Romani Holocaust

The Romani genocide or Romani Holocaust, also known as the Porajmos (Romani /pʰo.ɽaj.mos/), was the attempt made by Nazi Germany and its allies to exterminate the Romani people of Europe during World War II. Under Hitler's rule, both Roma and Jews were defined as "enemies of the race-based state" by the Nuremberg laws; the two groups were targeted by similar policies and persecution, culminating in the near annihilation of both populations within Nazi-occupied countries.

Estimates of the death toll of Romanies in World War II range from 220,000 to 1,500,000. West Germany formally recognised the genocide of the Roma in 1982.

Etymology

The term porajmos (also Porrajmos or Pharrajimos—literally, devouring or destruction in some dialects of the Romani language) was introduced by Ian Hancock, in the early 1990s. Hancock chose the term, coined by a Kalderash Rom, from a number of suggestions in an "informal conversation in 1993".

The term is used mostly by activists and is unknown to most Roma, including relatives of the victims and survivors. Some Russian and Balkan Romani activists protest against using the word porajmos. In various dialects, "porajmos" is synonymous with poravipe which means "violation" and "rape", a term which some Roma consider to be offensive. Balkan Romani activists prefer the term Samudaripen ("mass killing"), first introduced by linguist Marcel Courthiade. Hancock dismisses this word, arguing that it does not conform to Romani language morphology. Some Ruska Roma activists offer the emotive term Kali Traš ("Black Fear"). Another alternative that has been used is Berša Bibahtale ("The Unhappy Years"). Lastly, adapted borrowings such as Holokosto, Holokausto etc. are also occasionally used in the Romani language.

Linguistically, the term is composed of the verb root porrav- and the abstract-forming nominal ending -imos. This ending is of the Vlax Romani dialect, whereas other varieties generally use -ibe(n) or -ipe(n). For the verb itself, the most commonly given meaning is "to open/stretch wide" or "to rip open", whereas the meaning "to open up the mouth, devour" occurs in fewer varieties.

History

Romani discrimination before 1933

The emergence of racism

In the late 19th century, the emergence of scientific racism and Social Darwinism, linking social differences to racial differences, provided the public justifications for prejudices against Jews and Romani. During this time, “the concept of race was systematically employed to explain social phenomena.” This approach validated the idea that races were not variations of a single species and instead were of different biological origin. It established a scientifically backed racial hierarchy, which othered minority groups on the basis of biology.

In addition to racial pseudo-science, the end of the 19th century was a period of state-sponsored modernization in Germany. Industrial development altered many aspects of society. Most notably, the period shifted social norms of work and life. For Roma, this meant a denial of their traditional way of being. János Bársony notes that "industrial development devalued their services as craftsmen, resulting in the disintegration of their communities and social marginalization."

Persecution under the German Empire and Weimar Republic

The developments of racial pseudo-science and modernization resulted in anti-Romani state interventions, carried out by the German Empire and Weimar Republic. In 1899, the Information Services on Gypsies by the Security Police was created in the Imperial Police Headquarters in Munich. Its purpose was to keep records (identification cards, fingerprints, photographs, etc.) and continuous surveillance on the Roma community. Roma in the Weimar Republic were forbidden from entering public swimming pools, parks, and other recreational areas, and depicted throughout Germany and Europe as criminals and spies. By 1926, this ‘racial panic’ was transmitted into law. The Law for the Fight Against Gypsies, Vagrants and the Workshy was enforced in Bavaria. It stipulated that groups identified as ‘Gypsies’ avoid all travel to the region. Those already living in the area were to “be keep under control so that there [was] no longer anything to fear from them with regard to safety in the land.” Herbet Heuss notes that "[t]his Bavarian law became the model for other German states and even for neighbouring countries."

The demand for Roma to settle in a specific region was often the focus of anti-Gypsy policy both of the German Empire and Weimar Republic. Once settled, communities were concentrated and isolated in one area within a town or city. This process facilitated state-run surveillance practices and ‘crime prevention.’

