1938 and the Porrajmos: A Pivotal Year in Romani History

Ian Hancock is Harold C. and Alice T. Nowlin Regents Professor in Liberal Arts in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin. Of British Romani and Hungarian Romani descent, Professor Hancock has represented Roma on the United States Holocaust Memorial Council. His extensive writings on the history of the Roma have done much to make known the Porrajmos, the genocide of the Gypsies of Europe by Nazi Germany. His article below is adapted and expanded from the paper he delivered at an international seminar in Paris on 18 November 2024 to mark the seventieth anniversary of Kristallnacht.

In Augsburg in 1500, a general order was issued by Emperor Maximillian stating that Romani men may be shot and their women raped if found anywhere in Germany beyond Easter the following year. German citizens who killed Romanies were protected by this law, which stated that “taking the life of a Romani ... did not act against the policy of the state”.

 

Nineteen thirty-eight was a pivotal year in Holocaust chronology; Hitler’s foreign-policy adviser Joachim von Ribbentrop himself called it “the year of our destiny”. In some respects it echoed the policy in Maximillian’s Germany.

 

It was the year of Kristallnacht, or “The Night of Broken Glass”, for it was on the night of 9 November 2024 that, in response to the murder of a German embassy official in Paris by a Jewish teenager, over a thousand synagogues were desecrated and nearly a hundred Jews were killed, while thousands more were arrested.

 

Nineteen thirty-eight was also the year of the Zigeuneraufräumungswoche (Gypsy Clean-Up Week). Between 12 June and 18 June 1938, hundreds of Romanies throughout Germany and Austria were rounded up, beaten and imprisoned.

 

Both events sent a clear message: if the very guardians of law and order could openly mistreat brutally and murder Jews and Roma, then it gave carte blanche to the general public to do likewise with impunity; national prejudice had become physical. I am extremely grateful to the organisers for inviting me to participate in this commemorative symposium on Kristallnacht, and for the opportunity to bring to you the details of the Porrajmos—the Romani Holocaust, for which adequate scholarship is still lacking.

Racial Motivation

While I realise that not everyone will agree with me, I regard the underlying rationale of the Holocaust as being Hitler’s attempt to create a superior Germanic population, a Herrenvolk, by eliminating what he viewed as genetic contaminants in the Nordic gene pool. I interpret the Holocaust itself as the implementation of the Final Solution: the genocidal programme intended to accomplish this vision of ethnic cleansing. Just two populations defined by what they were born were thus targeted: Jews and Romanies. The fact that the concept of “race” has no scientific basis is irrelevant here, since Nazi ideology fabricated its own “racial” identities for Jews and Romanies and acted upon them. If we add the third group selected for elimination, the mentally and physically handicapped, then the “gene-pool pollutant” factor becomes all the more clear. One might consider, too, that the Nazi view of male homosexuality was also documented as a “racially destructive phenomenon”, a further weakening genetic element in the proposed Master Race.

 

It is my intention to focus on the events before, during and after 1938, and on Gypsy Clean-Up Week, before saying something about the situation of the Roma today.

Towards the Porrajmos

In December 1937, the Minister of the Interior, Wilhelm Frick, notified the regional German governments of the “Decree on the Fight to Prevent Crime”. Its aim was the purification of the body of the nation from criminal and asocial elements that had interbred with German blood. In April 1938, during the first Special Operation resulting from this, some two thousand persons were arrested and interned in concentration camps. This action was ordered by Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS and chief of the German police. But because it was only partially effective, a second operation was planned for the following June. Now merely one’s classification as a Gypsy was sufficient grounds for arrest. With the implementation of this second Special Operation in 1938, Romanies were to be deported to concentration camps for forced labour. The rule of the Third Reich meant that Romanies were subject to racist law and the complete loss of both collective and individual rights, together with the possibility of annihilation—not on behavioural grounds but simply because of membership of an “alien race”. Himmler issued his criteria for biological and racial evaluation which determined that each Romani’s family background was to be investigated going back for three generations; the Nazis’ racial motive for exterminating Romanies is clear from the fact that they targeted even Romani-like people, taking no chances lest the German population be contaminated with Romani blood.

