Porrajmos: The Romani and the Holocaust with Ian Hancock - Holocaust Living History

well first of all thank you very much for this invitation this opportunity to come to beautiful San Diego and talk to you it's not a very cheerful topic unfortunately I want to talk about the Holocaust of the Romani people and normally when I give talks I don't refer to my notes but in this instance I'm going to be referring to my notes because there's names and dates that I just cannot keep straight in my head and I want to have some time at the end to answer some of your questions usually although I speak to very many groups particularly Jewish groups about the Holocaust whenever I speak about that particular topic the when it's question time people want to know first of all well who exactly are Roma gypsies who are we talking about we see these shows on television and so on but we're not really sure who these people are very briefly Romani people are a people of Asian origin who came into Europe in the early Middle Ages and separated and spread out in all directions and so that today it is more accurate to talk about Romani people's for example one of the confusions is why say Roma and Sinti cyntia Roma but they are a separate division of Roma it's it would be a little bit like Ashkenazim and Sephardim both Jewish but distinct and it's sort of like that with us so more about that a bit later on what I want to get into is to understand why Hitler wanted to eradicate the Romani people and this immediately raises the question of terminology word holocaust gets used in my mind very freely it's applied to all kinds of situations I approach it as the implementation of the final solution which was a directive ordering the extermination of the Jewish people and the Romani people there were lots of populations groups victimized by the Nazis but no directive to exterminate and no directive to single out just two people's for what they were born and that's a distinction that I make and I see the implementation of this genocidal action in modern terms as a kind of ethnic cleansing because Hitler wanted to create a heaven folk a master race and in order to accomplish that he sought to eradicate what he saw as genetic contaminants in the Aryan gene pool and if we look at it from that perspective we can then see why another group that was selected for eradication the mentally and physically handicapped not a people as such but nevertheless people regarded as being genetically defective and therefore in need of eradication you could argue perhaps that targeting homosexuals may have fallen under this category of genetically imperfect people because if you look at the Nazi documentation the the male homosexual population was also regarded as somehow genetically imperfect that didn't extend to the homosexual female population and it wasn't a program of annihilation but still if we look at it in terms of cleaning up the gene pool then we can see a bigger picture the Romani people my people have never tried to take anybody else's land have never started a war have never been a political or an economic or a military threat to anybody and perhaps this is the difference between the rationale for targeting the Jews as opposed to targeting the Roma in the case of the Roma it was purely a racial motive Jews it was racial - they created a peculiar pseudoscience as most of you know measuring earlobes and nostrils and what have you there are some pictures on the table there of that kind of genetic science Jews were a threat in a great many other ways political and so on but for for my people it was none of that it was it was purely a racial issue for the Nazis the inventor of the term genocide Raphael Lemkin actually referred when he created the term he referred to the genocide of the Jews and the gypsies that's the word that mostly crops up even before the Holocaust was over he recognized that the Jews and Roma were being singled out for genocide but following the end of the Second World War there were no Roma who were able in a position either factually in a position or educationally in a position to speak out for what had happened no scholars it was just a terrible situation following the war for these survivors the Romani survivors and so very little made its way into the public knowledge about what had happened to the Roma in fact until as late as 1947 there were some Roma particularly cinta Roma who stayed hidden in the abandoned concentration camps fearing arrest because the pre-war laws against Roma was still in effect and if you had no papers no proof of citizenship and so on you were liable for arrest and and so even as late as that Roma were still keeping a very low profile and it's only been in the past 10 or 20 years that the scholarship has really begun to focus on the other group targeted for genocide the Roma to understand then why this attitude this this disdain for the Romani people existed in the minds of the Nazis we have to go back a very long way we have to go back to the beginning of the arrival of Roma in Europe particularly northern Europe various groups came across from Anatolia from the Byzantine Empire which had now become the Ottoman Empire and the Roma when they arrived in the south of Europe were initially confused with the Ottoman Turks representing the Islamic threat to the Christian world the southern Europeans of course realized very quickly that the aroma were not Turks they weren't Muslims they didn't speak Turkish but when that population moved further north into german-speaking Europe nobody had