Public policy increasingly targeted the Roma on the explicit basis of race following the Law for the Fight Against Gypsies, Vagrants and the Workshy. In 1927, legislation was passed in Prussia that required all Roma to carry identity cards. Eight thousand Roma were processed this way and subjected to mandatory fingerprinting and photographing. Two years later, the focus became ever more explicit. In 1929, the German state of Hussen proposed the Law for the Fight Against the Gypsy Menace. The same year the Centre for the Fight Against Gypsies in Germany was opened. This body enforced restrictions on travel for undocumented Roma and "allowed for the arbitrary arrest and detention of gypsies as a means of crime prevention.”

Legislation before Hitler’s rise to power was propelled by a rhetoric of racism. Policy based on the premise of “fighting crime” was redirected to “fighting a people.” Targeted groups were no longer determined by juridical grounds. Instead, they were victims of racialized policy.

Aryan racial purity

Main article: Racial policy of Nazi Germany

For centuries, Romani tribes were subject to antiziganist persecution and humiliation in Europe. They were stigmatized as habitual criminals, social misfits, and vagabonds. Given the Nazi predilection for “racial purity”, the Roma were among their first victims. However, in the early days of Third Reich, the Romanies posed a problem for Hitler’s racial ideologues: the Romani language is one of the Indo-Aryan languages, originating in northern India. Nazi anthropologists realized that Romanies migrated into Europe from India and were thus descendants of the Aryan occupants of the subcontinent, thought at the time to have invaded India from Europe. In other words, the Romanies are native speakers of an Aryan language.

Huttenbach argues that the Nazis planned to eliminate the Romanis, one way or another, from as early as 1933; they announced on July 14, 1933, the goal of preventing lebensunwertes Leben (see Life unworthy of life) from reproducing. The Department of Racial Hygiene and Population Biology began to experiment on Romanis to reach criteria for their racial classification.

Nazi racialist Hans F. K. Günther added a socioeconomic component to the theory of racial purity. While he conceded that the Romanies were, in fact, descended from Aryans, they were of poorer classes that had mingled with the various “inferior” races they encountered during their wanderings. This, he explained, accounted for their extreme poverty and nomadic lifestyle. While he conceded that there were some groups that were "purely Aryan", most Romanies posed a threat to Aryan homogeneity because of their racial mingling.

Romani woman with German police officer and Nazi psychologist Dr. Robert Ritter

To study the problem further, the Nazis established the Racial Hygiene and Demographic Biology Research Unit (Rassenhygienische und Bevölkerungsbiologische Forschungsstelle, Department L3 of the Reich Department of Health) in 1936. Headed by Dr. Robert Ritter and his assistant Eva Justin, the body was mandated to conduct an in-depth study of the "Gypsy question (Zigeunerfrage)" and to provide data required for formulating a new Reich "Gypsy law". After extensive fieldwork in the spring of 1936, consisting of interviews and medical examinations to investigate genealogical and genetic data, it was determined that most Romanies posed a danger to German racial purity and should be eliminated. No decision was made regarding the remainder (about 10 percent of the total Romani population of Europe), primarily Sinti and Lalleri tribes living in Germany, though several suggestions were made. At one point Heinrich Himmler even suggested the establishment of a remote reservation, where "pure Gypsies" could continue their nomadic lifestyle unhindered. According to him:

...The aim of measures taken by the State to defend the homogeneity of the German nation must be the physical separation of Gypsydom from the German nation, the prevention of miscegenation, and finally, the regulation of the way of life of pure and part-Gypsies.

Nine representatives of the Romani community in Germany were asked to compile lists of pure-blooded Romanies to be saved from extermination. However, these lists were often ignored and some who were named on them were still sent to concentration camps.

Loss of citizenship

On November 14, 1935, The Law for the "Protection of Blood and Honour", a supplementary extension to the Nuremberg Laws, was passed. This law forbade Aryans to marry non-Aryans. Criteria defining who is Romani were exactly twice as strict as those defining any other group. The second Nuremberg law, The Reich Citizenship Law, stripped citizenship from "non-Aryans", blacks and Romanies, like Jews, lost their right to vote on March 7, 1936.

