By Maria Sierra, Professor of Contemporary History, University of Seville
“We do not need a memory that shies away from the confrontation between victims and executioners, that eases consciences. We need a memory that walks through the carriages, that stands on the ramp, that sees the faces, that hears the screams”, Ewald Hanstein, Auschwitz survivor (Meine hunder Leben (‘My Hundred Lives’), 2005, p. 156)
More than half a million people were murdered by the Nazi regime and its collaborators simply for being considered “Gypsies”1. This number continues to rise as researchers uncover new mass graves on the Eastern Front of World War II. This means that more than two thirds of the Roma people who lived in Europe before 1933 were victims of a genocide that, in proportional terms, may have been even more devastating than that of the Jewish people during the Holocaust. The comparison is not just supported by numbers, but also by the intentions and methods used: treated under the Nuremberg Laws as an “inferior race”, the so-called “Zigeuner” were expelled from their jobs or recruited for forced labour, subjected to sterilisation and plunder, registered as criminals, and violently mistreated, if not outright tortured, under various so-called scientific study techniques. They were imprisoned in local jails or camps and deported to extermination camps and ghettos spread across the vast Nazi concentration camp network. Many fell into mass graves, shot by firing squads or subjected to other brutal methods, and eventually endured the “death marches” with the collapse of the Third Reich. Even Auschwitz, the symbol of the Holocaust as an industrial and bureaucratised system of human liquidation, holds a prominent place in the history of the Romani genocide: in 1942, a “Zigeuner-lager” (Gypsy camp) was established there, envisioned by the Nazis as the “final solution” for this European minority.
The similarities with the much more well-known Jewish case are so numerous that it is not surprising that Jewish researchers were the first to detect the documentary traces of the mass murder of Romanies carried out by the Nazi regime. Written memoirs by Jewish survivors recall them as part of the racial “scum” of the camps (a term used by Simon Lacks). Raphael Lemkin himself, the man who coined the legal concept of ‘genocide’ after the war, included this group in his early reflections on the crimes of Nazism. It is true that there are also some differences between the two genocides: dates, legislative patterns, racial-scientific arguments and so on, but none as significant as the difference in their recognition and memory.
“Persecuting the Survivors”
This was the title of an article published in 1998 by Holocaust historian Sybil Milton, describing the fate of the Romani people after the war. The title is both expressive and accurate, given the extent to which the suffering of this persecution, whose racial motives were not recognised until much later, was ignored. It is true that, within the framework of the flawed post-war denazification, it was not until the mid-1960s that a series of high-profile trials (Eichmann, Auschwitz) confronted German and global public opinion with the genocidal nature of the destruction of the Jewish people. However, the legal journey for the Romani case was far more tortuous: according to the majority of German courts, what had happened to the “Gypsies” was not a consequence of Nazi racial (nor national or religious) persecution, but rather the consequence of police action to prevent crime. Although nuances were discussed (for example, around the 1943 decree that massively deported Romanies from a large part of Europe to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp), the legal discourse was based on the affirmation of the “known” asociality and criminal tendencies of “Gypsies”, thus perpetuating the Nazi legal-police logic.
Such a doctrine meant that for a long time, the persecution that sent thousands of Romanies to the ghettos and camps in Polish territories from 1940 onwards was not considered racially motivated. Nor was the persecution that, from the 1938 decree (the so-called “Combating the Gypsy Plague”), sent many others to detention camps after confiscating their property and subjected them to racial tests. Neither was the forced sterilisation of men, women, and children from even earlier dates considered persecution. The case of Dr. Ritter, head of the unit for the study and identification of “Gypsies”, is paradigmatic: despite his involvement with the Nazi criminal police, after the war, he became a professor at the University of Tübingen and later joined Frankfurt’s health service, where he worked as a child psychologist. He was exonerated after an investigation initiated by complaints from his victims, in which his claims were accepted (he argued that he did not know about the extermination and had only recommended sterilisation). Experts consulted during the trial relied on Ritter’s own work as the scientific basis for their arguments about the nature of “Gypsies”, while the victims’ testimonies were disregarded for their supposed lack of evidential strength. Eva Justin, his closest collaborator, who had written a doctoral thesis on the asociality of children with a “live test subject” who was later liquidated in the extermination camps, was also acquitted. Her youth and supposed inexperience were taken as mitigating factors in the trial.
