Racism - A Short History - George M Fredrickson.pdf - WNLibrary

THREE Climax and Retreat
on the path from being merely an overtly racist regime
to being a deliberately genocidal one distinguishes it quite
sharply from the American and South African cases. 45
Nazi racism of course applied to all non-Aryans and
not simply the Jews. Proclamations implementing the Nuremberg
Laws put Gypsies in the same pariah category as
Jews, and a substantial portion of them were placed in concentration
camps within Germany in 1936, from which
some would eventually be sent East to die in the gas chambers
of Auschwitz. But, as a recent study has shown, much
confusion existed on the precise racial status of Gypsies,
and apparently no clear decision was ever made to exterminate
them as a race. It was the belief of Gestapo chief Heinrich
Himmler that “racially pure” Gypsies were direct descendants
of the ancient Aryans and should be preserved as
subjects of ethnological research into the early development
of the contemporary “master race.” Consequently,
only Gypsy “Mischlinge” were sent to Auschwitz. Whereas
Jews of mixed descent were for a time treated with somewhat
greater leniency than full Jews, the opposite preference
operated in relation to Gypsies. 46 As for the hundreds
of mixed offspring sired on German women by French colonial
African soldiers in the Rhineland during the early
postwar years, they were rounded up and sterilized in 1937,
thus saving German blood from an intolerable source of
pollution. 47 Had there been a significant black population
in Germany, they might conceivably have been sent to gas
chambers along with all the Jews who could be apprehended
and some of the Gypsies. Nevertheless, the German
fixation on the Jews clearly did not depend on large numbers:
they were only about 1 percent of the population
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