Remembering Holocaust of the Romas, Europe’s most discriminated community
In 2015 the European Parliament promulgated 2 August as the annual “European Roma Holocaust Memorial Day” to mark the genocide of 500,000 European Romani people
By Md. Zameer Anwar
Romani people remain till today the most prosecuted community of Europe and have been targeted with more ferocity and savageness than any other community. Almost everywhere, their fundamental rights are transgressed and threatened. Racist violence targeting Roma is commonplace. Discrimination against Roma in employment, education, health care, administrative and other services is the order of the day in most of the European societies, and hate speech intensifies the anti-Romani stereotypes typical of European public opinion.
History demonstrates that the Romani people have always been the beau ideal of constructive and positive integration, living as equal among equals but keeping their cultural heritage alive – provided they are not rejected, alienated, burnt, gassed and slaughtered – mainly during the Nazi regime. Roma community was lost to the history of the Holocaust until 2015 when the European Parliament through a resolution promulgated 2 August as the annual “European Roma Holocaust Memorial Day” to commemorate and remember the genocide of 500,000 European Romani people including women and children. For almost four decades the German authorities and institutions denied the genocide of Roma, perpetrated by the Nazis on the ground of racial inferiority. In 1982, the West German government recognized racially motivated massacre of Roma. In 2011, the Polish parliament officially adopted August 2 as a day of commemoration for the Romani genocide, the next year the Croatian government followed the suit.
In 1926, Bavaria- the state of Germany initiated one of the first legislations against Roma that necessitated the registration of all Romani people with the authorities in order to regulate their movement. The same law was enacted throughout the country by the German government in 1929. This legislation gave way to a number of draconian legislations based on ideology of pure blood and German Aryan racial superiority.
In July, 1933, ‘German Aryan racial superiority’ law and in November of the same year, Law against ‘Dangerous Habitual Criminals’ were enacted which deemed Roma as racially inferior. As a result, Hitler ordered sterilization of Roma under the law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring. Finally, in September, 1935 Law for ‘the Protection of German Blood and Honor’ (Nuremberg Race Laws) was introduced which empowered the authorities to arrest and incarcerate the Roma in prisons and concentration camps. During twelve years of Nazi rule Romani people in Germany were incarcerated in prisons, labor camps and concentration camps. Around half a million Roma were killed in the Holocaust. Even thereafter, persecution continued particularly in Central and Eastern Europe where Roma constituted 10% of total population of Bulgaria and Romania.
De facto, World War II brought about the most horrendous troubles recorded in the history of Roma community who suffered the culmination of cruelty, bestiality and inhumanity in the twentieth century. The first mass genocide of Holocaust came about in January 1940 when 250 Romani children from Brno were killed in Buchenwald and their dead bodies were used as guinea-pigs to test the efficacy of the Zyklon-B cyanide gas crystals which were later put to use in the gas chambers (Proester, 1940). On 16th December 1942, Heinrich Himmler signed the order for sending Germany’s Sinti/Roma to Auschwitz.
With connivance of Nazi authorities, the Pavelic regime in Croatia and Antonescu in Romania had implemented anti-Roma measures amounting to genocide. The Nazi provided the framework for destruction to Pavelic regime, as result 75 per cent of local Roma was decimated in Croatia where as in Romania one third of Roma died of typhus epidemics on account of excruciatingly agonizing plight in Transnistria camp and besides Romanian policemen along with SS men occasionally killed Roma.
In Vichy France, the persecution of Roma persisted according to the earlier discriminatory legislation dealing harshly with nomads. In March 1942, Vichy government established a special camp for itinerant Roma at Saliers in Southeast France. As Vichy regime deemed internment as the best way of assimilation but it resulted in persecution and privation of Romani people.
Fixing the number of Romani people who were killed and murdered in the Holocaust has not been feasible or easy. As Bernard Streck (in Rakelmann, 1979) stated that any effort to determine the casualties and tolls in terms of numbers cannot be ascertained through the lists or camp files, because most of Roma died in Eastern and Southern Europe, shot by execution forces and Fascist gang members and many murders were not recorded as which took place in remote areas and forests where Roma were arrested. There are no correct figures of pre war Romani population in Europe, though the official census of 1939, conducted by Nazi Government, reported to be around two million that was certainly underrepresentation in terms of numbers. The figures of half a million of Romani tolls between 1939 and 1945 are too less to be tenable.
The Society for Threatened Peoples International (STPI) appraised the deaths of 277,100 Romani people during the Second World War. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum estimated the number of Sinti and Roma killed was between 220,000 and 500,000. Martin Gilbert reported that between 220,000 and 700,000 Romani people in Europe were killed, including 15,000 (mainly from the Soviet Union) in Mauthausen in January–May 1945. Dr. Sybil Milton, a historian at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Research Institute, said the number of lives lost was between a half-million and a million-and-a-half.
It was Raphael Lemkin who coined the word genocide, was the first scholar who raised the issue of genocide related to Roma community. Lemkin stated, Roma along with Jews and Slavs were the victims of holocaust perpetrated by Nazi. He said in one of his speeches on Radio on October 1955 that almost all the gypsies/ Roma were destroyed by Nazi. Another prominent Holocaust scholar Holler narrated how the members of Security Unit Police forced a group of Romani people to dance half naked in freezing temperature prior to killing them. He further noted that macabre torture and brutality of persecution were committed by German Filed Police unit against a group of three hundred Roma including women and children.
The gory massacre of Roma and Sinti culminated on 2 August 1944, when Nazi Germans went on killing spree across the Zigeunerlager (“Gypsy/ Roma camp”) at Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps where 2,897 Romani people were annihilated as a as part of Hitler’s genocidal plan. However Roma genocide was masqueraded and lesssystematically pursued. The lack of recognition of pogroms reflects the long-standing discrimination against Roma. In recent years awareness of the Roma holocaust started accelerating and Roma community across the world observe 2nd August as commemoration of Auschwitz holocaust, known in Romani language Porajmos or Samudaripen, for paying tribute to the victims as well as a testifying the strength of the survivors, besides making advocacy of Roma rights, social inclusion and the improvement of the current economic situation of the community.
This commemorative event is a pledge to snuff out the historical amnesia and address the xenophobic sentiments by mobilizing the concerted efforts to raise awareness about Europe’s darkest period in order to avoid repetition of such genocide.
The author is Senior Research Associate,
Centre for Roma Studies and Cultural Relations, Antar Rashtriya Sahayog Parishad-ARSP (Indian Council for International Co-operation)
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