Thus, administration experts and police officers who had participated in the persecution of the Romanies remained in the public service, while the criminal records and files constructed by the Nazis continued to be used for decades. The failure to acknowledge that the racial characterisation of the “Gypsies” by the Nazi regime was based on attributing a genetic criminality to all of them was closely related to the persistence of specifically anti-Gypsy racism, which was as ancient as it was socially widespread. In addition to the judicial and administrative disregard of the Romanies as victims, they continued to experience widespread prejudice and were treated as presumed criminals in everyday life. The fact that their suffering under Nazism had not sparked a societal shift in this regard was noted by historian Wolfgang Benz, who pointed out that the prejudices that had fuelled the Nazi anti-Gypsy racial machine were still alive in Germany. He wrote this in 1985, at a time when there remained a tacit agreement that this persecution had been somehow justified.
This is not just a German problem. In France, for example, the work of Lise Foisneau shows that not only were the internment camps for the Romanies prolonged after the war, but post-war violence also manifested itself in accusations of collaboration, arrests, and murders, all tinged with an anti-Gypsy bias. Furthermore, legal discrimination persisted for decades, as it was not until 1969 that a law was revised which required “nomads” to carry an anthropometric identity card, placing them in a legal limbo subject to special police surveillance, despite the motto “liberté-égalité-fraternité” emblazoned on the front of the document. Nor is this just a capitalist issue. On the other side of the wall, in the communist bloc, Romani communities suffered two paradoxically parallel processes. On the one hand, their suffering as a racialised group targeted for destruction during the war was rendered invisible; on the other hand, they were forced to assimilate into the dominant culture. In this first respect, what happened with a children’s story, Ede and Unku, written in 1931, is telling. It narrates the friendship between a working-class boy and a Romani girl. The book became compulsory school reading in East Germany from 1972 for its antifascist symbolism, bolstered by the author’s profile, John Heartfield’s photographs, and its inclusion in the infamous Nazi book burnings of 1933. However, its use in schools overlooked the suffering of a group persecuted on racial grounds, even though the protagonist was a real Romani girl. Erna (Unku in Romani) Lauenburger, who was deported with her family to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1943 and murdered a few months later. A 1981 film revisiting the story also failed to address the fate of the Romanies.
In general, post-war communist countries’ dominant narratives of national unity, which erased the racial identity of victims to highlight the role of the heroic, suffering “people”, were accompanied in the case of the Romanies by policies aimed at their assimilation into mainstream society. The forms of these policies varied widely, from forced sedentarisation but with some provision of resources (Bulgaria, the Soviet Union) to more repressive measures such as property confiscation (Poland) or forced sterilisation (Czechoslovakia). Although in some cases there were opportunities for education and social mobility, the cost of forced cultural assimilation was high. Additionally, where local populations had collaborated with Nazi authorities during the war, the official discourse afterwards placed all responsibility for the Romani genocide on the German occupiers, as happened in Romania with the deportation of thousands of Romanies to Transnistria.
From justice to the fight for memory
Post-war justice ignored the racial persecution of Europe’s Romanies, dismissing their claims, prolonging (and even reinstating) pre-existing anti-Gypsy laws, and ultimately perpetuating a racist discourse deeply rooted in society. At times, there appeared to be opportunities for legal and administrative recognition of the victims, such as when the Cologne court ruled in favour of claimants in 1963 who had fled Germany after being subjected to racial tests by Ritter’s team, establishing that they had been persecuted on ideological grounds. However, legal change was slow and fragmented. Meanwhile, the victims struggled to survive without assistance, their properties confiscated, and their families destroyed; they even sought to erase their Romani identity in the face of continued social stigma and police harassment, while the traumatic effects of the Holocaust were exacerbated by the prevailing silence.
The paralysis of the official channels could only be overcome through activism and the struggle for rights led by civil associations, shifting the battleground to the streets and public opinion. This was a multifaceted process, with initiatives that sometimes received support from non-Romani allies and the solidarity of some Jewish representatives. As early as the 1960s, some national organisations began to form, connecting the cause of defending the civil rights of those treated as second-class citizens with the demand for recognition of Nazi victims. The convergence of these local initiatives, not always easy, led to the First International Romani Congress (London, 1971), which explicitly took up the cause of Holocaust recognition, and was later formalised as the International Romani Union (1977). This is where the first comprehensive study on the Romani genocide originated, by Grattan Puxon and Donald Kenrick, published by the University of Sussex (“The Destiny of Europe’s Gypsies”, 1972).
