O Porrajmos: The Romani
Holocaust
Ian Hancock
To understand why Hitler sought to eradicate the Romanies, a people who presented no problem numerically, politically, militarily or economically, one must interpret the underlying rationale of the holocaust as being his attempt to create a superior Germanic population, a Master Race, by eliminating what he viewed as genetic pollutants in the Nordic gene pool, and why he believed that Romanies constituted such contamination. The holocaust itself was the implementation of his Final Solution, the genocidal program intended to accomplish this vision of ethnic cleansing. Just two “racial” populations defined by what they were born were thus targeted: the Jews and the Romanies1 . The very inventor of the term, Raphael Lemkin, referred to the genocide of the “gypsies” even before the Second World War was over2 .
It is also essential to place the holocaust of the Romanies3 in its historical context. For perhaps most Romanies today it lacks the special place it holds for Jews, being seen as just one more hate-motivated crisis— albeit an overwhelmingly terrible one—in their overall European experience. Others refuse to speak about it because of its association with death and misfortune, or to testify or accept reparation for the same reason.
The first German anti-Romani law was issued
in 1416 when they were accused of being foreign spies, carriers of the plague, and traitors to Christendom;
In 1500 Maximilian I ordered all to be out of Germany by Easter; Ferdinand I enforced expulsion and extermination orders in 1566;
In 1659 the mass murder of Romanies took place in Neudorf;
In 1710 Frederick I of Prussia condemned all males to forced labor, had the women whipped and branded, and their children permanently removed;
In 1721, Emperor Karl VI ordered the extermination of all Romanies, 220 | 2 years before the same directive was issued by Hitler;
In 1725, Friedrich Wilhelm I 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 Grellmann published his treatise demonstrating their Asian origin. He wrote that in studying Romanies he felt a “clear repugnancy, like a biologist dissecting some nauseating, crawling thing in the interests of science,”4echoed in the words of the Lutheran minister Martinus Zippel: “Gypsies in a well-ordered state in the present day are like vermin on an animal’s body.”5 Acknowledgement of the physical and social differences of the Romanies was being increasingly incorporated into German scholarly and ecclesiastical attitudes.
In 1808 Johann Fichte wrote that the German “race” had been selected by God himself for preeminence among the world’s peoples;6 two years later, the German nationalist Jahn wrote that “a state without Volk is a soulless artifice, while a Volk without a state is nothing, a bodiless, airless phantom, like the Gypsies and the Jews;”7 the fact of non-territoriality marked both Romanies and Jews as asocials, populations who didn’t fit in;
In 1830, using the same techniques employed in the previous century, the Nordhausen city council attempted to bring about the eventual eradication of the Romani population by taking children away from their parents for permanent placement with German families; In 1835, Theodor Tetzner called Romanies “the excrement of humanity.”8 Robert Knox described them as the “refuse of the human race.”9
In his influential 1855 treatise Gobineau 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: “Aryans were the cream of mankind,” he believed, “and the Germans, the cream of the cream—a race of princes.” This had particular impact upon the development of German philosophical and political thinking;
In 1863, Richard Liebich wrote about the “criminal practices” of the Romanies,11 and described them as lives unworthy of life, the first use of a phrase which was repeated in 1869 in an essay on Romanies by Kulemann, and which was later to have ominous significance.
The opinions of these scholars were having repercussions at the highest administrative levels for, just one year later, on November 18th, 1870, | 3 Imperial Chancellor Otto von Bismarck circulated a brief demanding 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 Romanies at the borders into other areas of the new Reich;
Charles Darwin, also writing in 1871, used racist language in referring to “the uniform appearance in various parts of the world of Gypsies and Jews . . . which contrast[s] sharply with all the virtues represented by the territorially settled and culturally advanced Nordic Aryan race;”
Basing his ideas on Darwin, Cesare Lombroso published his influential work L’Uomo Deliquente in 1876, which contained a lengthy chapter on the genetically criminal character of the Romanies, whom he described as “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 or 1891 the Swabian parliament organized a conference on the “Gypsy Scum” (Zigeunergeschmeiß) and suggested means by which the presence of Romanies could be signaled by ringing church bells. The military was also empowered to apprehend and move Romanies on.
