Abstract
Miriam Novitch refers to the motives put forth to justify the murder of the Romanies, or ‘Gypsies’, in the Holocaust, but in her small but groundbreaking book she is only partly right: both Jews and Romanies did indeed share the status — along with the handicapped — of being targeted for elimination because of the threat they were perceived to pose to the pristine gene pool of the German Herrenvolk or ‘Master Race’; but while the Jews were considered a threat on a number of other grounds as well, political, philosophical and economic, the Romanies were only ever a ‘racial’ threat.
The motives invoked to justify the death of the Gypsies were the same as those ordering the murder of the Jews, and the methods employed for the one were identical with those employed for the other.
Miriam Novitch, Ghetto Fighters’ House, Israel’
It was the wish of the all-powerful Reichsfuhrer Adolf Hitler to have the Gypsies disappear from the face of the earth.
SS Officer Pery Broad, Auschwitz Political Division2
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Notes
M. Novitch, Le genocide des Tziganes sous le regime nazi (Paris: AMIF and the Ghetto Fighters’ House, Israel, 1968), p. 3.
P. Broad, ‘KZ Auschwitz: Erinnerungen eines SS Mannes’, Hefte von Auschwitz, 9 (1966), 41.
C. Bernadec, L’Holocauste oublie (Paris: Editions France-Empire, 1979), p. 44.
G. Lewy, The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
G. Margalit, Germany and its Gypsies: A Post-Auschwitz Ordeal (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002).
J. Ledgard, ‘Europe’s Spectral Nation’, The Economist (12 May 2001), 29–31.
I. Hancock, ‘Responses to the Porrajmos (the Romani Holocaust)’, in Is the Holocaust Unique?, ed. A.S. Rosenbaum (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996), pp. 39–64. Some of the arguments I have received include: the respective overall numbers of losses cannot be compared; some Romanies were spared death; there were family camps for Romanies; the Holocaust was a divine punishment specifically intended for Jews; ‘generalizing’ the Holocaust diminishes its gravity; ‘generalizing’ the Holocaust weakens justification for Israel’s existence; Nazi methods of dealing with Romanies were more humane; Romanies were responsible for their own mistreatment. In the Romani language, the Holocaust is referred to as the Baro Porrajmos, or ‘great devouring’ of human life.
This phrase, used by Tetzner, is documented in R. Hehemann, Die ‘Bekampfung des Zigeunerunwesens’ im Wilhelminischen Deutschland und in der Weimarer Republik, 1871–1922 (Frankfurt am Main: Haag & Herschen, 1987), pp. 99, 116 and 127, and in W. Wippermann, Das Leben in Frankfurt zur NS-Zeit: Die Nationalsozialistische Zigeunerverfolgung (Frankfurt am Main: Kramer, 1986), pp. 57–8. Note that in Germany the traditional Romani population calls itself Sinti, and that the word Zigeuner is the German equivalent of ‘Gypsy’ and should be avoided.
C.W. Dohm, On the Civic Improvement of the Jews (Stuttgart, 1781); H. von HundtRadowsky, Der Judenspiegel (Munich, 1819); R. Knox, The Races of Men (London, 1850); A. de Gobineau, L’Inegalite des races hurnaines (Paris, 1855); A. Ploetz, Grundlinie einer Rassenhygiene: Die Tuchtigkeit unserer Rasse und der Schutz der Schwachen (Berlin, 1895). W. Schallmeyer, in his ‘Einfuhrungen in die Rassenhygiene’, in Ergebnisse der Hygiene, ed. W. Weichardt (Berlin, 1917), vol. 2, p. 455, argued for the regulated pairing of German men and women of ‘suitable genetic quality’ and the euthanizing of those of inferior heredity.
H.S. Chamberlain, Die Gnindlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (Leipzig, 1899).
A. Dillmann, Zigeuner-Buch (Munich: Wildsche, 1905).
K. Binding and A. Hoche, Die Freigabe der Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens (Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1920).
R. Liebich, Die Zigeuner in ihrern Wesen und ihre Sprache (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1863).
R. Kulemann, ‘Die Zigeuner’, Unserer Zeit, 5 (1869), 843–71.
An excellent overview is found in D. Stone, Breeding Superman: Nietzsche, Race and Eugenics in Interwar Britain (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2002).
E. Bartels and G. Brun, The Gipsies in Denmark (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1943), p. 5.
State Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Memorial Book: the Gypsies at Auschwitz-Birkenau (Munich: K.G. Saur, 1993), p. xiv, emphasis added.
D. Kenrick, Historical Dicrionary of the Gypsies (Romanies) (Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 1998), pp. 74–5.
J. Behrendt, ‘Die Wahrheit uber die Zigeuner’, NS-Partei Korrespondenz, 10 (1939). 26 E. Proester, Vraidni cs. Cikanu v Buchenwaldu. Document No. UV CSPB-K-135 of the Archives of the Fighters against Fascism, Prague (1940).
B. Muller-Hill, Murderous Science: Elimination by Scientific Selection of Jews, Gypsies and Others, 1933–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 58–9.
M. Burleigh and W. Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany, 1933–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 121–5.
S. Milton, ‘Nazi Policies towards Roma and Sinti 1933–1945’, Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, 5th series, 2, 1 (1992), 10.
R. Breitman, The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1991), p. 164.
D. Czech, Auschwitz Chronicle, 1939–1945 (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1979). A Jewish Auschwitz survivor now living in Los Angeles remembered Zigeunernacht and revealed recently that the Nazis told the Romani men that if they would agree to fight for Germany on the Russian front their lives, and the lives of their families, would be spared. The men agreed and were separated from the women and children, and shot. Nearly all those who were subsequently gassed were Romani women and children. The purpose in doing so was that, as Ulrich KOnig makes clear in his Sinti und Roma unter dem Nationalsozialismus (Bochum: Brockmeyer Verlag, 1989), pp. 129–33, Romani families being eradicated together became completely unmanageable for the guards. See also Hancock, ‘Responses to the Porrajmos’, p. 50 for further discussion.
Quoted in G.A. Rakelmann, ed., Loseblattsammlung fiir Unterricht undBildungsarbeit (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1979).
J. Latham, ‘First US Conference on Gypsies in the Holocaust’, Current AffairsBulletin, No. 3–23928 (Washington, DC: Voice of America, 1995).
M.-A. Heine, Roma Victims of the Nazi Regime May Be Entitled to Compensation (Geneva: International Organization for Migration, Office of Public Information, 2001), p. 1.
I. Friedman, The Other Victims: First-Person Stories of Non-Jews Persecuted by the Nazis (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1990).
Y. Bauer, ‘Gypsies’, in Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, ed. Y. Gutman and M. Berenbaum (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. 441–55.
E. Haberer, ‘The Second Sweep: Gendarmerie Killings of Jews and Gypsies on January 29th, 1942’, Journal of Genocide Research, 3 (2001), 212.
USGPO, Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, Vol. 3 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1946).
U.-K. Heye, J. Sartorius and U. Bopp, eds., Learning from History: The Nazi Era and the Holocaust in German Education (Berlin: Press and Information Office of the Federal Government, 2000), p. 14.
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Hancock, I. (2004). Romanies and the Holocaust: A Re-evaluation and Overview. In: Stone, D. (eds) The Historiography of the Holocaust. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230524507_18
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