundred Roma are murdered in one action on the night of December 24 in the Crimea. On July 31of this year, Heydrich, "Head of the Reich Main Security Office and leading organizational architect of the Nazi Final Solution," puts the machinery of the Endlosung into operation with his directive to the Einsatzkommandos to "kill all Jews, Gypsies and mental patients." The Holocaust begins.
1944 In the early hours of the August 1, four thousand Roma are gassed and incinerated at Auschwitz-Birkenau in one mass action, remembered by survivors as Zigeunernacht.
1945 By the end of the war, between 70% and 80% of the Romani population had been annihilated by Nazis. No Roma were called to testify at the Nuremberg Trials, and no one came forth to testify on their behalf. No war crimes reparations have been paid to the Roma as a people.
1950 First of many statements over the years to follow, made by the German government, that they owe nothing to the Romani people by way of war crimes reparations.

After the issuing of the Compensation Laws of the States (Länder) in 1949-50 most of the prominent German bureaucrats claimed that the Gypsies were not persecuted for racial motives but because of their antisocial and criminal behaviour and therefore were not entitled to official recognition as victims of Nazism. Most of the German courts which then considered the appeals of Gypsies against the decisions of the Compensation Authorities tended to uphold the decisions. Final sanction was given in 1956 by the Federal Supreme Court (Bundesgerichtshof) in Karlsruhe which determined that only those Gypsies who were imprisoned after the issuing of the Auschwitz Decree of 1 March 1943 were persecuted for racial motives. The Court decided that the measures taken against Gypsies before that date had had a preventive character and stemmed from the interests of national security. Therefore the victims were not entitled to receive compensation under federal compensation law. The main group affected by this decision were the survivors of the deportation to Poland in May 1940.

In 1963 the Federal Supreme Court revised its former decision and determined that Gypsies were persecuted for racial reasons beginning in 1938. Official recognition of responsibility for the persecution of Gypsies took place only in 1985 after years of public debate concerning the issue. In 1985 the German President Richard von Weiszäcker counted the Romanies and Sinti among the victims of Nazi Germany. In his ceremonial speech for the 40th anniversary of the end of the Second World War before the German Federal Parliament (Bundestag) in November of the same year Helmut Kohl and the representatives of all the political parties in the Bundestag recognized German responsibility for the persecution of the Gypsies in the Third Reich and the continuing discrimination by the German authorities towards them after 1945.

A wooden statue honoring Gypsies killed during the war was dedicated in 1991 in a southwestern Hungarian town; it is believed to be the first such memorial in Eastern Europe.

1992 Germany sells Romani asylum seekers back to Romania for $21 million, and begins shipping them in handcuffs on November 1. Some Roma commit suicide rather than go. The German press agency asks western journalists not to use the word "deportation" in their coverage of this, because that word has "uncomfortable historical associations."

This brief chronology was condensed from "Gypsy History in Germany and Neighboring Lands: A Chronology to the Holocaust and Beyond," in Nationalities Papers, 19(3):395-412(1991), a special issue on Gypsies.