| Gypsies in Auschwitz
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Gypsies in Auschwitz: Part 1
"For Nazi Germany the Gypsies became a racist dilemma. The Gypsies 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 Gypsies...
At a conference held in Berlin on January 30, 1940, a decision was taken to expel 30,000 Gypsies from Germany to the territories of occupied Poland...
The reports of the SS Einsatzgruppen [special task forces] which operated in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union mention the murder of thousands of Gypsies along with the massive extermination of the Jews in these areas.
The deportations and executions of the Gypsies 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 Gypsies were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where a special Gypsy camp was erected. Over 20,000 Gypsies 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 Gypsy 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...
Gypsies 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 Gypsies were shot..."
[Excerpted from Arad, Yitzhak. Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka—The Operation Reinhard Death Camps. IN: Indiana University Press, 1987, pp. 150153.]
According to The Institut Fuer Zeitgeschicthe in Munich, at least 4,000 gypsies were murdered by gas at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Gypsies in Auschwitz: Part 2
"Like the Jews, Gypsies 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 Gypsies 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."
The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 aimed at the Jews were soon amended to include the Gypsies. 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, Gypsies 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. It is not known how many were killed by the Einsatzgruppen charged with speedy extermination by shooting. For the sake of efficiency Gypsies 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.' The first to go were the German Gypsies; 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.
Just how were the Gypsies 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. Eichmann.
Open season was declared on the Gypsies, 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. There they were subjected to all that Auschwitz meant, including the medical experiments, before they were exterminated.
Gypsies 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. Gypsies 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.
Gypsy women were forced to become guinea pigs in the hands of Nazi physicians. Among others they were sterilized as 'unworthy of human reproduction' (fortpflanzungsunwuerdig), only to be ultimately annihilated as not worthy of living. ... At that, the Gypsies were the luckier ones; in Bulgaria, Greece, Denmark and Finland they were spared.
For a while there was a Gypsy Family Camp in Auschwitz, but on August 6, 1944, it was liquidated. Some men and women were shipped to German factories as slave labor; the rest, about 3,000 women, children and old people, were gassed.
No precise statistics exist about the extermination of European Gypsies. Some estimates place the number between 500,000 and 600,000, most of them gassed in Auschwitz. Others indicated a more conservative 200,000 Gypsy victims of the Holocaust. <14>"
[Extracted from Laska, Vera. ed. Women in the Resistance and in the Holocaust: The Voices of Eyewitnesses. CT: Greenwood Press, 1983.]
Gypsies in Auschwitz: Part 3
"Gypsies 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. In 1939, resettlement of Gypsies was put under Eichmann's jurisdiction along with that of the Jews. Gypsies 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 Gypsies 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. Gypsy 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 Gypsies 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."
[Excerpted from Fein, Helen Accounting for Genocide: Victims and Survivors of the Holocaust. NY: Free Press, 1979.]
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| The Lodz Ghetto
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Lodz is a city which is located about 75 miles southwest of Warsaw in Poland. More than a third of the cities population was made up of around 160,000 Jews, which was the second largest of the Jewish communities in pre-war Poland, After Warsaw. On 1 September 1939, Germany invaded Poland and occupied Lodz for one week. Lodz was annexed to Germany as part of the Warthegau, and it was renamed Litzmannstadt, after the German general Karl Litzmann, who had originally captured the city during the First World War. The Germans established a ghetto in the northeastern section of Lodz in the February of 1940.
The 160,000 Jews were forced into a small area of the ghetto, which they then isolated from the rest of Lodz with barbed-wire fencing. The perimeter of the ghetto was guarded by special police units, and the internal order of the ghetto was the responsibility of the Jewish ghetto police. The ghetto was divided up into three segments by the intersection of two major roads, which were outside of the ghetto itself. There were bridges constructed which connected the three main segments of the ghetto. The remaining non-Jewish population outside of the ghetto was able to travel through these main roads, but they were forbidden to stop within it.
During prewar Poland, Lodz had been a thriving industrial center, and so the Lodz ghetto became a major production centre under the German occupation. Factories were established quite early on in the May of 1940 and the Jewish residents were used for forced labor. There were almost 100 factories established within the ghetto by August 1942. Use was made of this forced labor in order to produce textiles and the uniforms for the German army. The chairman of the Jewish Council within the ghetto, Mordechai Chaim Rumkowoski had hoped to prevent the destruction of the ghetto by encouraging it to be as productive as possible. It was a gamble to assume that the labor the Jewish were providing would be essential to German factories and would therefore spare the Jews from the eventual deportation, and he had hoped that the Lodz ghetto would stay productive until the end of the war.
