The Lives of Roma and Sinti in Europe Before, During, and After the National Socialist Dictatorship and the Holocaust
Historical Background
Roma and Sinti, often inaccurately called “Gypsies,” are the largest European minority, numbering an estimated 8 million people (note: the term "gypsy" is widely considered to be a derogatory term and is not recommended to be used; it is included here in quotations as a learning opportunity for students to provide a historical reference of the term used by some at that time). Originally migrating from northeastern India, where culturally and linguistically related groups still live, Roma and Sinti emigrated in several waves between the 5th and the 11th centuries from that region to Persia and the Byzantine Empire. The majority of the Roma settled in Central and Eastern Europe during the Turkish Wars (17th through 19th centuries, often by the order of the local rulers). They also settled in Western European countries. However, although they have lived in Europe for more than a thousand years, they do not have a country of their own.
Roma and Sinti speak different languages. Although all their languages have common Indian roots – with words from Persian, Armenian, and Greek – they have become distinct in the course of their development. Various Sinti languages are spoken in Northern and Western Europe; the Romani languages dominate in Central and Southern Europe. Influences from surrounding languages, such as Albanian and Turkish in the Balkans and Romanian, Hungarian, and various Slavic languages, are evident.
The lives of Roma and Sinti are diverse and deeply integrated into their respective home countries. They are citizens, speak the official languages, and generally adhere to mainstream religious denominations. Over the centuries, they have made significant contributions to the culture and economy of the nations in which they reside.
However, in much of Western Europe, Roma and Sinti faced systemic exclusion for centuries. They were often banned from joining trade associations and guilds or from owning land. As a result, many worked as independent craftsmen, entertainers, retailers, or merchants, often adopting a traveling lifestyle.
Despite these barriers, many Roma and Sinti found success and made lasting contributions to professional life and society. Their children attended local schools, and many Roma and Sinti men served as soldiers in World War I, further demonstrating their deep ties to their home countries.
While most Sinti and Roma settled down hundreds of years ago, some of them, especially in Western Europe, continued to live a kind of half-nomad life and traveled to various fairs and markets in their caravans. They dealt in cattle, horses, or scrap metal, or worked as smiths, grinders, and tinkers. They usually followed traditional routes during the summer, setting up temporary camps or returning to their home towns and villages for the winter. In Central Europe, most of the Roma worked as seasonal help on farms assisting with the harvest. Eastern European Roma earned a living as day laborers, farm hands, or harvest workers. In winter, most of them sought to add to their meager wages through various itinerant trades, working as tinkers, grinders, umbrella repairers, rake makers, and basket weavers.
Many also found an additional source of income as musicians. All over Europe, Roma and Sinti became professional musicians and some were even employed by the nobility and in concert halls. From the 19th century onwards, Roma and Sinti started to receive professional training in music schools, conservatories, and universities.
During the 19th century, all emancipation and social integration attempts of the so-called “gypsies” came to an end with the establishment of rigidly organized nation states. Strict citizenship and pass laws left many Roma stateless, while new vagrancy laws prevented them from pursuing their itinerant trades. Some laws even criminalized them. Itinerant Roma suffered increasingly from the workings of the modern police system. The police deported them or locked them away in poorhouses. This resulted in increasing impoverishment. During the First World War, many countries interned itinerant Roma in prison camps for many years. On the other hand, Roma who had settled down, served in various armies and often returned as highly decorated soldiers.
By the beginning of the 20th century, more than 90 percent of the European Roma and Sinti no longer lived in caravans, but the way of life of those who still did became the stereotype for all members of this ethnic group. During the world economic crises (The Great Depression) in the 1920s, tensions between Roma and Sinti and the majority of society increased. Large numbers of unemployed citizens left the cities to return to their home villages and took over jobs that the Roma had been performing, leading to them losing their sources of income receiving “poor relief.” The authorities became less and less willing to provide funds for school fees, hospital bills, and welfare services that most of the now unemployed Roma could no longer pay. As a result, many communities simply wanted to get rid of these poor and hungry people, leading many countries of Europe to introduce "anti-Gypsy laws”.