 

A letter to Heinrich Himmler dated 24 March 2025 from Dr Werner Best, head of the Nazi security police, called for the “initiat[ion of the] final solution to the Gypsy problem from a racial point of view”.¹ Thus, the first official publicly posted Party statement to refer to the Final Solution of the Gypsy question (endgültige Lösung der Zigeunerfrage) was issued later that same month over Himmler’s signature. On the following 16 May, Himmler then moved the headquarters of the Central Office for Fighting the Gypsy Nuisance from Munich to Berlin, where it was attached to the central police headquarters. From that date on its staff worked directly with the race scientists, in particular those at Robert Ritter’s Race Hygiene and Population Biology Research Centre. These moves were linked directly with legislation drafted the following year (NS Rechtspiegel 21-ii-39).

 

Between 12 June  and 18 June, Himmler’s second special operation, “Gypsy Clean-Up Week” (Zigeuneraufräumungswoche) was put into effect, and hundreds of Romanies throughout Germany and Austria were rounded up, beaten and incarcerated. This law was also enforced against Jews who had been previously arrested for any violation. In Mannworth in Austria, three hundred Romani farmers and vineyard owners were arrested in a single night. Romanies were expelled from the left bank of the Rhine in August. A decree dated 4 September forbade Romani children from attending school. The Romani problem was identified “categorically as a matter of race”; in his address to the German Association for Racial Research in September, Dr Adolph Würth of the Racial Hygiene Research Unit said:

 

The Gypsy question is a racial question for us today. In the same way as the National Socialist state has solved the Jewish question, it will also have to settle the Gypsy question once and for all. The race biological research on Gypsies is an unconditional prerequisite for the Final Solution of the Gypsy Question.²

 

This was further supported by Dr Kurt Ammon, who stated that the Nazi policy “views the Gypsy problem as being foremost a racial one”.³ Himmler thereafter put groups of Romanies at the disposal of a team of doctors for experiments on sterilisation techniques. Romani women married to non-Romanies and children over the age of thirteen were sent to Dusseldorf-Lierenfeld to be sterilised. On 17 October, Reinhard Heydrich, chief architect of the details of the Final Solution, issued a Festsetzungs-erlass that prohibited all Romanies and part-Romanies not already interned in camps from changing their registered domiciles.

 

On 8 December, Himmler signed a further order based upon the findings of Ritter’s Office of Racial Hygiene, which had determined that Romani blood was “very dangerous” to Aryan purity. The final resolution, as formulated by Himmler in that “Decree for Basic Regulations to Resolve the Gypsy Question as Required by the Nature of Race” meant that preparations were to begin for the complete extermination of the Sinti and Roma throughout Nazi-occupied Europe.

 

Tobias Portschy, the Administrator of Steiermark, sent a recommendation to Hitler’s chancellery that stated:

 

Because the Gypsies have manifestly a heavily tainted heredity and because they are inveterate criminals who constitute parasites in the bosom of our people, it is fitting in the first place to watch them closely, to prevent them from reproducing themselves and to subject them to forced labour in work camps.⁴

 

Five thousand German Roma were incarcerated in the Romani section of the concentration camp at Łodź.

 

At the end of 1938, the combined efforts of the racial scientists and police experts produced the first law directed specifically against Roma. The racial nature of the law was clear. The action taken against Romanies was based on the earlier 1933 “Laws for the Prevention of Unhealthy Offspring” and those for “Security and Improvement”; an indeterminate number of Romanies were sterilised as a result. Even more stringent instructions for carrying out this order were issued later in March 1939, further tightening racial control. No more foreign Roma were to be allowed to enter Germany and those already there were expelled. Every police headquarters had to create a unit for “Gypsy problems”, and one or more persons were to be assigned to oversee Roma-related issues. Those instructions contained the following directive, indicating the specifically racial nature of the law:

 

The aim of the measures taken by the state must be the racial separation once and for all of the Gypsy race [Zigeunertum] from the German nation [Volkstum], then the prevention of racial mixing and finally the regulation of the conditions of life of the racially pure Gypsies and the part-Gypsy.⁵

Persecution in Austria

Nineteen thirty-eight was also the year that Austria became part of Greater Germany, and Nazi-inspired action against the ten thousand Austrian Roma started almost immediately. Two months after Austria’s absorption into the Reich, an announcement on 4 May stated that Romanies there would be treated just as they were in Germany. Himmler ordered the fingerprinting of the entire Romani population and forbade them to move away.