Under the directorship of Alfred Dillmann 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 Dillmann’s Zigeunerbuch, in which Romanies were described as “a pest against which society must unflaggingly defend itself,”15 and special instructions were issued to the police by the Prussian government to “combat the Gypsy nuisance.” The crimes listed in Dillmann’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 AustroGerman Alliance, was sent to the Ministers of the Interior, Defense and Justice “concerning measures to reduce and eliminate the Gypsy population” (emphasis added).
Using Liebich’s phrase in the title of their book,16 psychiatrist Karl Binding and magistrate Alfred Hoche argued in 1920 for the euthanizing of those who were “Ballastexistenzen,” dead weight within humanity. Three populations were considered: those with gross physical disfigurements, those carrying hereditary diseases, and those in comas considered unlikely to recover. Romanies belonged to the second category, their genetically-transmitted disease being criminality; this rationalized the “preventative detention” of Romanies in Weimar 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, | 4 i.e. racial, characteristic;
By 1922 all Romanies in Baden 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 16 1926 aimed at controlling the “Gypsy Plague;”
By 1927 legislation requiring the photographing and fingerprinting of Romanies 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 sixteen 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 Weimar Constitution—which guaranteed equal rights for all citizens—after April 12 1928 Romanies in Germany were placed under permanent police surveillance. In the same year, Professor Hans F. Günther wrote that “it was the Gypsies who introduced foreign blood into Europe.”1
On April 16-17 1929, the Munich Bureau’s National Center jointly established a Division of Romani Affairs with the International Criminology Bureau (Interpol) in Vienna. Working closely together, they enforce restrictions on travel for all Romanies without documents, and impose up to two years’ detention in “rehabilitation camps” upon those sixteen years of age or older.
On January 20 1933 officials in Burgenland called for the withdrawal of all civil rights from Romanies; in May a law was introduced to legalize eugenic sterilization. On July 14, Hitler’s cabinet passed a law against the propagation of “lives not worthy of life” (Lebensunwertesleben) called “the law for the prevention of hereditarily diseased offspring.” It ordered sterilization for certain categories of people, “specifically Gypsies and most of the Germans of black colour” (i.e. the Afro-Europeans resulting from liaisons with African troops during the First World War). Other laws issued in the same year that were intended to ‘Prevent Offspring with Hereditary Defects’ and for ‘the Reform of Habitual Criminals and Social Deviants,’ directly targeted Roma.
From January 1934 onwards they were being selected for transfer to camps at Dachau, Dieselstrasse, Sachsenhausen, Marzahn and Vennhausen for processing, which included sterilization by injection or castration. Two laws issued in Nuremburg in July forbade Germans from marrying “Jews, Negroes, and Gypsies.”
Starting on September 15 1935 Romanies became subject to the restrictions of the Nuremberg Law for the Protection of Blood and Honor, which forbade intermarriage or sexual relationships between Aryan and non-Aryan peoples (“ The Law for Marriage Health”). A telling policy statement issued by the Nazi Party read “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 | 5 problem on either a national or an international level” was drafted under the direction of State Secretary Hans Pfundtner of the Reichs 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).” In this year Dr. Hans Globke, 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, only Jews and Gypsies are of foreign blood,” and race-hygienist Dr. Robert Körber wrote in an essay entitled “Volk und Staat” that “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. E. Brandis in the same year, when he wrote that besides the Jews “only the Gypsies are to be considered as an alien people in Europe.”20 German romaphobia became transnational when Interpol established the International Center for Combating the Gypsy Menace, formerly the Bureau of Gypsy Affairs.
The main Nazi institution to deal with Romanies, 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-Dahlem, the expressed purpose of which was to determine whether the Romani people were Aryans or subhumans (“Untermenschen”).
In Berlin, Romanies 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.
From 1937 onwards the Wehrmacht High Command began issuing decrees ordering the exclusion of all Romanies from military service for reasons of “racial policy”.
In his 1938 address to The German Association for Racial Research, Dr. Adolph Würth of the Racial Hygiene Research Unit said “the Gypsy 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.” This was further supported by Dr. Kurt Ammon, who stated that the Nazi policy “views the Gypsy problem as being foremost a racial one.” Himmler thereafter put groups of Romanies at the disposal of a team of doctors for experiments on sterilization techniques. Ironically, the more Romani ancestry an individual had, the less threatening he was seen to be. Himmler’s suggestion that a number of “pure” Romanies be exempt and subject to the “law for the protection of historic monuments” for future anthropologists to study was mocked, and never implemented.