The police authorities also became increasingly involved in international cooperation to create records of the “gypsies” and widespread fingerprinting was employed for the first time for that purpose. From 1912 onwards, files of “gypsies” were created with photographs and fingerprints. In 1933, representatives of all the Austrian political parties came together in Oberwart, in the province of Burgenland, for a “gypsy conference,” where the first plans were discussed for forced labor or deportation to Africa. The National Socialists led that task and in 1938, the Nazis started deporting Roma and Sinti to labor camps – such as the Lackenbach “gypsy camp” in Burgenland – and later, starting in 1941, to Auschwitz-Birkenau and Chełmno in Poland.
Persecution
Based on racist and eugenic theories that the Roma and Sinti were “contaminating“ the gene pool of the European population, the Nazis, after coming to power, intensified the process of excluding Sinti and Roma from all aspects of life in the German Reich. The Nazis barred Sinti and Roma from practicing their professions, from attending school, and gradually forced them out of society. Later, the Nazis created detention camps and put an end to the Roma’s freedom of movement, referring to them as “born criminals.”
The Nazis also forcibly sterilized some of those they arrested according to the “Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases" (Gesetz zur Verhütung erbkranken Nachwuchses), which was passed in January 1934. In addition, the Nazis extended the Nuremberg Laws, which they had initially conceived as anti-Jewish legislation, to include Sinti and Roma from 1936 onwards.
In 1938, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler set up the “Reich Central Office to Combat the Gypsy Nuisance" (Reichszentrale zur Bekämpfung des Zigeunerunwesen) in Berlin, and ordered that Sinti and Roma be sent to concentration camps. Working closely with the “Research Institute for Racial Hygiene and Population Biology" (Rassenhygienische und Bevölkerungsbiologische Forschungsstelle), a division of the Reich Department of Health, headed by Robert Ritter, the office produced a complete record of this minority group. They forced Sinti and Roma to undergo humiliating racial screening and to disclose information about their relatives under interrogation. By the end of the war, the research Institute had produced 24,000 “race files” providing the practical and ideological basis for the genocide.
The Spread of Terror
The Nazis deported the first groups of Roma and Sinti to concentration camps in 1938 and rapidly increased the deportations in 1939. After the Anschluss with Austria, the Nazis sent thousands of Austrian Roma and Sinti to Dachau, Buchenwald, and Ravensbrück as slave laborers. Eventually, Roma and Sinti were in almost every concentration camp in the Third Reich. In the concentration camps, SS guards divided the people into categories and forced them to sew symbols onto their clothing to indicate their group. For Roma and Sinti that was usually the black triangle used to indicate “anti-social” imprisoned people; some camps had a separate “Gypsy” category requiring incarcerated individuals to wear a brown triangle.
The German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939 marked the start of World War II. In the first few weeks after the invasion of Poland, members of the SS, military, and police killed tens of thousands of people and Roma and Sinti were among those deliberately targeted for murder. Against the background of war, the German leadership intensified its persecution of this minority. The first deportation of around 2,500 children, women, and men from Germany to occupied Poland took place in May 1940. The Nazis sent entire families from north and southwest Germany and from the Rhineland to camps.
From 1940 to 1941, German forces conquered large parts of Europe. The aims, implementation, and scale of the persecution of Roma and Sinti varied between the countries occupied by or allied with Germany, as did the participation of national authorities and the action taken by local forces. While Sinti and Roma in occupied France were mainly held in detention camps, the Wehrmacht (armed force) in Serbia shot and killed thousands of men in the autumn of 1941, simply because they were Roma.
War of Extermination
On June 22, 1941 German troops and their allies attacked the Soviet Union. This initiated the transition from the removal to the genocide of the Sinti and Roma. At least 30,000 fell victim to the Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units) of the SS and their auxiliaries in what is now referred to as the "Holocaust by Bullets." The largest mass shooting took place over three days in August 1942 in Chernihiv (Ukraine) when the Nazis murdered more than 2,000 people. By the spring of 1944 in Transnistria, the Romanian-occupied part of Ukraine, around 12,500 Roma – both from the local area or those who had been expelled from Romania – perished as a result of shootings, incarceration in camps, hunger, and disease.