Life was not easy in the ghetto as the living conditions were horrendous, with neither running water nor sewer systems in most parts. This coupled with hard labor, overcrowding and starvation made life unbearable. Sickness was rife amongst the residents of the ghetto and more than 20 percent of the population died of a result of the appalling livening conditions. Hard labor in the German factories paid only meager food rations.
In 1941 and 1942 around 5,000 Romanies from Austria, mainly from the Burgenland province, were deported to the Lodz ghetto, and were confined in a block of buildings which was their segregated space. In these same years around 40,000 Jews were also deported to the ghetto, half of which were from Germany, Austria, the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, as well as Luxembourg. The other half were from the smaller tows in the Warthegau.
Deportations from the Lodz ghetto first began taking place in January 1942, and by September 1942 the Germans had deported over 70,000 Jews and 5,000 Romanies to Chelmno extermination camp. At first the Germans required the Jewish Council to prepare lists of all the people to be deported; however, this method failed the required quotas, and resulted in police roundups. The Germans then shot hundreds of Jews, including children, the elderly and the sick during these deportation roundup operations. Chelmo held a special SS detachment who killed the Jewish deportees in mobile gas vans, which were trucks with hermetically sealed compartments that served as a gas chamber.
From September 1942 to May 1944, the ghetto more resembled a forced labor-camp and no major deportations occurred. Devastation struck in the Spring of 1944 when the Germans made the decision to destroy the Lodz ghetto, despite the fact that there was a population of around 75,000 Jews resident there. The Lodz ghetto was the last remaining ghetto in Poland. Deportations were again resumed during June and July of 1944, starting with the deportation of 3,000 Jews to Chelmno. They were told that they were being transferred to a work camp in Germany. The remaining ghetto residents were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in the August of 1944.
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| Romani Holocaust Victims Not Fully Acknowledged
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[Regarding] the persecution of Gypsies, it should be noted that their plight equaled that of the Jews. Their liquidation was part and parcel of the Nazi' agemda to eradicate 'worthless life'. Wrapped up in the Holocaust per se, the genocide of the Roma in the East is still very much an untold story. In some ways, their victimization was practiced even more ruthlessly because they held no 'economic value' and were traditionally considered a particular asocial and criminally inclined people [and] more alien in appearance, culture and language.
(Eric Haberer "The Second Sweep: Genearmerie Killings of Jews and Gypsies on January 29th, 1942" , Journal of Genocide Research, 3(2):207-18)
The United Nations too, did nothing to assist Romanies during or following the Holocaust nor, sadly, were Romanies mentioned anywhere in the documentation of the US War Refugee Board. This is all the more puzzling since the situation was known to the War Crimes Tribunal in Washington as early as 1946, as is evident from file No. 682-PS (USGPO,1946:496) which contains the text of the meeting between Justice Minister Otto Thierack and Josef Goebbels on 14 September 1942. This stated plainly that
"With regard to the destruction of asocial life, Dr Goebbels is of the opinion that the following groups should be exterminated: Jews and Gypsies unconditionally, Poles who have served 3-4 years on penal servitud, and Czechs and Germans who are sentenced to death .... The idea of exterminating them by labour is best (emphasis added)."
Nevertheless, the situation is gradually improving. In Germany itself, the handbook and CD-ROM on Holocaust education prepared for teachers and issued by the Press and Information Office of the Federal Government in 200 makes it clear that
"recent historical research in the United States and Germany does not support the conventional argument that the Jews were the only victims of Nazi genocide. true, the murder of Jews by the Nazis differed from the Nazis' killing of political prisoners and foreign opponents because it was based on the genetic origin of the victims and not on their behaviour. The Nazi regine applied a consistant and inclusive policy of extermination based on heredity only against three groups of human beings: the handicapped, Jews, and Sinti and Roma ("Gypsies"). The Nazis killed multitudes, including political and religious opponents, members of the resistance, elites of conquered nations, and homosexuals, but always based these murders on the belief, actions and status of those victims. Different criteria applied only to the murder of the handicapped, Jews, and "Gypsies". Members of these groups could not escape their fate by changing their behaviour or belief. They were selected because they existed."
(Heye, Uwe-Karsten, Joachim Sarotius and Ulrich Bopp, eds, 200. Learning from History: The Nazi Era and the Holocaust in German Education. Berlin: Press and Information Office of Federal Government).©
Forget-Me-Nots
Back to Square one: In 1984 American Romanies demonstrated in Washington to protest the exclusion of our representation on the US Holocaust Memorial Coucil. President Reagan made our first appointment in 1987, but in 2002 it was taken away by the Bush administration. Once again Romanies have been denied recognition of their history in theHolocaust.©
Extracts taken from Ian Hancock 'We are the Romani People' The Interface Collection 2002:50/51
Recommended Publications
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| Memorials
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Sachsenhausen has been preserved as a place to remember those who died there. It is also a reminder of what can happen when a totalitarian regime is allowed to take power. The museum here which aims to inform new generations about what happened here to make sure that the lessons of history are learnt ...