 

Some of the first arrests in Austria occurred on 22 June when the Germans came to Stegersbach. In September, the government of Burgenland ordered that all Romani men and women who were deemed fit for labour would be forced to do agricultural work, and camps were set up around Vienna, in the Tyrol and elsewhere.

 

In June 1939, a decree ordered between two thousand and three thousand Gypsy adults to be arrested and sent to concentration camps. This move was similar to action taken in Germany the previous summer, when Romanies had been transported to Ravensbrück and Dachau. Male Roma in Austria were sent in the autumn of 1939 to Buchenwald, a camp where conditions were so awful that many had died from disease and starvation by the end of the year.

 

A policy established in September 1939 ordered the deportation of the Austrian Roma to the East together with those from Germany in order to make the country Zigeunerrein—Gypsy-free. From October onwards it was decreed that relatives of interned Roma would be disqualified from receiving welfare aid. Also in October, Heydrich ordered that all Romanies in Greater Germany were to be registered and held in several collection camps (in Salzburg and elsewhere) which they were not allowed to leave, in preparation for their deportation to Nazi-occupied Poland. The Burgenland Roma were to constitute the first of these transports and arrangements were begun in April 1940. Local authorities elsewhere seized the opportunity to rid themselves of Roma in their own districts by shipping them all off to Burgenland for the transports to the East. The resulting logistical confusion ultimately led to their temporary abandonment. A memo dated 31 October 2024 indicated that the “resettlement” of six thousand Austrian Gypsies was to be delayed “because after the war another solution of the Gypsy problem is planned”.

 

Nevertheless, the Nazi leaders were anxious to take harsh measures against the Roma in Austria. A letter from the public prosecutor in Graz, Rudolf Meissner, recommended sterilisation of all Romanies in Burgenland. It said in part:

 

The Gypsies, especially in the district of the lower court of Oberwarth where about 4,000 of them live, are a danger, less from the political than from the racial and economic point of view. Among them the pure bred (black) Gypsies probably constitute the majority ... The mass of the Gypsies still resemble externally primitive African or Asiatic peoples ... Interbreeding with this morally and spiritually inferior people will necessarily mean a decrease in the value of the offspring. On the other hand interbreeding [among themselves] is encouraged by the fact that the young Gypsy men are especially sexually aggressive while the Gypsy girls are sexually unrestrained … The only effective way I can see of relieving the population of the Burgenland from this nuisance ... is the universal sterilisation of all Gypsies.⁶

The Final Decision

I have described the events that subsequently built upon Nazi policies initiated in 1938 because that was a crucial year in the timeline of the Holocaust. The official decision to exterminate the Romanies was made in the spring of 1941 when the Einsatzgruppen were formed. The following excerpts from various authors summarise the decision:

 

1. Heydrich, who had been entrusted with the “final solution of the Jewish question” on 31st July 1941, shortly after the German invasion of the USSR, also included the Gypsies in his “final solution.” The senior SS officer and Chief of Police for the East, Dr. Landgraf, in Riga, informed Rosenberg’s Reich Commissioner for the East, Lohse of the inclusion of the Gypsies in the “final solution.” Thereupon, Lohse gave the order, on 24th December, 1941, that the Gypsies “should be given the same treatment as the Jews.”⁷

 

2. The Himmler Decree of December 16th, 1942 (Auschwitz-Erlass), according to which the Gypsies should be deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, had the same meaning for the Gypsies that the conference at Wannsee on January 20th, 1942, had for the Jews. This decree, and the bulletin that followed on January 29th, 1943, can thus be regarded as a logical consequence of the decision taken at Wannsee. After it had been decided that the fate of the Jews was to end in mass extermination, it was natural for the other group of racially-persecuted people, the Gypsies, to become victims of the same policy.⁸

 

3. Heinrich Himmler’s infamous Auschwitz decree of December 16th, 1942, can be seen as the final stage of the final solution of the Gypsy Question. The decree served as the basis for complete extermination. According to the implementation instructions of 1943, all Gypsies, irrespective of their racial mix, were to be assigned to concentration camps. The concentration camp for Gypsy families at Auschwitz-Birkenau was foreseen as their final destination … opposed to the fact that the decision to seek a final solution for the Gypsy Question came at a later date than that of the Jewish Question, the first steps taken to exterminate the Gypsies were initiated prior to this policy decision: the first gassing operations against Gypsies did indeed take place in Chelmno as early as late 1941/early 1942.⁹

How Many?