In March 1938 Romanies were prohibited from voting, and in that same month a letter to the “Imperial Leader of the SS” from Dr. Werner Best, Head of the Nazi Security Police addressed the “initiat[ion of the] Final Solution to the Gypsy problem from a racial point of view.”
The first official publicly-posted Party statement to refer to the Final Solution of the Gypsy question (endgültige Lösung der Zigeunerfrage) was also issued at that time signed by Himmler, | 6 who also ordered the Bureau of Romani Affairs to be moved from Munich to Berlin.
Between June 12-18 1938 “Gypsy clean-up week” (Zigeuneraufräumingswoche, in French la Semaine d’Epurations des Tsiganes) was in effect, and hundreds throughout Germany and Austria were rounded up and incarcerated;23 in Mannworth three hundred Romani farmers and vineyard owners were arrested in a single night. In a parallel development to the 1938 Jewish expulsions, Romanies were expelled from the left bank of the Rhine in August. In that month too one Dr. Karl Hannermann wrote that “Rats, bedbugs 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.”24 After September 4 Romani children were forbidden to attend school.
On December 8 1938 Himmler signed a new order based upon the findings of the Office of Racial Hygiene, which had determined that Romani blood was “very dangerous” to Aryan purity. Dr. Tobias Portschy, Area Commander in Styria, wrote in a memorandum to Hitler’s Chancellery that “Gypsies place the purity of the blood of German peasantry in peril,”26 and recommended mass sterilization as a solution.
An order released on December 14 1938 stated that persons could be incarcerated on the grounds of their being inherently, as well as habitually, criminal, i.e. 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 Romanies had begun. At Buchenwald, a special camp for “pure” Romanies was set up, and Romanies were incarcerated in camps in Nazi-controlled territories throughout Europe. Four hundred were sent to Taucha, others to Mauthausen, Gusen, Dautmergen, Natzweiler, Stutthoff, Flossenberg, Salzwed, Ravensbrück, Dusseldorf, Lackenbach, Westerbork, Malines and elsewhere. Individuals were categorized by percentage of Romani ancestry; if two of one’s eight greatgrandparents were even part-Romani, that individual had too much “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 had been applied to Romanies, some 18,000 would have escaped death (18,000 was also the total number of Romanies in Germany at the time).25 Romani women married to non-Romanies and children over the age of 13 were sent to Dusseldorf-Lierenfeld to be sterilized. Five thousand German Romanies were concentrated in the Gypsy Section of the concentration camp at Łodź.
On March 1 1939 the Order for the Implementation of the Reich Criminal Police Department was issued, that stated “The decree of the Reichsführer 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.”27 Instructions for carrying out these orders were also 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, then the prevention of racial mixing.” Every police headquarters was to set up a unit to monitor Romani matters, and one or more persons were to be permanently responsible for Romanies.
According to the minutes of a meeting organized by Heydrich on September 27 1939, Hitler instructed that German Romanies and Jews were to be moved by rail into Poland. That order came on October 16: “With regard to the transportation of the Gypsies, we advise that the first transport of Jews is leaving Vienna on Friday, 20 October 1939; four wagons of Gypsies are to be added to that transport.”28 This may not have taken place, but in December Hitler issued a new decree regarding these transportations, forbidding all “Gypsies and part-Gypsies” not already in camps from moving out of their areas, and trains were subsequently reported moving east “packed with Gypsies.”
In 1939 Dr. Johannes Behrendt of the Office of Racial Hygiene issued the statement that “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.”29 Justice ReichsMinister Thierack would later write to Bormann that he “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 1st. Prosecution proceedings against Jews and Gypsies, however, should be taken without observing these reservations.”
A memorandum from Leonardo Conti, Secretary of State for Health in the Ministry of Interior, to the Main Office of the Security Police, Kripo headquarters, and the Reich Health Department, Berlin sent on January 1940 read:
It is known that the lives of Romanies and part Romanies are to be regulated by a Gypsy law (Zigeunergesetz) . . . I firmly believe, now as before, that the final solution of the Gypsy problem (endgültige Lösung der Ziegeunerproblems) can only be achieved through the sterilization of full and part Romanies . . . I think that the time for a legal resolution of these problems is over, and that we must immediately try to sterilize the Romanies and part Romanies as a special measure, using analogous precedents . . . 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.