seen a Turk and when the dark-skinned Roma showed up they were assumed to be Turks or spies for the Turks and laws began to be instituted even in the 1400s and they were pretty harsh laws they they mostly forbade Roma from stopping from taking up residence and forced that forced them to keep on the move and those laws have gone on ever since if you one of my books or book with my essays in called danger educated gypsy there's a chapter in there about the relationship in this country between law enforcement and the Romani American population and there are a lot of American laws again Roma believe it or not the last of which we managed to have taken off the books in 1998 in New Jersey and although you could say well these are old laws surely and they go back a long way they go back even to colonial times but they are as new as the most recent time that they were used and they have been used up into the 1990s to keep Roma out of this or that County or even state so we find the beginnings of the antagonism going back for centuries and we could add other factors to the Romani culture is shielded from non-roma we have a word for people who are not Roma which is gaji and with cultural beliefs inherited from Asia in place in conservative Romani culture we regard non Romani people as not physically unclean but spiritually unclean in order to live as a Romani person you have to obey certain rules you have to prepare food in a certain way wash things in a certain way and the outside world is seen as dangerous and polluting and of course if you keep people at a distance because of this you're not making friends you're inviting suspicion this is another ingredient in the anti ism that is developing we also have the association in the medieval Christian dogma between lightness and purity and darkness and sin and we rely on medieval church records a lot this is one of the places that actually kept written records for our evidence of the presence of Roma in different parts of Europe and and so often the descriptions relate the dark skin the dark hair with sin and dirt so another another factor the fact of not having a country the fact of being an internal outsider a stranger always wherever you are we saw this in the 90s in the Balkan wars when the ex yugoslavia was breaking up we have Serbia Bosnia Croatia and so on and each one kicking out non ethnics if you're a Bosnian in Croatia go to Bosnia get out of here if you're a Croatian in Serbia go to Croatia get out of here but if you were a ROM where do you go there is no no place to go so all of these things together over centuries have culminated in an overall suspicion and fear of Roma there is of course the other aspect the romantic one the Esmerelda and Carmen but that's fiction the reality is much more horrible I just got back from Slovakia last week I went there for the State Department to monitor the racism there and it's it is horrible and it's getting worse it has to be addressed in the case of the german-speaking parts of Europe then we can go back to and this is where I start looking at dates and names we can go back to 1416 the very first and anti Romani law was issued when they were accused of being foreign spies they were also accused of bringing the plague into Europe in 1500 Maximilian the first ordered all Saguna that's the word in German for for Roma to be out of Germany they had to leave before Easter there were expulsion and extermination orders in 1566 and in 1659 the mass murder of Rama knees took place in Noyd off in 1710 Frederick the first of Prussia condemned all male Roma to forced labor and had the women whipped and branded and their children permanently removed and in 1721 Emperor Karl d6 ordered the extermination of all Rama knees two hundred and twenty years before the same directive was issued by Hitler in 1725 Friedrich Wilhelm the first condemned all those 18 years and older to be hanged by the end of the 18th century anti Romani racism had received establishment sanction from the church and the Academy after Heinrich krelman published his treatise demonstrating their Asian origin and he wrote that in studying Romani see felt and I'm quoting a clear repugnancy like a biologist dissecting some nauseating crawling thing in the interests of science this was echoed in the words of the Lutheran minister Martinez Sybil who said JYP's is in a well-ordered state in the present day are like vermin on an animal's body acknowledgement of the physical and social differences of the Romneys was being increasingly incorporated into german scholarly and ecclesiastical attitudes simples statement is significant in two ways first of all he is contrasting the Romani way of living with an with a well-ordered state ie a country with boundaries and a government and so on very important in a country where ethnic nationalism is so important this is something that my American students still have a hard time understanding how important this is for European countries where you may be a national but if you run an ethnic as well you're still somehow an outsider an example would be the two million or more Romanian citizens of Hungarian descent families have been there for generations but they're not regarded as real Romanians regardless of their citizenship because they have a different ethnicity and so Sybil is referring to this idea of not having your own state and then his other the other part of his comment was the reference to Furman if we come ahead in time and look at Nazi propaganda to desensitize the general population to what was coming the first