Extermination

The Brown Triangle. Romani prisoners in German concentration camps such as Auschwitz were forced to wear the brown inverted triangle on their prison uniforms to distinguish them from other inmates.

The persecution of the Roma by the Third Reich government began as early as 1936 when they began to be transferred to municipal internment camps on the outskirts of cities, a prelude to their deportation to extermination camps. Notable internment and concentration camps include Dachau, Dieselstrasse, Marzahn (which evolved from a municipal internment camp) and Vennhausen. The Society for Threatened Peoples estimates the casualties at 277,100. Martin Gilbert estimates a total of more than 220,000 of the 700,000 Romani in Europe, including 15,000 (mainly from the Soviet Union) in Mauthausen in January–May 1945. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum cites scholars that estimate the number of Sinti and Roma killed to lie between 220,000 and 500,000. Dr. Sybil Milton, a historian at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Research Institute, estimated the number of lives lost as "something between a half-million and a million-and-a-half".

They were herded into ghettos, including the Warsaw Ghetto (April–June 1942), where they formed a distinct subclass. Ghetto diarist Emmanuel Ringelblum speculated that Romanies were sent to the Warsaw Ghetto because the Germans wanted:

...to toss into the Ghetto everything that is characteristically dirty, shabby, bizarre, of which one ought to be frightened, and which anyway has to be destroyed.

Initially there was disagreement about how to solve the "Gypsy Question". In late 1939 and early 1940, Hans Frank, the General Governor of occupied Poland, refused to accept the 30,000 German and Austrian Roma which were to be deported. For his "ethnic reservation" Heinrich Himmler "lobbied to save a handful of pure-blooded Roma", but was opposed by Martin Bormann, who favored deportation for all Roma. The debate ended in 1942 when Himmler signed the order marking the beginning of the mass deportations to Auschwitz. During Operation Reinhard (1941–43), an undetermined number of Roma were also killed in the extermination camps, such as Treblinka.

The Nazi persecution of Roma varied from country to country and region to region. In France, between 3,000 and 6,000 Roma were deported to Dachau, Ravensbrück, Buchenwald, and other camps. Further east, in the Balkan states and the Soviet Union, the Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing squads, travelled from village to village massacring the inhabitants where they lived and typically leaving few to no records of the number of Roma killed in this way. In a few cases, significant documentary evidence of mass murder was generated. Timothy Snyder notes that in the Soviet Union alone there were 8,000 documented cases of Roma murdered by the Einsatzgruppen in their sweep east. In return for immunity from prosecution for war crimes, Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski stated at the Einsatzgruppen Trial that "the principal task of the Einsatzgruppen of the S.D. was the annihilation of the Jews, Gypsies and Political Commissars". Roma in Slovakia were killed by the local collaborating auxiliaries. Notably, Roma in Denmark and Greece were not as intensely hunted as those in the Baltics. Bulgaria and Finland, although allies of Germany, did not cooperate with the Porajmos, just as they did not cooperate with the Shoah.

On December 16, 1942, Himmler ordered that the Romani candidates for extermination should be deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. To the Romani people of Europe, this order was equivalent to the January 20 decision of that same year, made at the Wannsee Conference, at which Nazi bureaucrats decided on the "Final Solution" to the "Jewish problem". Himmler then ordered, on November 15, 1943, that Romanies and "part-Romanies" were to be put "on the same level as Jews and placed in concentration camps".

Sybil Milton has speculated that Hitler was involved in the decision to deport all Romanies to Auschwitz, as Himmler gave the order six days after meeting with Hitler and Himmler had prepared for the meeting a report on the subject Führer: Aufstellung wer sind Zigeuner. Organized Jewish resistance occurred in nearly every large ghetto and concentration camp (Auschwitz, Sobibor, Treblinka, Ravensbrück, and Buchenwald, among many others), and the Roma themselves similarly attempted to resist the Nazis' extermination. In Auschwitz, in May 1944, SS guards attempted to liquidate the Gypsy Family Camp and were "met with unexpected resistance—the Roma fought back with crude weapons—and retreated". However, a few months later the SS succeeded in liquidating the camp, and ultimately 20,000 Roma were murdered in the camp.

