the quest for racial purity - United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

arracks. The SS refrained from carrying out the action at that time, and the Romani
prisoners’ defiance may have helped postpone their demise. However, on August 2–3, 1944,
the SS destroyed the Gypsy camp at Birkenau and used the gas chambers to murder the
nearly 3,000 remaining men, women, and children.
As with all so-called racial enemies of the Nazi regime, German SS and police units extended
the killing of Roma into German-occupied eastern Europe. After Germany invaded the Soviet
Union in June 1941, the Mobile Killing Squads (Einsatzgruppen), Order Police battalions, and
indigenous collaborators began shooting Roma together with Jews. On so-called racial grounds,
they killed tens of thousands of Romani men, women, and children in those massacres.
In western and southern Europe, the fate of Roma varied from country to country
depending on local circumstances. In France, authorities had placed restrictions on the
movement of Roma even before the German invasion. In northern France in October
1940, the German military commander ordered the arrest and internment of all Roma
in the occupied zone. French authorities did not shrink from implementing this order;
indeed, they participated in the roundups and served as guards in the camps. A number of
the Roma incarcerated in camps in both occupied and unoccupied France died of starvation
and disease; many others were eventually released during the war.
The German authorities deported 360 Roma from Belgium and northern France to
Auschwitz-Birkenau in January 1944; 121 Belgian Roma were registered at Auschwitz;
only 13 survived the war. From Holland, where, as in Belgium, itinerant Roma were subject
to discrimination and persecution, the SS and police deported 245 persons designated
as Gypsies from Westerbork to Auschwitz, where the SS classified them as “Polish Gypsies”
in the camp records. In Italy, the Fascist dictatorship interned some itinerant Roma
after 1938, although the Italian police released many of them after the fall of Mussolini in
July 1943. Some joined the Italian resistance after the German occupation in September
1943; German forces killed as many as 2,000 Italian Roma in occupied Italy.
In the German puppet state of Croatia, Ustas˘ a, Croatian fascists, killed between 26,000
and 30,000 Roma, between 8,000 and 15,000 of them in the Jasenovac concentration
camp system. In occupied Serbia, German soldiers and SS units shot Roma and Jews in
reprisal for partisan attacks against the military; the ratio was 50 to 100 people for every
German soldier killed. Estimated numbers of Roma killed in Serbia range widely, between
1,000 and 20,000. For Greece and Bulgaria, the numbers also vary, with about 200 Roma
killed in Greece and perhaps as many as 5,000 in Bulgaria. In Slovakia, although itinerant
Roma were subject to persecution by the so-called Slovak Republic, few were killed before
the Germans invaded the country in August 1944 to quell an uprising. In the aftermath of
fighting, German forces and Slovak collaborators shot between 200 and 500 Roma.
106 | nazi ideology and the holocaust