thing you do is strip the humanity from the targeted population they're not people anymore they're vermin they're diseases something that ought to be gotten rid of so we get this language back then in his influential treatise gobino argued that human beings could be ranked into higher and lower races with the white Aryans and particularly the Nordic people within them placed at the very top and I quote Aryans with a cream of mankind and the Germans the cream of the cream a race of princes that's where that phrase cream of the cream comes from this had particular impact upon the development of German philosophical and political thinking in 1863 Richard Lee Beck wrote about the quote criminal practices of the Romneys and described them as Lives unworthy of life the first use of a phrase which was repeated in 1869 in an essay on Romney's by Kulemin and which was later to have ominous significance lives unworthy of life laden some virata's laden the opinions of these scholars were having repercussions at the highest administrative levels for just one year later on November the 18th 1870 Imperial Chancellor Otto von Bismarck circulated a brief demanding quote the complete prohibition of foreign gypsies crossing the German border and which stated further that when arrested they were to be transported by the closest route to their country of origin when Alsace and Lorraine were annexed by the German Empire in 1871 each was made responsible for the control of Romney's at the borders into other areas of the new Reich Charles Darwin also writing in 1871 used racist language in referring to quote the uniform appearance in various parts of the world of gypsies and Jews which contrasts sharp plea with all the virtues represented by the territorially settled and culturally advanced Nordic Aryan races once again that reference to having a country that's the bottom line here and of course Jews and Roma also non territorial and also non European in origin that's a reason why the two populations are so often treated together basing his ideas on Darwin Cesare Lombroso published his influential work Roma deliquent a the criminal man in 1876 which contained a lengthy chapter on the genetically criminal character of the Romneys whom he described as quote a living example of a whole race of criminals this was later translated into German and had a profound effect upon German legal attitudes in 1890 the Schwabe in Parliament organized a conference on the Sugoi nagesh mice that means gypsy scum and suggested means by which the presence of Romneys could be signaled by ringing church bells the military was also empowered to apprehend and move Romneys on under the directorship of alfred Dillman the Bavarian police established the central office for fighting the gypsy nuisance in Munich in March 1899 relevant documents began to be collected particularly those pertaining to legislation and criminality and compiled into Dillman's Saguna bull in which romney's were described as quote a pest against which society must unflagging ly defend itself and special instructions were issued to the police by the Prussian government to quote combat the gypsy nuisance the crimes listed in Dillman's book consisted overwhelmingly of trespassing and stealing food one year later a policy statement from the House of Commons in Vienna capital of the austro-german alliance was sent to the ministers of the interior defense and justice quote concerning measures to reduce and eliminate the gypsy population I'll say a bit more about the crimes in its egoyan book this is a book in three parts the first part is this lengthy essay warning the German people to protect itself from race-mixing the largest part of the book is a register each different German land the police department in each land had to compile a register over the following five years submit them to Dillman and they were all compiled into a long register of individuals their names their family connections their relatives and their criminal record if they had one and then the third part of the book is mug shots photographs if you analyze the crimes they were as I said mostly trespass and the theft of food but if you put that in the context of the times where Roma were not being allowed to stop anywhere and we're not being served by shopkeepers then the trespass and stealing food mostly from farms makes sense but it's still criminal activity under the directorship of Dillman now I've read that part using lyrics phrase in the title of their book the lives I'm worthy of life psychiatrist Carl bending and magistrate alfred hawker argued in 1924 the euthanizing of those who were ballast exists ensign deadweight in humanity three populations were considered those with gross physical disfigurements those carrying hereditary diseases and those in comas considered unlikely to recover remedies belong to the second category they're genetically transmitted disease being criminality this rationalized the quote prevented prevented detention of Romneys in Vemma Germany and was clearly racial even if one had not committed a crime one was likely to do so eventually because criminality was a genetic ie a racial characteristic by 1922 all Romani Xin Barden were to be photographed and fingerprinted the bavarian parliament issued a new law to combat gypsies nomads and idlers and the provincial criminal commission endorsed another dated July the 16th 1926 aimed at controlling the Saguna plug at the gypsy plague by 1927 legislation requiring the photographing and fingerprinting of Romani's had been introduced in