Persecution in other Axis countries

Romanies were also victims of the puppet regimes that cooperated with the Third Reich during the war, especially the notorious Ustaše regime in Croatia. In Jasenovac concentration camp, along with Serbs and Jews, tens of thousands of Romanies were killed. Yad Vashem estimates that the Porajmos was most intense in Yugoslavia, where around 90,000 Romanies were killed. The Ustaše government also deported around 26,000; Serbian Romanies are parties to the pending Class action suit against the Vatican Bank and others currently pending in U.S. federal court seeking return of wartime loot.

The governments of some Nazi German allies, namely Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria, also contributed to the Nazi plan of Romani extermination, but this was implemented on a smaller scale and most Romani in these countries survived, unlike those in Ustaše Croatia or in areas directly ruled by Nazi Germany (such as Poland). The Hungarian Arrow Cross government deported between 28,000 and 33,000 Romanies out of a population estimated between 70,000 and 100,000.

The Romanian government of Ion Antonescu did not systematically exterminate Roma on its territory. Instead, resident Roma were deported to Romanian-run concentration camps in occupied Transnistria. Of the estimated 25,000 Romani inmates of these camps, 11,000 (44%, or almost half) died.

According to eyewitness Mrs. de Wiek, Anne Frank, a notable Jewish Holocaust victim, is recorded as having witnessed the prelude to the murder of Romani children at Auschwitz: "I can still see her standing at the door and looking down the camp street as a herd of naked gypsy girls were driven by, to the crematory, and Anne watched them going and cried."

In the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, Romani internees were sent to the Lety and Hodonín concentration camps before being transferred to Auschwitz-Birkenau for gassing. What makes the Lety camp unique is that it was staffed by Czech guards, who could be even more brutal than the Germans, as testified in Paul Polansky’s book Black Silence. The genocide was so thorough that the vast majority of Romani in the Czech Republic today are actually descended from migrants from Slovakia who moved there during the post-war years in Czechoslovakia. In Nazi-occupied France, between 16,000 and 18,000 were killed.

The small Romani population in Denmark was not subjected to mass killings by the Nazi occupiers, but classified as simply "asocial". Angus Fraser attributes this to "doubts over ethnic demarcations within the travelling population". The Romanis of Greece were taken hostage and prepared for deportation to Auschwitz, but were saved by appeals from the Archbishop of Athens and the Greek Prime Minister.

Estimated number of victims

According to Ian Hancock, director of the Romani Archives and Documentation Center at the University of Texas at Austin, there also existed a trend to downplay the actual figures. He surmised that almost the entire Romani population was killed in Croatia, Estonia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. Rudolph Rummel, a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Hawaii who spent his career assembling data on collective violence by governments towards their people (for which he coined the term democide), estimated that 258,000 must have been killed in Nazi Germany, 36,000 in Romania under Ion Antonescu and 27,000 in Ustaše-controlled Croatia.

The following figures are from The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust.

Country	Pre War Roma population	Low Estimate	High Estimate
Austria	11,200	6,800	8,250
Belgium	600	350	500
Czech Republic (Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia)	13,000	5,000	6,500
Estonia	1,000	500	1,000
France	40,000	15,150	15,150
Germany	20,000	15,000	15,000
Greece	?	50	50
Hungary	100,000	1,000	28,000
Italy	25,000	1,000	1,000
Latvia	5,000	1,500	2,500
Lithuania	1,000	500	1,000
Luxembourg	200	100	200
Netherlands	500	215	500
Poland	50,000	8,000	35,000
Romania	300,000	19,000	36,000
Slovakia	80,000	400	10,000
Soviet Union (1939 borders)	200,000	30,000	35,000
Yugoslavia	100,000	26,000	90,000
Total	947,500	130,565	285,650