"Death march" memorial stone: thousands
of prisoners were killed before the camp
was liberated by the Soviet army
Memorial inside the camp to those
who died here: the triangles represent the
18 types of prisoner who died here.
How to book a trip to Berlin:
Click here for futher information / booking details of tours: Berlin By Air
(for practical details about this tour and other trips by the same company, see:
Travel/Tours/Company/Anderson Tours)
Tour to Sachsenshausen starting in Berlin
To book a place on a guided tour to Sachsenhausen starting in Berlin, click here
Independent travel to Sachsenhausen
The Sachsenhausen camp is to the north of Berlin. To get there by public transport, take S-bahn line S1 to its northern terminus Oranienburg (make sure that your ticket is valid for zone C): from Friedrichstrasse station it takes about 50 minutes. It takes about 20 minutes to walk from the station to the camp. Alternatively, there is a bus 804 which leaves from the square outside Oranienburg station (take the bus towards Malz as far as the memorial - Gedenkstätte), but the service is not very frequent (hourly, or every 2 hours on Sundays). Allow at least half a day for this visit (for example, 1 hour 30 minutes to get there, 2 hours to visit and 1 hour 30 minutes to return to central Berlin).
© UK Student Life 2002-2006
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| Further Links & Resources
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| O Baro Porrajmos
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A black claw of death clutched the lives of the European Romani population with the Nazis’ fervent attempt to eradicate it as part of their plan to create a ‘Gypsy-free’ Europe. The Nazis judged the Romanies as ‘racially inferior,’ and the results were devastating as over half of the Romani population in Nazi-occupied Europe were destroyed. Romanies were the only population, along with Jews who were targeted for extermination on the grounds of ethnic/racial solutions.
 The Nazis’ subjected Romanies to internment, forced labour and massacre. Deportations to camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, Chelmo, Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka were regular and resulted in the extermination of thousands of Romanies.
Tens of thousands were also killed in Einsatzguppen, which were ‘mobile killing units’ in German-occupied Eastern territories. Further to this, thousands of Romanies were incarcerated Bergen-Belsen, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Dachau, Mauthansen and Ravensbrueck concentration camps.
Reinhard Heydrich, who was head of the Reich Security main office, held a meeting with Security police (Sipo) and Security Service (SD) officials in Berlin on 21 September 1939. The results could have brought about even more devastation and horror as the decision was taken to deport a further 30,000 German and Austrian Romanies to the east - from the Greater German Reich to the Generalgouverment, a territory inside German-occupied Poland. However, this plan was abandoned by the opposition of Hans Frank the Nazi governor-general of occupied Poland, on the decision to prioritise the deportation of Jews from Germany.
 Nonetheless several devastating deportations still continued to take place, with approximately 2,500 Romanies being deported to Poland in April and May 1940. Most of them had been subjected to hard labour, worked to death and half starved.
Those who were crippled or sick were shot. A further 5,000 Romanies were deported to Lodz where they were held in a separate area within the Lodz Ghetto. The conditions were appalling, and those who did survive were later deported from this ghetto to Chelmno extermination camp, where they were killed in gas vans.
In Romanes the Holocaust is O Baro Porrajmos, a very ugly and dark word which some do not like to say out loud. Its meaning is appropriate for the ugliest event in history … ‘great devouring of human life’ It can also mean ‘rape’ or ‘gaping’ as in shock or horror. The word Zigeuner is the German equivalent of ‘Gypsy’ and as the German Romani population calls itself Sinti this is preferred and more politically correct.
Eva Justin taking measurements for Robert Ritter's data. Romani inmates called her Loli Tschai which means 'red girl' because of her red hair.
The main picture is the haunting face of a young girl called Settela Steinbach, a Dutch born Sinti girl gazing through the door of a transport wagon that left Amsterdam on 19 May 1944 for Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. A journey to which she never returned.
The second picture is of some Romani girl twins. The Nazis liked to experiment on twins, many did not survive these horrific experiments.
The third picture shows a group of Romani children in one of the extermination camps.
 Romani Children stare out from behind a barbed wire fence.
A child lays dying in the ghetto.