It is logical, however, that it was in Germany, where the largest number of survivors lived, that the cause gained particular political momentum. The social climate began to change from the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, with a strong public debate about the significance of Nazism in the country’s history (the so-called Historians’ Dispute or Historikerstreit), which provided a favourable framework for a broad critical reassessment of the past. In this context, German Romani activists took a significant step forward in publicly defending their cause through demonstrations and other public actions laden with symbolic significance. A key moment was the success of the 1979 commemoration ceremony at the former Bergen-Belsen camp, which gathered around 2,500 people: German and international Romani representatives, genocide survivors and their descendants, Jewish representatives, and German and European parliamentarians. Shortly after, in 1980, a group of activists staged a hunger strike at the former Dachau camp to demand recognition of Romani Holocaust victims and to protest against the police’s continued use of Nazi criminal records. The campaign gained the support of the Social Democratic Party, and as a result, in 1982, the Zentralrat deutscher Sinti und Roma (Central Council of German Sinti and Roma) was established. During his visit to the newly established Council offices in Heidelberg, the then Chancellor of West Germany, Helmut Schmidt, officially recognised for the first time the existence of a genocide on racial grounds.
One of the Central Sinti Council’s most active battles from the late 1980s onwards was the fight for memory, demanding a rightful place in official Holocaust discourse and in the nation’s history. The project to build a memorial in Berlin as a site of remembrance and respect for the victims, an idea launched in 1988, became an opportunity to push this campaign into the public eye. This opinion was already stirred by competing views on the Holocaust’s meaning for national identity, the extent of recognition due to different victim groups, and the impact of these debates following the unification of the two Germanys in 1991. Indeed, the controversy over the memorial was long and was finally resolved by the German Parliament, which in 1999 agreed to build separate monuments for the various victim groups.
Some survivors became personally involved in the struggle to have their collective suffering under Nazism incorporated into official narratives. A handful of storytellers recognised the need to bear witness to their experiences through autobiographical writing and memoirs, with the dual purpose of attempting to overcome their trauma and forcing their neighbours to look them in the eye. The effort to break the wall of silence was especially significant as younger generations were now able to distance themselves from Nazism without having yet been educated about the persecution of the Romani people. Philomena Franz, the first Sinti to publish her memoirs as a survivor, began writing after her son was insulted at school as a “Zigeuner”. Recognising in this insult the same kind of racial prejudice that had driven the wheel of Romani genocide under Nazism, she began speaking to teachers and students about what had happened to her people, following a need to testify. From there, she began writing, something that had not been possible before the cultural and political shift of the 1980s. Her memoirs, published in 1985, paved the way for other survivors to follow (Ceija Stojka, Lily van Angeren-Franz, Walter Winter, Ewald Hanstein, and others).
Transcending – though not solving – national specifics, the memory of persecution suffered under Nazism has become a fundamental element of contemporary Romani identity in a transnational sense. In Spain, for example, where the Gypsies were not affected as such by Nazi racial policies, local associations commemorate the Holocaust in connection with the so-called “Great Round-up”, an 18th-century plan for the mass imprisonment of Spanish Gypsies aimed at their biological extinction. In Germany, meanwhile, associations competing with the Central Sinti Council have linked the historical suffering of the Nazi genocide with the plight of Romani migrants arriving from Eastern Europe, who lack the protection of German citizenship.
From the overexposed Jewish Holocaust to the blurred Romani genocide
The first memorial plaque in remembrance of the Romani genocide was installed at Dachau in 1982. It was not until 2005 that the European Parliament issued a resolution affirming the need for recognition, and then in 2012, the memorial for these victims of National Socialism was inaugurated in Berlin. This timeline reflects a delay in both recognition and study compared to the Jewish Holocaust. The gap had already formed in the immediate post-war period. While it is true that mainstream German (and European) society did not initially recognise the specificity of the Jewish genocide, and that antisemitism continued to be concealed behind questionable “denazification”, it is also true that Jewish victims could early on rely on a range of agencies and material resources to claim their rights. Similarly, scientific research soon gained momentum, fulfilling its dual social role of providing academic (and even judicial) support to survivors and promoting political and civic engagement.