The first mass genocidal action of the Holocaust took place in January or February 1940, when 250 Romani children in the concentration camp at Buchenwald were used as guinea pigs for testing the gas Zyklon B, later used for mass killings at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Nazis in Alsace complied with an order to round up “criminals, asocials, the sick, French nationalists and of course the Jews and the Gypsies.” In this year, Nazi statisticians Wetzel and Hecht estimated that “one hundred thousand Gypsies and others” were scheduled for deportation to Poland, and were shipped between May 15-18. | 8 In a speech delivered on February 1940 to top-level Nazi party officials, Himmler said “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 thirty thousand of them in the entire Reich, but they do great racial damage.”
On April 27 1940 a joint order from NS Headquarters and the Chief of Police stated that “The first transport of Gypsies to the General Government will leave in the middle of May with 2,500 people.” 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 Umsiedlungserlaß for the “resettlement, arrest, and deportation of Romanies above the age of 17 from western and northwestern border zones.”
On May 18 1940 Romanies were deported from seven assembly centers in the Old Reich to Lublin, located in the General Government. The first transport included 2,500 German Romanies, selected as full families wherever possible. The transport included 1,000 from Hamburg and Bremen, 1,000 from Cologne, Düsseldorf, and Hanover and 500 from Stuttgart and Frankfurt. The deportation to Lublin proceeded as planned, although subsequent police reports revealed that a further 300 had been “evacuated,” bringing the total number of deportees to 2,800. In Austria, the deportations to Poland were planned for the second half of August 1940.
An ordinance dated February 11 1941forbade Gypsies and “part-Gypsies” from serving in the German army “on the grounds of racial policy.” In July the Chief Administrative officer of Oberwart issued the order for the prohibition of the use of public transport by Romanies.
In Hungary Romanies were being targeted in the Nazi sympathetic regime led by Admiral Horthy. Between 500 and 1,000 Hungarian Romanies were sent to concentration camps in Transcarpathia. On July 31 1941 Heydrich, who had been entrusted with the details of the Final Solution, included Romanies together with Jews: “The Einsatzkommandos received the order to kill all Jews, Gypsies and mental patients.”
On October 10 1941 he proposed that the German Romanies be sent to Riga with the Jews instead of being sent to Auschwitz and Chelmno in Poland. At the same meeting, the motion that Litzmannstadt (Łodź) be chosen as the final destination for non-German-born Romanies was approved, and between November 9-11 five trainloads each transporting a thousand Romanies left from Austrian transit camps at Hartburg, Fürstenfeld, Mattersburg, Roten Thurm, Lackenbach, and Oberwart for Łodź, where they were joined by a transport of 20,000 Jews.
Of the 5,000 Romanies deported nearly two thirds were children. In December and in January Romanies were taken from Łodź to Kulmhof (Chelmno), where they were among the first to be killed in mobile gas vans. On November 24 1941, repeating his official orders, the Commander of the Wehrmacht in Byelorussia stated “The Jews must disappear from the | 9 countryside and likewise the Gypsies must be eradicated.”
In early 1942 Romanies were selected for experimentation at Dachau and Buchenwald by Dr. Adolf Pokorny to see how long they could survive on sea water, claiming that they “must not only be conquered, but exterminated also.”34 That same Spring, one thousand Romanies were shot and buried alive in a single action on a collective farm near Smolensk.
Nazi death squads entered Greece in June, murdering hundreds of Romanies. In Serbia, Military Governor Harald Turner announced—prematurely—that “Serbia is the only country in which the Jewish Question and the Gypsy Question have been resolved,” warning that “one must not forget that the Jews and the Gypsies generally constitute a threat to security and, as such, pose a threat to peace and public order; it 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.”35 In Greece, fifty Romanies were murdered for each German casualty. In Croatia between 80,000 and 100,000 Romanies are estimated to have perished at the hands of the Ustaša, mostly at the Jasenovac camp.36
On July 31 1942 the Ministry of the Eastern Occupied Territories reaffirmed to the SS and police leaders in Riga the order that “the treatment of both Jews and Romanies was to be placed on equal footing (gleichgestellt).”37 Romanies were being exterminated at Majdanek, Belsec, Sanok, Sobibor, Chelmno and Treblinka.