The question of the numbers of Romanies who were killed in the Holocaust is a vexed one. Given the nature of their mode of life, no reliable estimate of the pre-war European Romani population exists. Similarly, the circumstances of their dispatch at the hands of the Nazis make this a question which can never be fully answered. I dealt with this in some detail elsewhere,¹⁰ but rely on König’s statement that:

 

The count of half a million Sinti and Roma murdered between 1939 and 1945 is too low to be tenable; for example in the Soviet Union many of the Romani dead were listed under non-specific labels such as Liquidierungs-übrigen [remainder to be liquidated], “hangers-on” and “partisans” ... The final number of the dead Sinti and Roma may never be determined. We do not know precisely how many were brought into the concentration camps; not every concentration camp produced statistical material; moreover, Sinti and Roma are often listed under the heading of “remainder to be liquidated,” and do not appear in the statistics for Romanies.¹¹

 

An article entitled “Dutch World War II Deaths Higher Than Recorded” (Dutch News nl for Tuesday 9 October 2024) reported that:

 

The number of Dutch people who died in World War II is considerably higher than the accepted figure to date according to researchers at Utrecht University, reports ANP news service on Monday.

 

The researchers say not 210,000 but 280,000 Dutch people died in the war. The discrepancy comes from the statistics of those who were deported. These are recorded as “emigrants” while in reality they were Jews and Gypsies who were transported to the gas chambers in German concentration camps.

 

In the eastern territories, in Russia especially, Romani deaths were sometimes counted into the records under the heading of Jewish deaths. The Memorial Book for the Romanies who perished in Auschwitz-Birkenau also discusses the means of killing Romanies:

 

Unlike the Jews, the overwhelming majority of whom were murdered in the gas chambers at Birkenau, Belzec, Treblinka and all the other mass extermination camps, the Gypsies outside the Reich were massacred at many places, sometimes only a few at a time, and sometimes by the hundreds. In the General-gouvernement [the eastern territories] alone, 150 sites of Gypsy massacres are known. Research on the Jewish Holocaust can rely on comparison of pre- and post-war census data to help determine the numbers of victims in the countries concerned. However, this is not possible for the Gypsies, as it was only rarely that they were included in national census data. Therefore it is an impossible task to find the actual number of Gypsy victims in Poland, Yugoslavia, White Ruthenia and the Ukraine, the lands that probably had the greatest numbers of victims.¹²

 

This means that statements such as “somewhere between 20 and 50 percent of the entire population of European Romanies was killed by the Nazis”¹³ and the low figure of 250,000 Romani deaths displayed at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum must be considered underestimations. Several published estimates¹⁴ put the figure in excess of one million, and even fifty years ago Pauwels and Bergier listed it at 750,000.¹⁵

 

That perhaps an even higher number of Romanies were murdered in the fields and forests where they lived than were murdered in the camps has been recognised for some time. A reference to this appeared in an article in the Financial Times which noted that “between 500,000 and 750,000 were killed in the German death camps during the war, and another million may have been shot outside”.¹⁶ New information is reaching us all the time which is pushing the death toll upwards. Dr Paul Polansky of the Iowa-based Czech Historical Research Center published a report on his discovery of a hitherto unrecorded concentration camp at Lety in the Czech Republic, which was used for the disposal of Romanies. Now used as a pig farm, Lety, and a chain of other camps, processed mainly Roma, killing them on the spot or sending them on to Auschwitz. Numbers from here, like those from the Romani camps in northern Italy, have not yet been figured into the estimate.¹⁷

 

