Historical Dictionary of the Gypsies (Romanies) - Scarecrow Press

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xl • INTRODUCTION continuing until the 1960s. In this way, many families who would have settled down were forced back into nomadism. Discriminatory laws (on language and dress) fell into abeyance, but laws against nomadism remained a threat, in both western and eastern Europe, to those Gypsies practicing traditional crafts. Studies from all over the world have shown that sedentary peoples have an inherent fear of the nomad, even when the latter performs useful services. The policy of banning nomadism without helping the nomads to settle proved a failure throughout Europe, and Gypsy nomadism continued unchecked until World War II. THE HOLOCAUST When the Nationalist Socialist Party came to power in Germany in 1933, the nomadic Gypsies were already subject to restrictions. But the Nazis regarded Gypsies as a race and made both nomads and sedentaries subject to the Nuremberg Laws of 1935. These forbade marriages between Gypsies and “Aryan” Germans. Adolf Hitler’s Germany saw the Gypsies as no less a danger to the purity of the German race than the Jews and set about their isolation and eventually their destruction. This policy of exclusion was a contrast to the assimilationist policies practiced in the past. Gypsies were now not allowed to practice music as a profession, and boxers were similarly barred from competition. Next, Gypsy children were excluded from school. Camps were set up for nomads on the edge of towns. They were guarded, and the inmates were not allowed to practice their traditional trades but were put into labor gangs. Even sedentary Gypsies were removed from their houses and placed in these internment camps. In 1939 it was decided to send all 30,000 Gypsies from Germany and Austria to Poland. In May 1940 the first steps in this program were taken with the expulsion of more than 3,000. The deportations were stopped largely because of a shortage of transport. In 1942 Heinrich Himmler, the head of the Schutzstaffel (Storm Troopers) (SS), signed the so-called Auschwitz Decree, and in the following year some 10,000 German Gypsies were sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp. A sterilization campaign was undertaken both within and outside the camps. The slave labor of the Gypsies was needed, for ex
ample, in the underground factories where the V1 and V2 rockets were made, but they were not to be permitted to reproduce. In the occupied countries of eastern Europe, the Einsatzgruppen task forces massacred Gypsies in the woods outside the towns where they lived. Then extermination camps were opened, the four largest being Belzec, Chelmno, Sobibor, and Treblinka. Gypsies were brought to these camps—sometimes in their own caravans—and shot or gassed, alongside Jews. It is estimated that between a quarter million and a half million Gypsies were killed during the Nazi period. AFTER 1945 INTRODUCTION • xli In the first years following the end of the Nazi domination of Europe, the Gypsy community was in disarray. The small educational and cultural organizations that had existed before 1939 had been destroyed. The family structure was broken with the death of the older people, the guardians of tradition. While in the camps, the Gypsies had been unable to keep up their customs—the Romanía—concerning the preparation of food and the washing of clothes. They solved the psychological problems this presented by not speaking about the time in the camps. Only a small number of Gypsies could read or write, so they could not tell their own story. But also they were unwilling to tell their stories to others, and few non-Gypsies were interested anyway. In the many books written describing the Nazi period and the persecution of the Jews, Gypsies usually appear as a footnote or an appendix. It was hard for the Gypsies to come to terms with the Holocaust, for a persecution on this scale had never occurred before. There had been executions of smaller numbers, but nothing like this. A group of survivors in Munich began collecting evidence of the Gypsy genocide, but it was not until 20 years after the downfall of Hitler that Jewish writers such as Miriam Novitch, Ben Sijes, and Sylvia Steinmetz made available to the public a documentation of the fate of the Gypsies under the Nazis. No global reparations were made, and not many individuals received restitution. Eventually those Gypsies who held German citizenship did receive compensation for their suffering. In recent years, Swiss banks and other international funds have helped individual aging survivors.
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