• In a 2010 publication, Ian Hancock stated that he agrees with the view that the number of Romanies killed has been underestimated as a result of being grouped with others in Nazi records under headings such as "remainder to be liquidated", "hangers-on", and "partisans". He notes recent evidence such as the previously obscure Lety concentration camp in the Czech Republic and Ackovic's revised estimates of Gypsies killed by the Ustaše as high as 80,000–100,000. These numbers suggest that previous estimates have been grossly underrepresented.
• Zbigniew Brzezinski has estimated that 800,000 Romanies died as a result of Nazi actions.

Medical experiments

Further information: Nazi human experimentation

Another distinctive feature of the Porajmos and the Holocaust was the extensive use of human subjects in medical experiments. The most notorious of these physicians was Dr. Josef Mengele, who worked in the Auschwitz concentration camp. His experiments included placing subjects in pressure chambers, testing drugs on them, freezing them, attempting to change eye color by injecting chemicals into children's eyes and various amputations and other brutal surgeries. The full extent of his work will never be known because the truckload of records he sent to Dr. Otmar von Verschuer at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute were destroyed by von Verschuer. Mengele's own journals, consisting of some 3,300 pages, are likely never to be published, and they are suspected to contain denials of the Holocaust. Subjects who survived Mengele's experiments were almost always killed and dissected shortly afterwards.

He seemed particularly keen on working with Romani children. He would bring them sweets and toys, and would personally take them to the gas chamber. They would call him "Onkel Mengele". Vera Alexander was a Jewish inmate at Auschwitz who looked after 50 sets of Romani twins:

I remember one set of twins in particular: Guido and Ina, aged about four. One day, Mengele took them away. When they returned, they were in a terrible state: they had been sewn together, back to back, like Siamese twins. Their wounds were infected and oozing pus. They screamed day and night. Then their parents—I remember the mother's name was Stella—managed to get some morphine and they killed the children in order to end their suffering.

Recognition and remembrance

Sinti and Roma about to be deported from the German town of Asperg, 22 May 1940

The German government paid war reparations to Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, but not to the Romani. There were "never any consultations at Nuremberg or any other international conference as to whether the Sinti and Roma were entitled like the Jews to reparations.” The Interior Ministry of Wuerttemberg argued that "Gypsies [were] persecuted under the Nazis not for any racial reason but because of an asocial and criminal record." When on trial for his leadership of Einsatzgruppen in the USSR, Otto Ohlendorf cited the massacres of Romanis during the Thirty Years War as a historical precedent.

West Germany recognised the genocide of the Roma in 1982, and since then the Porajmos has been increasingly recognized as a genocide committed simultaneously with the Shoah. The American historian Sybil Milton wrote several articles arguing that the Porajmos deserved recognition as part of the Holocaust. In Switzerland, a committee of experts investigated the policy of the Swiss government during the Porajmos.

Formal recognition and commemoration of the Roma persecution by the Nazis is practically difficult due to the lack of significant collective memory and documentation of the Porajmos among the Roma, a consequence both of their oral traditions and their illiteracy, heightened by widespread poverty and discrimination that forces some Roma out of state schools. One UNESCO report put the illiteracy rate among the Roma in Romania at 30 percent, as opposed to the near universal literacy of the Romanian public as a whole. In a 2011 investigation of the state of the Roma in Europe today, Ben Judah, a Policy Fellow with the European Council on Foreign Relations, traveled to Romania and Transylvania. Nico Fortuna, a sociologist and Roma activist, explained the distinction between Jewish collective memory of the Shoah and the Roma experience:

There is a difference between the Jewish and Roma deportees...The Jews were shocked and can remember the year, date and time it happened. The Roma shrugged it off. They said, "Of course I was deported. I'm Roma; these things happen to a Roma." The Roma mentality is different from the Jewish mentality. For example, a Roma came to me and asked, "Why do you care so much about these deportations? Your family was not deported." I went, "I care as a Roma" and the guy said back, "I do not care because my family were brave, proud Roma that were not deported."

