The Historiography of the Holocaust

Romanies and the Holocaust 387
In 1920, a psychiatrist, Karl Binding and a magistrate, Alfred Hoche, published
a jointly authored book called The Eradication of Lives Undeserving of Life, 17
using a phrase first coined by Richard Liebich with specific reference to Romanies
nearly 60 years earlier 18 and used shortly after him, again specifically referring
to Romanies, by Rudolf Kulemann. 19 Among the three groups that they said were
‘unworthy of life’ were the ‘incurably mentally ill’, and it was to this group
that Romanies were considered to belong. Euthanasia and particularly nonpropagation
through sterilization were topics receiving a good deal of attention
at that time in the United States; Nazi programmes were to an extent based on
American research. 20 Perceived Romani ‘criminality’ was seen as a transmitted
genetic trait, though no account was taken of the centuries of exclusion of the
Romanies from German society, which made subsistence theft a necessity for
survival. A law incorporating the phrase lives undeserving of life was put into
effect just four months after Hitler became Chancellor of the Third Reich.
During the 1920s, the legal oppression of Romanies in Germany intensified
considerably, despite the official statutes of the Weimar Republic which stated
that all its citizens were equal. In 1920 they were forbidden to enter parks and
public baths; in 1925 a conference on ‘The Gypsy Question’ was held which
resulted in the drafting of laws requiring unemployed Romanies to be sent to
work camps ‘for reasons of public security’, and for all Romanies to be registered
with the police. After 1927 everyone, even Romani children, had to carry
identification cards bearing their fingerprints and photographs. In 1929, The
Central Office for the Fight against the Gypsies in Germany was established in
Munich, and in 1933, just ten days before the Nazis came to power, government
officials in Burgenland, Austria, called for the withdrawal of all civil rights from
the Romani people.
In September 1935, Romanies became subject to the restrictions of the
Nuremberg Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honour, which forbade
marriage between Germans and ‘non-Aryans’, specifically Jews, Romanies
and people of African descent. In 1937, the National Citizenship Law relegated
Romanies and Jews to the status of second-class citizens, depriving them of
their civil rights. Also in 1937, Heinrich Himmler issued a decree entitled ‘The
Struggle against the Gypsy Plague’ which reiterated that Romanies of mixed
blood were the most likely to engage in criminal activity, and required that all
information on Romanies be sent from the regional police departments to the
Reich Central Office. In their book published in 1943, the Danish sociologists
Erik Bartels and Gudrun Brun echoed this position, evidently unaware that the
sterilization of Romanies had been underway for a decade:
The pure Gypsies present no great problem, if only we realise that their mentality
does not allow of their admittance to the well-ordered general society . . .
the mixed Gypsies cause considerably greater difficulties (...nothing good