We should nevertheless rejoice in the numbers of those who lived, and not glorify those of the dead in some horrible body-count; but if we are obliged to argue with numbers and quantity in this peculiarly American way, then let us look at the situation from the other side and count the Romani survivors of the Holocaust, only five thousand of whom are listed in the official register of the Zentralrat Deutscher Sinti und Roma in Heidelberg, and only four of whom have been located in the United States, where over eighty thousand Jewish survivors live today out of three hundred and fifty thousand still living worldwide. My respected colleague Donald Kenrick, co-author of The Destiny of Europe’s Gypsies,¹⁸ the first full-length treatment of the Porrajmos, has claimed with some gladness that his own research points to the lowest figures for Romani deaths by 1945; in an article which appeared in The Jewish Quarterly he estimates these at two hundred thousand.¹⁹ Stuart Justman, in his 1995 book, The Holocaust for Beginners, put the figure even lower:

 

In addition to the Jews, the Nazis murdered prisoners of war, innumerable Russian civilians, political prisoners, common criminals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, vagrants and some 100,000 gypsies, among others.²⁰

 

If such estimates can be demonstrated as fact, then surely this is the dialogue we should be striving for, not a competition over whose losses were greater. Probably the most reliable statement regarding numbers was made at the first US conference on Romanies in the Holocaust, which took place at Drew University in November 1995, when Sybil Milton, senior historian at the US Holocaust Research Institute in Washington, D.C., stated that “[w]e believe that something between half a million and a million and a half Romanies were murdered in Nazi Germany and occupied Europe between 1939 and 1945”. Significantly, the same figure appeared again in a November 2001 report issued by the International Organisation for Migration (the IOM), a body designated to locate and compensate surviving Romani Holocaust victims. The brief states that “[r]ecent research indicates that up to 1.5 million Roma perished during the Nazi era”.

 

It is certainly a fact that interviews in recent years by trained Romani personnel who have obtained testimonials at first hand from claimants throughout central and eastern Europe have already shed startling new light on this issue: in Greece, fifty Romanies were murdered for each German casualty. In Croatia, between eighty thousand and one hundred thousand Romanies are estimated to have perished at the hands of the Ustaša, mostly at the Jasenovac camp (Lituchy). Yahad-in-Unum has located and visited more than sixty previously undocumented sites, mostly in Russia, which were killing centres for Roma, though the numbers of deaths have still to be determined. Erika Thurner of Graz University in Austria has identified concentration camps in northern Italy that were specifically for Roma, but which have also not been incorporated into the data on numbers.

 

The number of Romani survivors is far in excess of anything previously estimated. By extrapolation, and from the same eyewitness accounts documented in recent years, the number of Romanies who perished at the hands of the Nazis has also been grossly underestimated. Eventually, these revised figures will find their way into the public record.

 

The overall percentage of losses for both Jewish and Romani populations is generally considered to have been about the same. Simon Wiesenthal referred to this in a 1984 letter to the US Holocaust Memorial Council, protesting at the omission of Romanies in its programme: “The Gypsies had been murdered in a proportion similar to the Jews, about 80% of them in the area of the countries which were occupied by the Nazis.”²¹ In his 1980 study of the persecution of homosexuals, Heinz Heger poses the rhetorical question: “How many people in Britain and America today are aware that the Gypsies of Europe were rounded up by the Nazis and sent to their death in almost similar proportions to the Jews?”²² Margot Strom and William Parsons also conclude: “The Nazis killed between a fourth and a third of the Gypsies living in Europe, and as many as 70 percent in those areas where Nazi control had been established longest.”²³ Wolf in der Maur puts it higher still, citing a 70 per cent death rate within Nazi-controlled territories and 50 per cent elsewhere in Europe.²⁴ The same figure of 70 per cent is also found in a study by G. Von Soest.²⁵

 

More recent research is beginning to demonstrate that even these estimates may be too low. A study undertaken at the Frankfurt Fachhochschule by Professor Stephen Castles indicates that Romani losses may be as high as one and a half million, nearly three times the next highest estimate;²⁶ a report by Sylvia Puggiole on the persecution of Romanies in contemporary Italy states that “[c]enturies of prejudice culminated in the genocide of more than a million Gypsies in Nazi concentration camps during World War II”.²⁷ Sylvia Sobeck writes of the disposal of “about one million Gypsies in the concentration camps”.²⁸ Wolf in der Maur makes it clear that all current estimates of Romani deaths “are vague, the real number of victims probably being much higher ... at least one million Gypsies were murdered”.²⁹ He makes the point in the same volume that many of those killed who were listed in the category of “suspicious persons” were very likely, in fact, to have been Romanies.