prussia where eight thousand were processed in this way bavaria instituted laws forbidding any to travel in family groups or to own firearms those over 16 were liable for incarceration in work camps while those without proof of Bavarian birth began to be expelled from Germany in further direct violation of the vemma Constitution which guaranteed equal rights for all citizens after April at 12 1928 Romani's in Germany were placed and a permanent police surveillance and in the same year professor Hans Gunther that quote it was the gypsies who introduced foreign blood into Europe on April 16th 1929 the Munich bureau's National Centre jointly established a division of Romani Affairs with the International criminology Bureau that was Interpol working closely together they enforced restrictions on travel for all Romneys who didn't have documents and imposed up to two years detention in rehabilitation camps upon those 16 years of age or older on January the 20th 1933 officials in Burgenland called for the withdrawal of all civil rights from Romneys in May a law was passed was introduced to legalize eugenic sterilization on July the 14th Hitler's cabinet passed a law against the propagation of lives unworthy of life that very same phrase it was called the law for the Prevention of hereditarily diseased offspring and ordered sterilization for certain categories of people specifically and I'm quoting gypsies and most of the Germans of black color this is a population that doesn't get much acknowledgement because actually they were almost all eradicated before 1939 but by by the 1930s there was a substantial but small population of Afro Europeans they for the most part resulted from unions between the African troops that the French had brought in during the first world war and European women German women and for the most part they were easily identifiable and I think they're about 6,000 of them but they they were taken out pretty pretty soon I've had survivors come up and tell me that they remember in the 30s how they were afro Germans and then suddenly there weren't any almost overnight other 1933 laws to prevent offspring with hereditary defects and the reform of habitual criminals and social deviants directly targeted remedies from January 1934 onwards they were being selected for transfer to camps at Dachau diesel starza zaxon house and Mattson and fen housing for processing which included sterilization by injection and castration to laws issued in Nuremberg in July forbade Germans from marrying Jews Negroes and gypsies starting on September the 15th 1935 Romneys became subject to the restrictions of the nuremberg law for the protection of blood and honour which forbade into marriage or sexual relationships between Aryan and non Aryan people it's called the law for marriage health the telling policy statement issued by the Nazi Party read quote in Europe generally only Jews and gypsies come under consideration as members of an alien people the earliest Nazi document referring to the introduction of the total solution of the gypsy problem on either a national or an international level and a quote was drafted under the direction of state secretary Hans partner of the Rice Ministry of the Interior in March 1936 in June and July several hundred were transported to Dachau by order of the Minister of the Interior as dependents of the Munich Bureau of gypsy affairs and in this year dr. Hans globe Kerr head of service at the Ministry of the Interior for the Third Reich who served on the panel on racial laws declared that in Europe quote only Jews and gypsies are of foreign blood and race hygienist dr. Robert curva wrote in an essay entitled Falk winced at that quote the Jews and the gypsies are today remote from us because of their Asiatic ancestry just as ours is Nordic this sentiment was reiterated by dr. Brandis who wrote that besides the Jews only the gypsies are to be considered as an alien people in Europe German Roma phobia became transnational when Interpol established the International Centre for combating the gypsy Menace formerly the Bureau of gypsy Affairs the main Nazi institution to deal with Romneys the racial hygiene and population biology and research unit of the Ministry of Health was established under the directorship of dr. Robert Ritter at Berlin dalam the express purpose of which was to determine whether the Romani people were Aryans or subhumans want to mention in Berlin Rama knees were cleared off the streets away from public view because of the upcoming Olympic Games and placed in a toxic waste dump pamphlets were distributed to those attending the games promoting antigypsyism among the general public in his address to the German Association for racial research dr. Adolf vote of the racial hygiene Research Unit said quote the question is a racial question for us today in the same way as the national socialist state has solved the Jewish Question it will also have to settle the gypsy question once and for all the race biological research on gypsies is an unconditional prerequisite for the final solution of the gypsy question end of quote this was further supported by dr. Kurt Amin who stated that the Nazi policy quote views the gypsy problem as being foremost a racial one Himmler thereafter put groups of Romneys at this disposal of a team of doctors for experiments and sterilization techniques ironically the more Romani ancestry an individual had the less threatening he was seen to be him was suggestion that a number of quotes pure remedies be exempt and subject to quote the law for