For the Jews it was a total and everyone knew this—from bankers to pawnbrokers. For the Roma it was selective and not comprehensive. The Roma were only exterminated in a few parts of Europe such as Poland, the Netherlands, Germany and France. In Romania and much of the Balkans, only nomadic Roma and social outcast Roma were deported. This matters and has an impact on the Roma mentality.

Ian Hancock has also observed a reluctance among Roma to acknowledge their victimization by the Third Reich. The Roma "are traditionally not disposed to keeping alive the terrible memories from their history—nostalgia is a luxury for others". The impact of the illiteracy, the lack of social institutions and the rampant discrimination faced by Roma in Europe today have produced a people who, according to Fortuna, lack a "national consciousness...and historical memory of the Holocaust because there is no Roma elite."

Acts of commemoration

Plaque in Rome (Italy) in memory of Romani people who died in extermination camps

Monument in memory of Romani people who were murdered by German Nazis in forest in Polish village Borzęcin.

The first memorial commemorating victims of the Romani Holocaust was erected on May 8, 1956, in the Polish village of Szczurowa commemorating the Szczurowa massacre. Since 1996, a Gypsy Caravan Memorial is crossing the main remembrance sites in Poland, from Tarnów via Auschwitz, Szczurowa and Borzęcin Dolny, gathering the Gypsies and well-wishers in the remembrance of the Porajmos. Several museums dedicate a part of their permanent exhibition to that memory, like the Museum of Romani Culture in Czech Republic and the Ethnographic Museum in Tarnów. However some political organisations still try to block the building up of memorials near former concentration camps, as shows the debate around Lety and Hodonin in the Czech Republic.

On October 23, 2007, Romanian President Traian Băsescu publicly apologized for his nation's role in the Porajmos, the first time a Romanian leader has done so. He called for the Porajmos to be taught in schools, stating that, "We must tell our children that six decades ago children like them were sent by the Romanian state to die of hunger and cold". Part of his apology was in the Romani language. Băsescu also awarded three Porajmos survivors with an Order for Faithful Services. Before recognizing Romania's role in the Porajmos, Traian Băsescu was widely quoted after an incident on May 19, 2007, in which he insulted a journalist by calling her a "stinky gypsy". The president subsequently apologized.

On January 27, 2011, Zoni Weisz became the first Roma guest of honour at Germany's official Holocaust Memorial Day ceremony. Dutch born Weiz escaped death during a Nazi round-up when a policeman allowed him to escape. Nazi injustices against the Roma were recalled at the ceremony, including that directed at Sinto boxer Johann Trollmann.

The May 3, 2012 saw the world premiere of the Requiem for Auschwitz by composer Roger Moreno Rathgeb at the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam performed by the The Roma and Sinti Philharmoniker directed by Riccardo M Sahiti. The Philharmoniker is a pan-European orchestra of Roma and Sinto musicians generally employed by other classical orchestras, but aiming to focus on the contribution of Roma culture on classical music. Dutch-Swiss Sinto Moreno Rathgeb expressedly wrote his requiem for all victims of Auschwitz and Nazi terror. The occasion of the premiere was coupled however to a conference, Roma between Past and Future. The requiem has since been performed in Tilburg, Prague, Budapest, Frankfurt, Cracow, and Berlin.

On 24 October 2012 the Memorial to the Sinti and Roma victims of National Socialism was unveiled in Berlin.

