The Gipsy World

ON GYPSY GENOCIDE IN EUROPE:

Gypsies, Romanies, Zingaros ruled over a community as an ethnic community dating from the royal kingdoms on the Indian subcontinent with similar cultural characteristics despite enormous differences in the subgroups.

Today they are found mainly in Europe, the biggest minority groups are n the european Union, although they are also spread out across the world.

Of the calculated one million gypsies that lived in Europe before the war, at least 220, 000 died.

The Nazis considered the gyspy ‘inferior’ and the fate of the Romany people was similar to the Jews. The Romany were subjected to imprisonment, hard labour and even were massacred. Many were also sent to extermination camps.

The Einsatzgruppen (trucks for slaughter) were responsible for the death of tens of thousands of Romany in the territories of Eastern Europe that were occupied by the Germans. In addition thousands were also murdered in the extermination camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, y Treblinka. The Nazis also incarcerated thousand of Romany in th econcentrationc camps at Bergen-Belsen, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Dachau, Mauthausen, y Ravensbrueck.

In the occupied areas of Europe the Germans imprisoned them and deported them to camps in Poland and Germany. Many Romany in Poland, Holland, Hungary, Italy, Yugoslavia and Albania met the same fate. In the Baltic States and the Russian lands occupied by the Nazis the Romany were treated like the Jews and the Communist leaders. Thousands of men women and children were massacred in firing squads together with Jews in Babi Yar, near Kiev.

In France restrictive measures were already placed on the gypsy even before the arrival of the Germans. The deportations of the Romany people began when France was occupied by the Nazis and deportation began in late 1941. The majority ended up in the extermination camps like Buchenwald, Dachau and Ravensbrueck.

In Roumania there was no clear political plan to exterminate the gypsy. However in 1941 between 20,000 and 26, 000 Romanies from the Bucarest area were deported to Trasnistria, in the Ukraine where thousands died of disease, starvation and maltreatment. In Serbia in the autumn of 1941 the entire population of male gypsies together with the majority of male Jews suffered mass executions as repercussions for a massacre of German soldiers by the resistance movement. In Croatia the Ustasa, (a group of fascists allied with the Germans) murdered some 26,000 – 28,000 gypsies. Many were detained and massacred in the concentration camp in Jasenovac.

It is not known actually how many Romany died in the Holocaust, but historians calculate that the Germans and their allies killed 25-50% of all European gypsies living at that time. After the war the anti-gypsy discrimination continued when the new German Federal Republic decreed that all the measures taken before 1943 were politically legitimate and therefore the Romany were give no rights as compensation. Imprisonment, sterilisation and even deportation were considered ‘politically legitimate’.

The German Chancellor Helmut Kohl recognised the Nazi genocide of the Romany in 1982. Up till now the majority of the Romany that have had their rights returned by that German repealed law are now in fact already dead.