the protection of historic monuments for future anthropologists to study was mocked and never implemented an order released on December the 14th stated that persons could be incarcerated on the grounds of their being inherently as well as habitually criminal ie whether they were actually engaged in criminal activity or not depending upon genetic makeup and potential threat to Aryan security by the end of this year large-scale roundups of romney's had begun at Buchenwald a special camp for Romneys was set up and Romney's were incarcerated in camps in not wreak Nazi controlled territories throughout Europe 400 were sent to Talca others to Mauthausen Goosen doubt Meaghan natzweiler-struthof flossenbürg South's FET Rothenberg Dusseldorf Luckenbach Vesta Bach Moline and elsewhere from 1937 onwards the vert marked High Command began issuing decrees ordering the exclusion of all Romneys from military service for reasons of racial policy in March 1938 Romney's were prohibited from voting and in that same month letter to the Imperial leader of the SS from dr. Varna best who was head of the Nazi security police addressed the quote initiation of the final solution to the Gypsy problem from a racial point of view the first official publicly posted statement to refer to the final solution of the gypsy question in Google is indeed Saguna Fraga was also issued at that time signed by Himmler who also ordered the Bureau Bureau of Romani affairs to be moved from Munich to Berlin between June the 12th and the 18th gypsy cleanup week see going to our Fleming's Walker was in effect and hundreds throughout Germany and Austria were rounded up and incarcerated in man vote 300 Romani farmers and vineyard owners were arrested in a single night in a parallel development to the 1938 Jewish explosions ramaa knees were expelled from the left bank of the Rhine in August in that month - Karl Hahnemann wrote that rats bed bugs and fleas are also natural occurrences in the same way as Jews and gypsies all existence is a struggle we must therefore gradually biologically eradicate all these vermin after September the 4th Romney children were forbidden to attend school 1938 a significant year because it was also the year of Kristallnacht and both of those events the cleanup week and the Kristallnacht sent a very clear message to the general public because it was the police who were brutalizing Jews and Roma and the police are the ones who are supposed to protect us but if the police could do it openly it meant that it was ok individuals were categorized by percentage of Romani ancestry if two of one's eight great-grandparents were even part Romani that individual had too much quote gypsy blood to be allowed later to live these criteria were twice as strict as those applying to Jews if the criteria for determining Jewishness have been applied to Romneys some 18,000 would have escaped death Romany women married to non Romani non Romani men and and children over the age of 13 were sent to Dusseldorf leerin felt to be sterilized 5000 German Romneys were concentrated in the Gypsy section of the concentration camp at edge on December the 8th 9 18:38 Hitler signed a new order based upon the findings of the Office of racial hygiene which are determined that Romani blood was very dangerous to Aryan purity dr. Tobias pochi area commander in Styria wrote in a memorandum to Hitler's Chancellery that quote gypsies placed the purity of the blood of German peasantry in peril and recommended mass sterilization as a solution on March the 1st 1939 the order for the implementation of the Reich Criminal Police Department was issued that stated quote the decree of the reichsfuhrer SS of August 12 1938 orders the registration of persons living in the Reich territory who count as gypsies once it has been established how many there are in the Reich territory further measures can be taken and instructions for carrying out those orders were issued in March stating 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 and the prevention of racial mixing every Police Headquarters were set up to a unit to monitor Romani matters and one or more persons were to be permanently responsible for Rama knees according to the minutes of a meeting organized by Heydrich on September the 27th Hitler instructed the German Romneys and Jews Romneys and Jews were to be moved by rail into Poland that order came on October the 16th quote with regard to the transportation of the gypsies we advise that the first transport of Jews is leaving Vienna on Friday 20th of October 1939 and for wagons of gypsies are to be added to that transport in December Hitler issued a new decree regarding these transportations forbidding all quote gypsies and part gypsies not already in camps for moving out of their area and trains were subsequently reported moving east packed with gypsies dr. Johannes parent of the office of racial hygiene issued the statement that quote all gypsies should be treated 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 end of quote justice reichsminister Tirek would later write to Borman that he quote intended to make the reichsfuhrer SS responsible for the prosecution of poles Russians Jews and Gypsies poles and Russians can only be prosecuted by the police if they lived in the area of the former polish state prior to September the first prosecution proceedings against Jews and gypsies however should be taken without observing these reservations the first mass genocide action of the Holocaust took place in January of February in 1940 when 250 Romani children in