On August 2, 2013 ternYpe - International Roma Youth Network organized in Auschwitz Birkenau at the Roma and Sinti memorial in the former "zigeunerlager" site, the largest in history Youth Commemoration Ceremony gathering over 400 young people Roma and non-Roma from 20 countries, from all over the world.The Commemoration was part of a 4-day program of the Roma Genocide Remembrance Initiative “Dik I na Bistar/look and don’t forget”held in Krakow from the 30th July till the 4th of August 2013. This initiative of ternYpe Network was held under the European Parliament's High Patronage granted by the President Martin Schulz

Depiction in films

In 2009, Tony Gatlif, a French film director of Romani ethnicity, directed the film Korkoro, which is based on an anecdote by the historian Jacques Sigot. The film traces a Romani, Taloche's, escape from the Nazis, with help from a French notary Justes, and later, his inability to lead an immobile non-nomadic life. While it is not known if the French notary, Justes, really existed, the character Théodore in the movie is inspired by him. The film's other main character, Mademoiselle Lise Lundi, is inspired by the schoolteacher Yvette Lundy, who used to work in Gionges, La Marne. The film was shot in Loire, Monts du Forez, Rozier-Côtes-d'Aurec and Saint-Bonnet-le-Château.

The 1988 Polish film And the Violins Stopped Playing also has Porajmos as its subject, although this has been criticised for showing the killing of Roma as a method of removing witnesses to the killing of Jews.

A scene in the French-language film Train de Vie (Train of Life), directed by Radu Mihaileanu, depicts a group of Romanis singing and dancing with Jews at a stop en route to a concentration camp.

See also

• Antiziganism
• Szczurowa massacre
• And the Violins stopped playing
• Korkoro

References

Notes

Bibliography

• Bársony, János (2008). "Facts and Debates: The Roma Holocaust". In János Bársony and Ágnes Daróczi , eds., Pharrajimos: The Fate of the Roma During the Holocaust (pp. 1–12). New York, NY: International Debate Education Association. ISBN 978-1-932-71630-6. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help); templatestyles stripmarker in |first= at position 1 (help); templatestyles stripmarker in |last= at position 1 (help)CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
• Hancock, Ian (1991). "In David Crowe and John Kolsti, eds., The Gypsies of Eastern Europe (pp. 11–30)". Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. ISBN 978-0-873-32671-1. {{cite journal}}: |chapter= ignored (help); Cite journal requires |journal= (help); Invalid |ref=harv (help); templatestyles stripmarker in |first= at position 1 (help); templatestyles stripmarker in |last= at position 1 (help)CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
• ——— (1997). "A Glossary of Romani Terms". American Journal of Comparative Law. 45 (2): 329–344. JSTOR 840853. {{cite journal}}: |last= has numeric name (help)
• Heuss, Herbert (1997). "German policies of Gypsy persecution (1870–1945)". In Karola Fings, Herbert Heuss and Frank Sparing, From "Race Science" to the Camps: The Gypsies during the Second World War, Vol. 1 (pp. 15–37). Hertfordshire: University of Hertfordshire Press. ISBN 978-0-900-45878-1. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help); templatestyles stripmarker in |first= at position 1 (help); templatestyles stripmarker in |last= at position 1 (help)CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
• Jessee, Erin. "Nazi Atrocities: The Genocide of the Roma/Sinti." Lecture at Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, February 3, 2010.
• Matras, Yaron (2004). "A conflict of paradigms: review article" (PDF). Romani Studies. 14 (2): 193–219. doi:10.3828/rs.2004.7. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help); templatestyles stripmarker in |first= at position 1 (help); templatestyles stripmarker in |last= at position 1 (help)CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
• Sparing, Frank (1997). "The Gypsy Camps: The creation, character and meaning of an instrument for the persecution of Sinti and Romanies under National Socialism". In Karola Fings, Herbert Heuss and Frank Sparing, From "Race Science" to the Camps: The Gypsies during the Second World War, Vol. 1 (pp. 40–70). Hertfordshire: University of Hertfordshire Press. ISBN 978-0-900-45878-1. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help); templatestyles stripmarker in |first= at position 1 (help); templatestyles stripmarker in |last= at position 1 (help)CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
• Wolfgang Wippermann. “Compensation withheld: The denial of reparations to the Sinti and Roma.” In The Gypsies during the Second World War: The Final Chapter, ed. Donald Kenrick, 171-177. Hertfordshire: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2006.