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| For Further Information on the Holocaust Click on Links Below
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| Sachsenhausen
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Between 1936 and 1945 over 200,000 prisoners were kept at Sachsenhausen. At first these were mainly political prisoners or trade unionists. Later they were joined by groups which the Nazis decided were "inferior", including Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and religious leaders from Germany and the countries which had been occupied. Prisoners were marked with a triangle which identified why they were there, for example: black triangles for political dissidents, red triangles for communists, double yellow triangles (making a star) for Jews, pink triangles for homosexuals. Tens of thousands of prisoners died. Many died from hunger or disease. Many others were worked to death, or were murdered by the SS. Among the people who were brought to Sachsenhausen were those who were suspected of taking part in the attempt to assassinate Hitler on 20th July 1944.
In 1945 the war was going badly for the Nazis - Soviet soldiers were approaching Berlin. At the end of April that year the SS ordered the camp to be evacuated. Thousands of prisoners were sent on "death marches" to the Baltic Sea to the north. Many were put onto ships which were then sunk, drowning all of those on board. The intention was to kill all of the witnesses who knew what had happened in the camps. However, some sick prisoners (and some doctors) were still at the camp when it was liberated. Many of those who were liberated died soon afterwards, sometimes because their bodies could not adjust quickly to being fed properly.
Instead of destroying the camp or preserving it as a memorial, the Soviets decided to use Sachsenhausen as their own concentration camp. It was put under the control of the NKVD (the Soviet secret service). Former Nazi officials were imprisoned here, together with political prisoners. About 60,000 Germans were imprisoned here between 1945 and 1950, of whom over 12,000 died from hunger and disease. The camp was finally closed in March 1950, after which it was used by the East German army and police. In 1961 the site was turned into a National Memorial: at that time it was used by the communist regime as a symbol of the "victory of anti-fascism over fascism".
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the re-unification of Germany, Sachsenhausen has been administered by a public trust called the Brandenburg Memorials Foundation.
The entrance gate to the camp has the words "Arbeit macht frei", which means "hard work makes you free". These words were placed at the entrance of many of the German concentration camps. Of course the words were not true: however hard you worked while in the camp, you were not set free. The true policy was "Vernichtung durch Arbeit": extermination through work. New arrivals to the camp were greeted by SS guards with dogs and whips.
Entrance gate: "Arbeit macht frei"
The camp is surrounded by a wall, with an electric fence in front. Prisoners were not allowed to go near the wall: if they did, they were shot by a guard in one of the watch towers. Guards were rewarded for shooting prisoners, especially if they managed to kill with only one bullet.
 Watch tower
Prisoners forbidden
to approach the wall 
 Warning sign saying you will be shot dead
if you enter the zone
Prisoners lived in barracks such as the one below. Between November 1938 and October 1942, Barracks 38 and 39 were reserved for Jews. There is now a museum on this site, telling the story of the Jewish prisoners and showing what life was like here. November 1938 was the time of the Kristallnacht: the night of broken glass, when From October 1942, on the orders of Himmler, Jewish prisoners were sent to the death camps at Auschwitz.
The "Zellenbau" was a building within the concentration camp which was used as a prison. There were three wings to this building: only one of these remains today. It was used to punish anyone who broke the rules, and to hold important prisoners who had been arrested by the Gestapo. Torture and murder were common here. There is an exhibition inside.
 Barrack 38: Used to house Jewish prisoners
 This modern sign marks the entrance to the building used as a special prison by the Gestapo and SS camp authorities
The semi-circular open area inside the camp was the place where prisoners had to assemble twice or three times each day for the roll-call, to check that everybody was there. Prisoners were often forced to wait there for hours in the rain or cold: many suffered from frostbite. Gallows were placed at the side of this area: prisoners were executed here in front of the others.
Station Z was the location of the crematorium, where dead bodies were burnt. The letter "Z" was chosen because it is the last letter of the alphabet: it represents "the end". Local people used to complain about the foul smell of the thick black smoke from the crematorium. There were also extermination facilities here, where techniques for killing were developed. Ashes from the crematorium were buried next to the building. There is an execution trench here where people who were sentenced by the Nazi Special Courts (for example, resistance fighters) were shot and buried.
 Gallows: prisoners were hanged in front of
others during the roll-call
 Station Z: the site of the crematorium
and extermination facilities.
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| Holocaust In Schools Banned!
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A government study has revealed that schools in the UK are dropping the Holocaust from history lessons to avoid offending certain groups of pupils because teachers are reluctant to cover the Holocaust and the Nazi atrocities against Gypsies and Jews, etc., for fear of upsetting students whose beliefs include the denial of the Holocaust.
Did British schools ever teach this subject? Read more about it and view some videoes about the Holocaust in our forums here.
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