the concentration camp at Buchan vote were used as guinea pigs for testing the gas cyclone Bay later used for mass killings at Auschwitz Birkenau Nazis in Alsace complied with an order to round up the Jews in the gypsies in this year Nazi statisticians vessel and Hecht estimated that 100,000 gypsies and others were scheduled for deportation to Poland and were shipped between May the 15th and the 18th a memorandum from Leonardo Conte Secretary of State for health in the Ministry of the Interior to the main office of the secretary security police and the Reich's Health Department red it is known that the lives of Romneys and part Romneys are to be regulated by a gypsy law Saguna gazettes I firmly believe now as before that the final solution of the gypsy problem can only be achieved through the sterilization of full and part Romani's I think that the time for a legal resolution of these problems is over and that we must immediately try to sterilize the Romneys and part Romney's as a special measure using analogous precedence once sterilization is completed and these people are rendered biologically harmless it is of no great consequence whether they are expelled or used as labor on the home front on May the 18th remedies were deported from seven assembly centers in the old Reich to Lublin located in the general government the first transport included 2,500 German Romney's selected his full families wherever possible the transport included 1000 from Hamburg and Bremen 1000 from cologne düsseldorf and Hannover and 500 from Stuttgart in a speech delivered on February 29th to top-level Nazi Party officials Himmler said quote the gypsies are a question in themselves I want to be rid of them this year if it is at all possible there are only 30,000 of them in the entire Reich but they do great racial damage on April 27th the joint order from the Nazi headquarters and the Chief of Police stated that quote the first transport of gypsies to the general government will leave in the middle of May the following day reinhard heydrich chief of the reich security main office sent out more precise instructions to chiefs of police and district governors in germany in the so called oom seedlings cellars for the resettlement arrest and deportation of Romneys above the age of 17 an ordinance dated February 11th 1941 forbade gypsies and part gypsies from serving in the German army on the grounds of racial policy on July the 31st Heydrich who had been entrusted with the details of the final solution included Romanus together with Jews quote the einsatzkommando is received the order to kill all Jews Gypsies and mental patients end of quote I'm skipping some of this if you if you want full of detail you can certainly have copies of this paper but it's just dates and incidence one after the other I should read the the more significant ones in early 1942 Romney's were selected for experimentation at Dachau and Buchenwald by dr. Adolf Pokorny to see how long they could survive on seawater claiming that they must not only be conquered but exterminated also Nazi death squads entered Greece in June murdering hundreds of Romneys in Serbia military governor Harold Toma announced prematurely that quote Serbia is the only country in which the Jewish Question and the question have been resolved warning quote that one must not forget that the Jews and the gypsies generally constitute a threat to security and as such posed a threat to peace and public order is the Jewish nature which is responsible for this war and as for the Gypsy by his nature he can never be a useful member of international society in Greece fifty remedies were murdered for each German casualty in Croatia between 80,000 and 100,000 Romneys are estimated to have perished at the hands of the Ustasha mostly at the SN Ovitz camp on may the 14th 1948 of foreign affairs in Italy issued bulletin number ser 27 869 which read quote official recognition of gypsy residence in Germany in the same way as Jews for your information we have the pleasure of communicating to you that the Reich's ambassador of Berlin has officially recognized gypsy residence in the Reich as the same as Jews and therefore current anti-semitic laws will be effective in their case as well gypsies are considered gypsies not only with a hundred percent gypsy blood but so those that have only some gypsy blood on July the 31st the ministry of the eastern occupied territories reaffirmed to the SS and police leaders in riga the order that quote the treatment of both jews and Rama knees was to be placed on equal footing Rama knees were being exterminated at Maidan ik Bell said Sanok Sobibor hell no and Treblinka in Bucharest a policy statement that for romain for Romania the Gypsy question is as important as the Jewish was published in the minutes of September the 14th meeting justice minister otto tarik proposed that quote Jews and gypsies should be unconditionally exterminated a memo signed by Hitler Himmler requested data on Romani populations in Britain in anticipation of the eventual takeover of that country in January 1943 the president of the National Criminal Police Association issued the following statement quote political preventive custody can be ordered to stop any further children of mixed blood issuing from the willful continuation of sexual union between gypsies and gypsies of mixed race and those of German blood and a quote in February the remaining Romani's were transported to Birkenau the largest transport ever of Polish Romneys was brought to the same camp in March and exterminated within