As part of an active programme promoted on both sides of the Atlantic by Jewish groups, academic studies on the genocide of the Jewish people developed especially from the foundational work of Raul Hilberg (1961). The history of the Jewish Holocaust grew in scale as the discourse of its uniqueness was affirmed. There were also prominent Jewish historians, such as Henry Friedlander and the aforementioned Sybil Milton, who advocated for a broader focus on victim groups and addressed the Romani case in their studies. It is regrettable that the censorship of meaning recently imposed by the intergovernmental organisation IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) in defining “antisemitism”, with the aim of excluding comparisons and discussions of other genocides, betrays the legacy of these scholars and Jewish Holocaust survivors such as Simone Veil. Veil, who was President of the European Parliament in 1979, attended the protest organised by Romani activists at the Bergen-Belsen camp.
The academic study of the Romani genocide also shows a significant delay compared to the Jewish case. We can compare the date of Hilberg’s foundational work in 1961 with that of the book that played a similar academic role in Romani studies: Michael Zimmermann’s Rassenutopie und Genozid. Die nationalsozialistische “Lösung der Zigeunerfrage” (Racial Utopia and Genocide: The National Socialist “Solution to the Gypsy Question”), published in 1996. Following this inspiration, it has only been since the early 21st century that research on the Romani Holocaust has begun to develop and organise into academic programmes, as shown by two key state-of-the-field publications coordinated by Anton Weiss-Wendt (2013) and Celia Donert and Eve Rosenhaft (2023).
However, although the research into these two genocides differs significantly in terms of timing and resources, the most radical difference lies in the realm of public knowledge — the body of information and representations we manage as citizens, which shapes our perception of social issues. While the Jewish Holocaust is a topic that cinema, literature, the media, memorials, and museums have long introduced into mainstream culture, becoming a familiar reference point that – at times – prompts reflection, the Romani genocide is far less present in such cultural products. There are initiatives in the form of blogs, documentaries, and exhibitions, but much more work is needed to transfer this knowledge. Only sustained efforts over time can transform academic understanding into public knowledge, whether in a civic, educational, or commemorative sense. As long as the Romani genocide remains practically invisible in these spaces, our societies will not confront the anti-Gypsy racism embedded in the DNA of mainstream culture. We will continue to use language and engage in social practices that normalise a benign-seeming, yet insidiously harmful, form of racism (jokes, humour, TV programmes etc.) which, in reality, serves as a cultural support for actions as deadly as Nazi racial policy. And we are late: xenophobia and extreme nationalism, hallmarks of our present political moment, are not likely to foster self-criticism. This lack of memory poses a particularly grave danger.
- In this text, I use the word “Gypsy” (“Zigeuner” in German) as a historical term, always in quotation marks. Its deeply pejorative nature in several languages is integral to its meaning. For this reason, although I employ it when referring to historical texts or concepts, in my own discourse as the author of these lines, I have opted for the term Roma (Romani), an endonym that emerged from the First International Romani Congress (1971). Sinti refers to the Romani minority historically established in German-speaking regions; much like Gitano in Spain, these are self-referential terms used by these communities. ↩︎
Some resources
Berger, Karin: Unter den Brettern hellgrünes Gras (2005), documentary on the life of Ceija Stojka, survivor of the Romani genocide.
Gatlif, Tony: Korkoro (2008), film depicting the story of a Romani family under Nazi persecution.
Kos-Krauze, Joanna and Krauze, Krzysztof: Papusha (2013), biopic about Polish poet Bronislawa Wajs.
Navarro, David: My Holocaust. Philomena Franz (2022), open-access documentary available in EN/ES
Rosenhaft, Eve: “Strangers in Their Own Land: Romani Survivors in Europe 1945” (2021), open-access documentary on the life of Erna Lauenburger
Sierra, Maria: “Philomena Franz, narrator of the Romani Holocaust, study on the first Romani woman to recount her experiences under Nazism” EN/ES.
What happened to Unku?, open-access documentary on the life of Erna Lauenburger.