Further reading

• Bársony, János: Pharrajimos: the fate of the Roma during the Holocaust, IDEA, 2008, ISBN 978-1-932716-30-6.
• Guenter Lewy, The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000 ISBN 0-19-512556-8
• Fonseca, Isabel: Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies And Their Journey, London, Vintage, 1996. Chapter 7, The Devouring ISBN 978-0-679-73743-8
• "'Gypsies' as Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany" by Sybil H. Milton in Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany, edited by Robert Gellately and Nathan Stoltzfus (2001, hardcover, ISBN 0-691-00748-9; paperback, ISBN 0-691-08684-2).
• Paul Polansky, Black Silence: The Lety Survivors Speak ISBN 0-89304-241-2
• Ramati, Alexander And the Violins Stopped Playing: A Story of the Gypsy Holocaust : 1986. War time biography of Roman (Dymitr) Mirga, on which film of the same name is based.
• Romani Rose, The Nazi Genocide of the Sinti and Roma (Heidelberg: Documentary and Cultural Centre of German Sinti and Roma, 1995)
• Parcer, Jan Memorial Book: The Gypsies at Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau, (New York: K.G. Saur, 1993) ISBN 978-3-598-11162-4
• Klamper, Elisabeth. Persecution and Annihilation of Roma and Sinti in Austria, 1938-1945, Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society 5, Vol. 3, No. 2 (1993)
• Milton, Sybil. The Holocaust: The Gypsies, in William S. Parsons, Israel Chamy, and Samuel Totten, eds., Genocide in the Twentieth Century: An Anthology of Critical Essays and Oral History (New York, 1995), pp. 209–64.
• Tyrnauer, Gabrielle, Gypsies and the Holocaust: A Bibliography and Introductory Essay, Montreal, 1989
• Christian Bernadac (ed.), L'Holocauste oublié. Le martyre des Tsiganes, éd. France-Empire, 1979
• Heuss, H., Sparing, F., Fings, K. & Asséo, H. (Translated by Donald Kenrick). 1997. From "Race Science" to the Camps. Volume 1 of The Gypsies during the Second World War Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press
• Kenrick, Donald and Grattan Puxon Gypsies Under the Swastika Univ of Hertfordshire Press, 2009 ISBN 978-1-902806-80-8
• Kenrick, D. (ed. and translator). 1999. In the Shadow of the Swastika. Volume 2 of The Gypsies during the Second World War Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press
• Kenrick, D. (ed.). 2006 The Final Chapter. Volume 3 of The Gypsies during the Second World War Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press
• Sonneman, T. 2002. Shared Sorrows: A Gypsy family remembers the Holocaust Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press
• Winter, W. (Translated and annotated by Struan Robertson) Winter Time: Memoirs of a German Sinto who survived Auschwitz Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press
• Gilbert, Martin (2002). The Routledge Atlas of the Holocaust. London: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-28145-8. See Map 182 p 141 (with deaths by country) & Map 301 p 232. Note: formerly The Dent Atlas of the Holocaust; 1982, 1993.

External links

• Historical Amnesia: The Romani Holocaust—Desicritics
• Extensive online resource on the Holocaust of the Romanies from Holocaust Survivors and Remembrance Project: "Forget You Not"
• Non-Jewish Victims of Persecution in Germany—About the Holocaust, Yad Vashem
• Histories, Narratives and Documents of the Roma and Sinti (Gypsies), Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, University of Minnesota
• sintiundroma.de (German) (English)
• A Brief Romani Holocaust Chronology
• Roma-Sinti Genocide (Parajmos) Resources, Prevent Genocide International
• Memorial of Poraimos (Romani)
• Porajmos.com - a project by Yahad - In Unum and Roma Dignity
• Roma and Sinti Under-Studied Victims of Nazism (Symposium Proceedings), PDF, 98 р.
• Persecution and resistance of Gypsies under Nationalsocialism (in German)
• Gypsies: A Persecuted Race
• A People Uncounted. The Untold Story of the Roma. Dir. Aaron Yeger. 2011. Film.
• Genocide of the Roma by the German Nazis on the Combat Genocide Association website