In Bucharest a policy statement that “for Romania, the Gypsy question is as important as the Jewish” was published. In the minutes of a September 14 meeting Justice Minister Otto Thierack proposed that “Jews and Gypsies should be unconditionally exterminated.”38 A memo signed by Himmler requested data on Romani populations in Britain in anticipation of the eventual takeover of that country.
On January 26 1943 the president of the National Criminal Police Association issued the following statement: “Political preventative 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.” In February the remaining Romanies were transported to Birkenau; the largest transport ever of Polish Romanies was brought to the same camp in March, and exterminated within the first month. Dutch Romanies began being transported to Auschwitz as well.41 A party bulletin entitled Maintenance of the Race and the Genotype in German Law stated that “Gypsies are of foreign blood, pursuant to German racial legislation; their 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 ‘it is the will of the all-powerful Reichsführer to have the | Gypsies disappear from the face of the earth.”42 He reiterated this elsewhere, saying “the Central Office knew it was Hitler’s aim to wipe out all the Gypsies without exception”.
The OSS reported on 20 October 1944 that “in Bulgaria, as elsewhere in Nazi dominated Europe, the Gypsies have been treated as an element which must be eradicated”.
Eva Justin’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. In the early morning hours of August 2-3 2, 1944 nine hundred Romanies at AuschwitzBirkenau were killed and cremated in one mass action referred to as Zigeunernacht. On September 26 a further 200 Romanies, mostly children, were shipped to Auschwitz from Buchenwald, and gassed two weeks later.
Not one Romani was called to testify in behalf of his own people at the Nuremberg Trials that began in October 1945. Current estimates now indicate that between one and one and a half million Romanies died during the period 1933-1945. 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-motivated genocidal policy.
At the Nuremberg Military Tribunals in September 1947 former SS General Otto Ohlendorf told presiding Judge Michael Musmanno that in the killing campaigns, “There was no difference between Gypsies and Jews.” As late as this date, Romani survivors from the camps were afraid to show themselves publicly because pre-Nazi laws were still in effect which would have put them back into detention centers if they were unable to show documentation proving German birth.
Despite the overwhelming documentary evidence to the contrary, in 1951 the Württemburg Ministry of the Interior issued a statement that judges hearing restitution claims should bear in mind that “Gypsies were persecuted under the National Socialist regime not for any racial reason, but because of an asocial and criminal record.” Members of the shattered postwar remnants of the surviving Romani population lacked the wherewithal legally to challenge this 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 “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 $100 million in war crimes reparations to Jewish survivors, but refused to pay anything to Romani survivors. Finally, on April 12 1990, the East German Government released a statement apologizing for the “immeasurable sorrow” the National Socialist regime had inflicted upon its victims, including Romanies, but “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 | 11 minorities such as . . . Gypsies remains as elusive as ever.
Notes
Recognition of this has been a long time coming. Luebke wrote that “[n]o comprehensive ‘Gypsy Law’ was ever promulgated” (David Luebke, The Nazi Persecution of Sinti and Ròma. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Research Brief, 18 April 1990, 3), and Breitman that “[w]hatever its weaknesses, ‘Final Solution’ at least applies to a single, specific group defined by descent. The Nazis are not known to have spoken of the Final Solution of the Polish problem or of the gypsy (sic) problem” (Richard Breitman, The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution. Hanover & London: University Press of New England, 1991, 20). The fact that the concept of “race” has no scientific basis is irrelevant here, since Nazi ideology fabricated its own “racial” identities for Jews and Romanies and acted upon them. If we add the third group selected for elimination, the mentally and physically handicapped, then the “gene-pool pollutant” factor becomes all the more clear. One might consider too that male homosexuality was also documented by the Nazis as a “racially destructive phenomenon,” a further weakening genetic element in the proposed Master Race.
Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress (Washington: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944).
Called O Baro Porrajmos (“paw-rye-mawss”) “The Great Devouring” in the Romani language. The Romani people are commonly, but inaccurately, referred to as “Gypsies,” a label based on the false assumption that they had come into Europe from Egypt. The Romani population, numbering some 12 million throughout the world, consists of very many subgroups, including the Sinti, the Roma, the Kalé, the Bashalde, the Romanichals and so on. Originally from northwestern India, they left that region a millennium ago as a result of Islamic expansion, and entered Europe for the same reason some 250-300 years later.
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