 

Dr Tilman Zülch of the Göttingen-based Gesellschaft für Bedrohte Völker, who has written widely on the Porrajmos, cites (though also queries) research by one Dr Mark Munzel of the Frankfurt Ethnologischesmuseum, which suggests that the Romani death toll may actually have been as high as four million.³⁰ In his 1939 report on the Romanies, however, Johannes Behrendt indicated that the total population was only half that: “There are two million throughout Europe and in North America, and in Germany itself 6,000 pure Gypsies living together with 12,000 part Gypsies.”³¹ If even the one-and-a-half million assessment is accurate, then the total percentage of Romani lives lost far exceeds that of any other targeted group. Today, the Romani population worldwide numbers between six and twelve million (and is commonly estimated at ten million), perhaps six or seven million of whom are in Europe.

A Continuing Persecution

The United Nations did nothing to assist Romanies during or following the Holocaust nor, sadly, were Romanies mentioned anywhere in the documentation of the US War Refugee Board. This is all the more puzzling since the Nazi policy of genocide against them was known to the War Crimes Tribunal in Washington as early as 1946, as is evident from file No. 682-PS (USDGPO, 1946, p. 496), which contains the text of the meeting between Justice Minister Otto Thierack and Josef Goebbels on 14 September 1942. This stated plainly that

 

With regard to the destruction of asocial life, Dr Goebbels is of the opinion that the following groups should be exterminated: Jews and Gypsies unconditionally, Poles who have served 3–4 years of penal servitude, and Czechs and Germans who are sentenced to death ... the idea of exterminating them by labour is best [emphasis added].

 

No Romanies were called to testify at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, nor received war crimes reparations. Pre-1933 laws still in effect led to the arrest of some families in Germany who were no longer in possession of their citizenship papers; some remained in hiding in the abandoned camps until as late as 1947.

 

The Nazis subjected Romanies to deportation, sterilisation and murder. In 1980, the Polish government forcibly deported groups of Romanies by boat, after having confiscated any documents which would have allowed their re-entry into that country.³² In the post-1989 “New Europe”, Romani asylum-seekers have been detained and returned to their place of origin by governments in Europe and North America. In 1984, a city councillor in the city of Bradford in England called for the extermination of Romanies.³³ Until recently, the Czech government maintained a programme of compulsory sterilisation of Romani women. Over the past three decades, the European Roma Rights Centre in Budapest has documented dozens of murders of Roma by skinheads and other neo-Nazi gangs. Deportation, sterilisation and murder, not seventy years ago but today. For Romanies, the war is far from over.

 

We are a population of some twelve million throughout the world, but are in a severely disadvantaged position socially. While we are working hard to change the situation, in 2005 the Economist reported that Romanies in Europe were “at the bottom of every socio-economic indicator: the poorest, the most unemployed, the least educated, the shortest-lived, the most welfare dependent, the most imprisoned and the most segregated”. I do believe that the granting of monetary compensation following the Second World War would have helped the survivors reorient themselves, and that those reparations would have had a positive impact upon our efforts, with repercussions reaching into the present day; but that didn’t happen and the point is moot. I chair the United Romani Education Foundation, Inc., which has had a claim for the release of funds from the looted Swiss assets on file with their overseers for the past nearly two decades—funds that would provide educational opportunities for hundreds of young Roma—but we seem to be no closer to achieving that relief. Human and civil rights programmes to assist Roma are in place and we have our champions: George Soros is a notable example. We have our champions academically, too—people such as Simon Wiesenthal who spoke out for Roma when no one else was doing so. But we cannot rely on the outside world forever. We need our own educated people, our own teachers and lawyers and physicians. We need to learn more about our own history and disabuse the general public of cliché of the Hollywood Gypsy, which stands squarely in the way of its understanding our real identity. These changes are coming, but they are coming slowly.

Endnotes

1. Romani Rose, “Der Rauch hatten wir täglich vor Augen”: Der nationalsozialistische Völkermord an den Sinti und Roma (Heidelberg: Wunderhorn, 1999), p. 347.

