The Second World War and the Holocaust

During the Second World War (1939-1945), in the territories occupied by the Nazi Germany and its allies, the Romani people suffered the worst attempt of annihilation. This historical event was produced by the gain of the political power by the National Socialist Party in Germany, in 1933. Its ideology wanted a pure Aryan Europe, according to their definition of what means Aryan. In the context of the beginning of the 20^th century, when the global stage was occupied overwhelmingly by Western political powers, it was easy for a group in Germany, alienated by the modern crisis of identity, to hijack some identity labels from a non-Western people, like the name Aryan or the swastik and to claim them as their own.

The disrespect for the others and for themselves, the mediocrity of their approach in concocting the so-called Aryan identity appeared also in their political platform that imagined a pure “Aryan” Europe. This implied the disappearance, by any means, of the two local non-assimilated ethnic groups, the Roma and the Jews. It was an immoral and unjust concept because it branded as foreigners millions of people who lived for centuries in Europe. In the case of the Roma, it was also a case of denying the true identity, since, according to the Nazi ideology, only the Germans and some other ethnic groups from Northern Europe qualified as true Aryans, the contemporary Desi being considered as a mix of Aryans, Dravidians, Mongoloids, Munda, Turks and Semites. The reality is that, if indeed it was once a self-identification as Aryans by the ancestors of the Germans and other North Europeans, it disappeared long time ago and they too mixed with the local proto-Indo-European population when they arrived in the territories they live today. The features of blonde hair and blue eyes, supported by the Nazis as describing the Aryan race, are rather non-Aryan, from the proto-Indo-European population.

For various reasons, this unserious ideology was not disputed; on the contrary, it gained popular support, seizing the political power, as already said, in 1933. Then the laws issued at Nüremberg in 1934-1935, stripped of citizenship the “Jews, Gypsies and Negroes”, forbidding also the marriages between them and the so-called “Aryans”. The Romani population was the first targeted to be forbidden the access to school and to serve in the army. In the same years it began the round-up of the Romani individuals in Germany and their imprisonment in camps. Initially it was envisaged the sterilization, then, as expressed first in a document drafted in 1936 by the Ministry of Interior, “the introduction of a total solution for the Gypsy problem on either a national or international level”. Documents endorsed by Heinrich Himmler on 24 March and 8 December 1938 mention “the final solution of the Gypsy problem”. In the same year, between 12 and 19 June, it is carried out the Zigeunerfrämungswoche (“Gypsy clean-up week”), when many Roma are arrested, beaten and imprisoned.

As the Second World War began in 1939, the anti-Romani policy was extended to the territories occupied by the Nazi Germany. They were rounded up and sent to death camps, mostly in the area of contemporary Poland, where they suffered the horrors known to have happened there. The parts of the camps where the Roma were kept were known as “family camps”, they were not separated by men, women and children, like the others, because otherwise they used to revolt, they became uncontrollable. Those from the Western part of the Soviet Union were usually killed on spot by the special forces Einsatzgruppen.

Some of the states allied to the Nazi Germany followed the same policy, most notably Croatia, Romania and Hungary. The Ustashe regime in Croatia partly sent the Roma at Auschwitz and other camps, partly killed them in their own death camp, at Jasenovac. In Romania, under the leadership of Ion Antonescu, in the summer-autumn of 1942 all the nomad and part of the sedentary Roma were deported in Transnistria. They were concentrated in a few villages evacuated by the local Ukrainians, where they were kept 20-25 in a house without food and heating. In the winters of 1942-1943 and 1943-1944 many of them died. In Hungary many Roma were killed or sent to Auschwitz.

It is estimated that up to a million and a half Romani persons died. The number is uncertain because in the pre-war years, in fact the same as today, many Roma did not disclose the real ethnicity in censuses for fear of discrimination and many countries did not even recognized them as an ethnic group. Then, after the war, there were not conducted official inquiries about the Romani victims and survivors and many were counted as Jews. This uncertainty is related also to the bias for denying the existence of the Holocaust in the case of the Romani people. While in the case of the Jews, the Holocaust was recognized by the rest of the World after the end of the war and its perpetrators were brought to justice, that of the Romani people was denied by the responsible parties and overlooked by those non-involved. The Romani individuals found difficult to fight for their rights, since both victor and vanquished had no respect for them, some of the pre-war anti-Romani discriminatory laws were still enforced. For many survivors in Northern Europe it was even denied the citizenship at the end of the war, on the grounds that they could not provide written proofs.

The victorious powers organized at Nüremberg the trial of those guilty of war crimes, including of the Holocaust. They did not request to any Romani victim to testify, unlike for other categories of people, nor did anyone else testified on their behalf. In Germany and Austria the general mood was to hide the crimes against Roma, while lacking any pressure from the international level. These two states and their post-war societies considered overtly the Holocaust as a moral issue, but they handled it, at least in the case of the Romani people, in a cold political manner.

In 1950, Germany rejected the request of some Romani organizations to admit what happened during the war and to settle war crime reparations, on the grounds that it was not an organized persecution, racially motivated. The case of the Romani people is usually compared with that of the Jews, which from the first days after the end of the war was acknowledged, supported by the victors and consequently much better organized and documented. The latter quickly attained a unique status in the official history. The documentation was indispensable, because the Nazis perpetrated their crimes away from the public, stove to destroy all the proofs, until their defeat not even all the German population knew what was happening. Afterwards, the public image of the organized extermination of the Roma, while remaining poorly documented for a long time and repeatedly compared with that of the Jews, produced the delusion of a lower level of persecution.

In fact, the persecution of the Roma was even worse than that of the Jews. While only one Jewish grandparent made a person officially non-“Aryan”, a Mischlinge (crossbread), as they were named derogatorily, in the case of the Roma there was enough only a grand-grandparent. In the territories afflicted by the war, about 70-80% of the Romani population perished, in some cases, entire castes and clans. The percent tends to be higher than in the case of the Jews, because usually the Roma were more visible, conspicuous amid the local population, they had less chances to pass unnoticed. Also they did not have the worldwide organization and social relations, things that helped the survival of many Jews. The absolute number is lower because at that time the Romani population was fewer in the territories occupied by the Nazis and their allies. Some of the victims counted initially as Jewish were in fact Romani, as it was discovered later. Emblematical is the case of the Setella Steinbach, whose image staring out of a wagon heading towards Auschwitz became a symbol of the Holocaust victims. Initially she was supposed to be Jewish, but in 1994 it was found out that she was Sinti Romani. The same as the victims, many Romani survivors were counted as Jewish and some even immigrated to Israel, considered a safer place in the years after the war (years when also the Israeli authorities did not check thoroughly the Jewish ethnicity of the immigrants).

In the last decades, it increased the awareness among Romani individuals and organizations about this painful historical event, there were coined in the Romani language expressions to name it, like Poraymos (“Devouring”), Samudaripen (“Mass Killing”), Kali Trash (“Black Fear”).