As the war progressed in Eastern and Southeastern Europe, the Nazis adopted an increasingly radical approach to the treatment of Sinti and Roma in both the German Reich and occupied Poland. In November 1941, the SS deported 5,000 Burgenland Roma – among them 2700 children – to the Litzmannstadt (Łódź) Ghetto. A typhus epidemic broke out there soon afterwards due to food and water contamination. Between mid-December 1941 and early January 1942, the 4,300 survivors were transported to Chełmno (Kulmhof), where the Nazis murdered them in gas vans. In all, the SS units murdered tens of thousands of Polish Roma either in the gas chambers at the extermination camps of Belzec, Treblinka, and Sobibór or by shooting them. These murders reached a peak between 1942 and 1943.
Auschwitz
On December 16, 1942, it was determined that all “Gypsies” living in the German Reich were to be deported to Auschwitz by order of Heinrich Himmler. This Auschwitz Decree marked the final phase of a plan for the extermination of the “Gypsies”. Starting in February 1943, the SS deported approximately 23,000 men, women, and children to Auschwitz. They were tattooed with a number and the letter Z and imprisoned in a segregated area. In the designated “Gypsy family camp (Zigeunerfamilienlager), they were crammed into 32 wooden huts. Most of them perished between March 1943 and May 1944 from the shortage of food and lack of sanitation or as the result of forced labor, arbitrary killings, and asphyxiation in the gas chambers. In addition, SS doctors targeted Roma and Sinti for medical experiments.
On May 16, 1944, the SS attempted to clear the "Gypsy" camp to make additional room for Jewish individuals. The Roma and Sinti recognized their impending deaths and resisted; they would not leave their barracks and were ready to fight the SS guards with planks and shovels. The guards dispersed, leaving them for the time being. In the weeks that followed, the Sinti and Roma who were fit for work were transported to other concentration camps such as Ravensbrück, Flossenbürg, or Buchenwald. Around 4,300 people remained, most of them elderly people or children. The Nazis murdered them in the gas chambers on the night of August 2 to August 3, 1944. Tragically, only one percent of all Sinti and Roma imprisoned in Auschwitz-Birkenau survived.
Death Toll
Altogether, close to half a million Roma and Sinti perished during the Holocaust. Among the Roma and Sinti this tragedy is referred to as Pharrajimos (the "Great Devouring") or as Samurdaripen (the "Great Killing").
General Resistance
From 1933, Sinti and Roma in Germany resisted the racist brutality of the Nazi regime in a variety of ways. They protested against arrests, endeavored to secure the release of relatives, evaded registration, fled when deportation was imminent, or emigrated to neighboring countries. In addition, German Sinti and Roma urged church dignitaries to take action against the persecution.
In all parts of Europe occupied after 1939, Roma and Sinti developed many different strategies to resist repression and terror. Entire families hid in forests; others went underground or concealed that they belonged to this minority. Some protested against the mass shootings.
Roma fought in the regular armies against German troops and occupiers or, primarily in Yugoslavia, Poland and Belarus, where they joined the partisans. They organized rebellions or escapes from camps. May 16, the day when Sinti and Roma in Auschwitz-Birkenau mounted a rebellion against the SS in 1944, is commemorated annually as Roma Resistance Day.
After the War
After the war, Roma and Sinti found themselves in essentially the same situation as other survivors. Many perished in their first days and weeks of freedom from the effects of their time in captivity. The survivors had absolutely nothing left. They suffered from the consequences of years of fear, imprisonment, and forced labor. In the hope of being reunited with family members or close friends, their first destination was usually the place where they had lived before the war. However, in many cases, no one was left, and their possessions had been looted. The loss of relatives and the experience of violence resulted in trauma, which persisted for generations. Many nations refused to recognize them as citizens. Continued discrimination and the lack of recognition for the injustice Sinti and Roma had endured increased the trauma.
Finally, in the 1980s, a new generation of Romani sparked an international Roma rights movement. Their efforts led to a recognition of the suffering of the Roma and Sinti. Dedicated in 2012, a Memorial to the Sinti and Roma of Europe Murdered under National Socialism, located in Berlin’s Tiergarten, publicly acknowledges the systematic murder of the Roma and Sinti under the Third Reich.