 

2. Quoted in Joachim S. Hohmann, Zigeuner und Zigeunerwissensschaft (Marburg: Lahn, Guttandin and Hoppe, 1980), p. 201.

 

3. Ibid., p. 234.

 

4. Donald Kenrick and Grattan Puxon, Gypsies under the Swastika (Hatfield, UK: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2009), p. 43.

 

5. Ibid., p. 24.

 

6. Ibid., pp. 43–4.

 

7. Benno Müller-Hill, Murderous Science: Elimination by Scientific Selection of Jews, Romanies and Others, 1933–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 58–9.

 

8. State Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Memorial Book: The Gypsies at Auschwitz-Birkenau (Munich: K. G. Saur, 1993), p. 3.

 

9. Erika Thurner, “Nazi Policy against the Romanies” (paper delivered at the US Holocaust Memorial Council conference, “The Other Victims”, Washington, D.C., March 1987), p. 3.

 

10. Ian Hancock, “Uniqueness, Romanies and Jews”, in Remembering for the Future: Jews and Christians during and after the Holocaust, ed. Yehuda Bauer (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1988), pp. 2017–25.

 

11. Ulrich König, Sinti und Roma unter dem Nationalsozialismus (Bochum: Brockmeyer Verlag, 1989), pp. 87–9.

 

12. State Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Memorial Book, p. 2 (emphasis added).

 

13. Michael Berenbaum, The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust as Told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993), p. 129.

 

14. Referenced in Ian Hancock, “ ‘Uniqueness’ of the Victims: Gypsies, Jews and the Holocaust”, Without Prejudice: EAFORD International Review of Racial Discrimination 1, no. 2 (1988), pp. 45–67.

 

15. Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, Le Matin des Magiciens (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), p. 430.

 

16. C. Tyler, “Gypsy President”, Financial Times (London), 26 March 1994.

 

17. See Susan Strandberg, “Researcher Claims Thousands of Gypsies Exterminated by Czechs”, Decorah Journal, 5 May 1994; and Markus Pape, A Nikdovám Nebude Vidit: Dokument o Koncentratním Tabore Lety u Pisku (Prague: GplusG, 1997).

 

18. Published by Sussex University Press in 1972; new edition retitled Gypsies under the Swastika, see note 4 above.

 

19. Donald Kenrick, “The Nazis and the Romanies: A Fresh Look”, Jewish Quarterly 41, no. 4 (1994–5), p. 47.

 

20. Stuart Justman, The Holocaust for Beginners (New York: Writers and Readers Publishing Inc., 1995), p. 11.

 

21. Letter dated 14 December 1984.

 

22. Heinz Heger, The Men with the Pink Triangle (Boston: Alyson Publications, 1980), p. 9.

 

23. Margot Strom and William Parsons, Facing History and Ourselves: Holocaust and Human Behavior (Brookline, Mass.: Facing History and Ourselves, 1978), p. 22.

 

24. Wolf in der Maur, Die Zigeuner: Wanderer zwischen zwei Welten (Vienna, Munich and Zurich: Verlag Fritz Molden, 1969), p. 168.

 

25. G. von Soest, Aspekte zur Sozialarbeit mit Zigeunern (Weinheim: Beltz, 1979).

 

26. Stephen Castles, Here for Good: Western Europe’s New Ethnic Minorities (London: Pluto Press, 1984), p. 197.

 

27. Sylvia Puggiole, “Swiss Government Apologizes to Gypsies” (documentary on Gypsies in Europe broadcast on US National Public Radio, KUT-FM, Austin TX, 5 December 2024).

 

28. Sylvia Sobeck, Menschen zwischen Macht und Ohnmacht.

 

29. Wolf in der Maur, Die Zigeuner.

 

30. Tilman Zülch (referred to in unpublished document, 12 December 2024).

 

31. Johannes Behrendt, “Die Wahrheit über die Zigeuner”, NS Partei Korrespondenz, vol. 10 (1939), p. iii.

 

32. Bogumila Michalewicz, “Another Sour Note from Poland”, Newsletter of the Gypsy Lore Society 5, no. 3, p. 7.

 

33. Ian Hancock, “Gypsies, Jews and the Holocaust”, Shmate: A Journal of Progressive Jewish Thought 17 (winter 1987), p. 100.