November 18 Homework Update

Our first research and writing assignment included choosing one of the five groups for reporting back to the class. The assignments were handed out, and the two remaining groups to review included the Sinti and Roma and the Jehova's Witnesses. I've completed my assignment and posted the reports below. We will review these in our next class, as well as the three remaining groups.

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Sinti and Roma

Europeans viewed Gypsies as social outcasts, a group with strange clothing, language and culture. The Nazis viewed Gypsies as racially inferior, and sought to prevent racial mixing to protect the “superior Aryan race” from impurity. Beginning in 1933, the Nazis made laws and created government offices to further restrict or eliminate the rights of Gypsies.

(Brown patch for Gypsies in the camps)

Laws against the Gypsies

• 1933 “Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Defects” government doctors force-sterilized Gypsies, part-Gypsies and Gypsies in mixed marriages.
• 1933 “Law Against Dangerous Habitual Criminals” Gypsies and others arrested and sent to concentration camps.
• Nuremburg Racial Laws, passed in 1935, prohibited mixed marriages, deprived Gypsies of their civil rights
• 1936 office to “Combat the Gypsy Menace” formed

Force movement of Gypsies to camps

• 1936, Berlin Zigeunerlager created, 600 Gypsies moved to special camp, near a sewage dump and cemetery. Three water pumps and two toilets meant disease spread rapidly. Zigeunerlager created in many other German cities.
• 1938: Austria’s Gypsies fall under laws, camps created in Austria for forced labor.
• 1938: 1000 Gypsies exported to Buchenwald, Dachau, Sachsenhausen and Lichtenburg
• 1939: several thousand sent to Mauthausen, Ravensbruck, Dachau and Buchenwald.

220,000 – 500,000 Gypsies were killed by the Nazis

• Einsatzgruppen used to kill thousands of Gypsies in Ukraine, Russia and Poland
• Fall 1941 in Serbia, almost all adult male gypsies and male Jews killed by German firing squads
• November 1941, 5000 Gypsies were sent to Lodz ghetto and then to Chelmno, and were some of the first victims of the gas vans in late 1941.
• In the summer of 1942, German and Polish Gypsies were transported to Treblinka and gassed.
• December 16, 1942, Heinrich Himmler ordered the deportation of Gypsies and part-Gypsies to Auschwitz-Birkenau. 23,000 transported to a Gypsy camp there, most killed through gassing, starvation and disease.
• Gypsy camp at Auschwitz liquidated on August 2 and 3, 1944, 2,897 gassed, and 1,400 remaining were moved to Buchenwald and Ravensbruck work camps.