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Gypsies in the Holocaust


"Gypsies", or the "Roma" as they prefer to be called, are an ethnic group which originated in India (their language - Romany - is directly descended from Sanskrit) which for unknown reasons took to a wandering life-style in the late middle ages. Eventually they reached Europe and became part of the ethnic mix of many countries, contributing not a little in areas such a music and the arts.

Because they were strangers to many of the people they moved among, strong prejudices grew up, and indeed continue to this day. Although they were indisputably "Aryan" according to the Nazi racial typology, they were pursued relentlessly.

Gypsies in Auschwitz - Part 1




The deportations and executions of the Gypsies came under Himmler's authority. On December 16, 1942, Himmler issued an order to send all Gypsies to the concentration camps, with a few exceptions...



`One day, while I was working near the gate, I noticed the Germans and Ukrainians making special preparations...meanwhile the gate opened, and about 1,000 Gypsies were brought in (this was the third transport of Gypsies). About 200 of them were men, and the rest women and children...all the Gypsies were taken to the gas chambers and then burned'...

Gypsies from the General Government [Poland] who were not sent to Auschwitz and to the operation Reinhard camps were shot on spot by the local police or gendarms. In the eastern region of the Cracow district, in the counties of Sanok, Jaslo, and Rzeszow, close to 1,000 Gypsies were shot..."

Excerpted from. Yitzhak Arad, BELZEC, SOBIBOR, TREBLINKA - the Operation Reinhard Death Camps Indiana University Press -, 1987.,--pp150-153--

According to the The Institut Fuer Zeitgeschicthe, in Munich, at least 4000 gypsies were been murdered by gas at Auschwitz-Birkenau. (See victim count, Holocaust Almanac)

Gypsies in Auschwitz - Part 2

"Like the Jews, Gypsies were singled out by the Nazis for racial persecution and annihilation. They were `nonpersons,' of `foreign blood,' `labor-shy,' and as such were termed asocials. To a degree, they shared the fate of the Jews in their ghettos, in the extermination camps, before firing squads, as medical guinea pigs, and being injected with lethal substances.

Ironically, the German writer Johann Christof Wagenseil claimed in 1697 that Gypsies stemmed from German Jews. A more contemporary Nazi theorist believed that `the Gypsy cannot, by reason of his inner and outer makeup (Konstruktion), be a useful member of the human community.'<70>

The Nurembuerg Laws of 1935 aimed at the Jews were soon amended to include the Gypsies. In 1937, they were classified as asocials, second-class citizens, subject to concentration camp imprisonment. <71> As early as 1936, some had been sent to camps. After 1939, Gypsies from Germany and from the German-occupied territories were shipped by the thousands first to Jewish ghettos in Poland at Warsaw, Lublin, Kielce, Rabka, Zary, Siedlce and others. <72> It is not known how many were killed by the Einsatzgruppen charged with speedy extermination by shooting. For the sake of efficiency Gypsies were also shot naked, facing their pre-dug graves. According to the Nazi experts, shooting Jews was easier, they stood still, `while the Gypsies cry out, howl, and move constantly, even when they are already standing on the shooting ground. Some of them even jumped into the ditch before the volley and pretended to be dead.' <73> The first to go were the German Gypsies; 30,000 were deported East in three waves in 1939, 1941 and 1943. Those married to Germans were exempted but were sterilized, as were their children after the age of twelve. <74>

Just how were the Gypsies of Europe `expedited'? Adolf Eichmann, chief strategist of these diabolical logistics, supplied the answer in a telegram from Vienna to the Gestapo:


Open season was declared on the Gypsies, too. For a while Himmler wished to exempt two tribes and `only' sterilize them, but by 1942 he signed the decree for all Gypsies to be shipped to Auschwitz. <76> There they were subjected to all that Auschwitz meant, including the medical experiments, before they were exterminated.

Gypsies perished in Dachau, Mauthasusen, Ravensbruck and other camps. At Sachsenhausen they were subjected to special experiments that were to prove scientifically that their blood was different from that of the Germans. The doctors in charge of this `research' were the same ones who had practiced previously on black prisoners of war. Yet, for `racial reasons' they were found unsuitable for sea water experiments. <77> Gypsies were often accused of atrocities committed by others; they were blamed, for instance, for the looting of gold teeth from a hundred dead Jews abandoned on a Rumanian road. <78>

Gypsy women were forced to become guinea pigs in the hands of Nazi physicians. Among others they were sterilized as `unworthy of human reproduction' (fortpflanzungsunwuerdig), only to be ultimately annihilated as not worthy of living. ... At that, the Gypsies were the luckier ones; in Bulgaria, Greece, Denmark and Finland they were spared. <80>

For a while there was a Gypsy Family Camp in Auschwitz, but on August 6, 1944, it was liquidated. Some men and women were shipped to German factories as slave labor; the rest, about 3,000 women, children and old people, were gassed. <81>

No precise statistics exist about the extermination of European Gypsies. Some estimates place the number between 500,000 and 600,000, most of them gassed in Auschwitz. <82> Others indicated a more conservative 200,000 Gypsy victims of the Holocaust. <83>"


<70> Raul Hilberg, "The Destruction of the European Jews" (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1961), p.641; quotation by Staatsrat Turner, chief of the civil administration in Serbia, October 26, 1941, in ibid., p.438

<71> Donald Kenrick and Grattan Puxon, "Destiny of Europe's Gypsies" (New York: Basic Books, 1972), p.72

<72> Jan Yoors, "Crossing, A Journal of Survival and Resistance in World War II" (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1971), pp. 33-34

<73> Hilberg, p. 439

<74> Ruzena Bubenickova, et al., "Tabory utrpeni a smrti" (Camps of Martyrdom and Death)(Prague: Svoboda, 1969), pp. 189-190

<75> Simon Wiesenthal, "The Murderers Among Us" (New York: Bantam, 1967) pp. 237-238

<76> Kendrick, pp. 88-90


<78> ibid., p.489


<80> Kenrick, p.100

<81> Ota Kraus and Erich Kulka, "Tovarna na smrt" (Death Factory) (Prague: Nase vojsko, 1957), p.200


<83> Gilbert, Martin. "The Holocaust, Maps and Photographs" (New York : Mayflower Books, 1978. p.22; Kendrick, p. 184

Extracted from "WOMEN IN THE RESISTANCE AND IN THE HOLOCAUST: THE VOICES OF EYEWITNESSES" Edited (and with introduction) by Vera Laska. Greenwood Press, Westport & London, 1983. LOC 82-12018, ISBN 0-313-23457-4

Gypsies in Auschwitz - Part 3







(c)Paul Halsall Aug 1997