the first month Dutch Romani's began being transported to Auschwitz as well a party bulletin entitled maintenance of the race and the genotype in German law stated that quote gypsies are a foreign blood pursuant to German racial legislation the political biological cultural and vocational separation from the German race has now been effected by means of the elimination of those of foreign blood in the same way as was done for the Jews in his memoirs SS officer Perry Broad who worked in the political division at Auschwitz wrote that quote it is the will of the all-powerful reichsfuhrer Hitler to have the gypsies disappear from the face of the earth Jiri it reiterated this elsewhere saying the central office knew it was Hitler's aim to wipe out all the gypsies without exception Ava you Steen's book dealing with Romani children appeared in 1944 in it she expressed the hope that it would serve as a basis for future race hygiene laws regulating such unworthy primitive elements in May when she had finished studying the children they were all sent to Auschwitz and were killed there I should say something about Ava used in one of the pictures on the table is of her she worked for Ritter and she had red hair and pretended to be a friend to the Roma but she was really gathering information for the party she would tell the Roma that they and their families were likely to be arrested so would they please tell her where all the relatives live so she could go and warn them and then she would turn that information over but she did such a good job of gaining their confidence that because of her red hair they had given her a nickname Lolita which means red-haired lady but she really did that and her dissertation we have a copy of it in the archives we also have the Sugoi book in the archives in Austin a dissertation on the backwardness of Romani children compared with the white children in school in the early morning hours of August the second and third 20900 Romney's at auschwitz-birkenau were killed and cremated in one mass action referred to as seagoing enacted on September 26 a further 200 Romani's mostly children were shipped to Auschwitz from Buchenwald and gassed two weeks later another survivor sometime ago came and told me afterwards he survived Auschwitz and he said he remembered see going in AK nacht and the greasy black smoke that hung over the camp from from the bodies that have been put into the ovens that the Roma not one Romani was called to testify on behalf of his own people at the Nuremberg trials that began in October 1945 current estimates now indicate that between one and a half a half a one and a half million Romney's died during the period 1933 to 1945 if this estimate is correct between 50 and 75 percent of the entire Romani population in Nazi controlled Europe had perished at the hands of the Nazis victims of racially motive motivated genocidal policy at the Nuremberg military tribunals in September 1947 former SS General Otto Ohlendorf told presiding judge Michaelmas mano that in the killing campaigns quote there was no difference between gypsies and Jews despite the overwhelming documentary evidence to the contrary in 1951 the votin Book Ministry of the Interior in Germany issued a statement that judges hearing restitution claims should bear in mind that quote gypsies were persecuted under the National Socialist regime not for any racial reason but because of a social and criminal record it's clear from quotes are given you today that race was front and center but there were no Roma speaking out at this time members of the shattered post-war remnants of the surviving Romani population lacked the wherewithal legally to challenge the statement and no outside agency came forward to take up the Romani case a report was issued by the German Ministry of Finance in 1986 which concluded that quote all those victimized by Nazism have been adequately compensated the circle of those deserving compensation need not be extended any further two years later in February the East German government announced its resolution to pay a hundred million dollars in war crimes reparations to Jewish survivors but refused to pay anything to Romani survivors finally on April the 12th 1990 the East German government released a statement apologizing for the quote immeasurable sorrow the National Socialist regime had inflicted upon its victims including Romney's but quote while the world celebrates the changes in Eastern Europe the traditional gypsy role of scapegoat is already being resurrected in countries like Romania and Hungary collective rights for minorities such as gypsies remain as elusive as ever thank you

Channel: University of California Television (UCTV)

Views: 34,178

Rating: 4.8242679 out of 5

Keywords: Romanies, holocaust, Porrajmos, Ian Hancock, Romani, Roma, Holocaust Living History Workshop

Id: tAEJb-p6SOE

Length: 57min 25sec (3445 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 15 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/nashef]

I don't understand why it has to be "raising awareness" as opposed to simply history education.

Regardless, a pretty good talk.

[u/[deleted]]

Interestingly, Hitler only had a problem with the gypsy travellers. He explicitly stated to leave the settled Romani alone, and also to leave "pure Romani" alone.

He complained about the gypsy travellers causing trouble to the German peasants, and that's why he wanted to get rid of them.

[u/--_-_-_-_-_-_-_--]

Sorry but you cant use the word Holocaust^TM for the Romani otherwise youre an anti-semite^TM