Porajmos

The Romani genocide or Romani Holocaust, also known as the Porajmos ( Romani pronunciation: ), or Samudaripen ("Mass killing"), was the effort during World War II by the government of Nazi Germany and its allies to exterminate the Romani people of Europe. Under Adolf Hitler's rule, both Roma and Jews were defined by the Nuremberg laws as "enemies of the race-based state." These two groups (and others) were targeted by similar policies and persecution, culminating in the near annihilation of both populations within Nazi-occupied countries.

Estimates of the death toll of Romani in World War II range from 220,000 to 1,500,000. West Germany in 1982 formally recognized that genocide had been committed against the Romani; Poland agreed with this recognition in 2011.

Etymology
The term porajmos (also Porrajmos or Pharrajimos—literally, "devouring" or "destruction" in some dialects of the Romani language ) was introduced by Ian Hancock, in the early 1990s. Hancock chose the term, coined by a Kalderash Rom, from a number of suggestions in an "informal conversation in 1993".

The term is used mostly by activists and is unknown to most Roma, including relatives of victims and survivors. Some Russian and Balkan Romani activists protest against using the word porajmos. In various dialects, "porajmos" is synonymous with poravipe which means "violation" and "rape", a term which some Roma consider to be offensive.

Balkan Romani activists prefer the term samudaripen ("mass killing"), first introduced by linguist Marcel Courthiade. Hancock dismisses this word, arguing that it does not conform to Romani language morphology. Some Ruska Roma activists offer the term Kali Traš ("Black Fear"). Another alternative that has been used is Berša Bibahtale ("The Unhappy Years"). Lastly, adapted borrowings such as Holokosto, Holokausto, etc. are also occasionally used in the Romani language.

Linguistically, the term porajmos is composed of the verb root porrav- and the abstract-forming nominal ending -imos. This ending is of the Vlax Romani dialect, whereas other varieties generally use -ibe(n) or -ipe(n). For the verb itself, the most commonly given meaning is "to open/stretch wide" or "to rip open", whereas the meaning "to open up the mouth, devour" occurs in fewer varieties.

The emergence of racism
In the late 19th century, the emergence of scientific racism and Social Darwinism, linking social differences to racial differences, provided the public justifications for prejudices against Jews and Romani. During this time, “the concept of race was systematically employed to explain social phenomena.” This approach validated the idea that races were not variations of a single species of man and instead were of distinctly different biological origin. It established a scientifically backed racial hierarchy, which defined certain minority groups as other on the basis of biology.

In addition to racial pseudo-science, the end of the 19th century was a period of state-sponsored modernization in Germany. Industrial development altered many aspects of society. Most notably, the period shifted social norms of work and life. For Roma, this meant a denial of their traditional way of life as craftsmen and artisans. János Bársony notes that "industrial development devalued their services as craftsmen, resulting in the disintegration of their communities and social marginalization."

Persecution under the German Empire and Weimar Republic
The developments of racial pseudo-science and modernization resulted in anti-Romani state interventions, carried out by the German Empire and Weimar Republic. In 1899, the Imperial Police Headquarters in Munich established the Information Services on Romani by the Security Police. Its purpose was to keep records (identification cards, fingerprints, photographs, etc.) and continuous surveillance on the Roma community. Roma in the Weimar Republic were forbidden from entering public swimming pools, parks, and other recreational areas, and depicted throughout Germany and Europe as criminals and spies. By 1926, this ‘racial panic’ was transmitted into law.

The "Law for the Fight Against Gypsies, Vagrants and the Workshy" was enforced in Bavaria. It stipulated that groups identified as ‘Gypsies’ avoid all travel to the region. Those already living in the area were to “be kept under control so that there [was] no longer anything to fear from them with regard to safety in the land.” Herbet Heuss notes that "[t]his Bavarian law became the model for other German states and even for neighbouring countries."

The demand for Roma to give up their nomadic ways and settle in a specific region was often the focus of anti-Romani policy both of the German Empire and Weimar Republic. Once settled, communities were concentrated and isolated in one area within a town or city. This process facilitated state-run surveillance practices and ‘crime prevention.’

Following passage of the Law for the Fight Against Gypsies, Vagrants and the Workshy, public policy increasingly targeted the Roma on the explicit basis of race. In 1927, Prussia passed a law that required all Roma to carry identity cards. Eight thousand Roma were processed this way and subjected to mandatory fingerprinting and photographing. Two years later, the focus became more explicit. In 1929, the German state of Hussen proposed the 'Law for the Fight Against the Gypsy Menace.' The same year the Centre for the Fight Against Gypsies in Germany was opened. This body enforced restrictions on travel for undocumented Roma and "allowed for the arbitrary arrest and detention of gypsies as a means of crime prevention.”

Before Hitler’s rise to power, legislation against the Romani was based on a rhetoric of racism. Policy based on the premise of “fighting crime” was redirected to “fighting a people.” Targeted groups were no longer determined by juridical grounds. Instead, they were victims of racialized policy.

Aryan racial purity
For centuries, Romani tribes were subject to antiziganist persecution and humiliation in Europe. They were stigmatized as habitual criminals, social misfits, and vagabonds.

Given the Nazi emphasis on Aryan “racial purity”, they identified the Roma as a minority group to control and restrict. But Hitler’s racial ideologues knew that the Romani language is one of the Indo-Aryan languages, originating in northern India. Nazi anthropologists realized that Romani had migrated into Europe from India and were descendants of the Aryan occupants of the subcontinent. At the time, they believed the Aryans had invaded from Europe. In any event, the Romani spoke an Aryan language and in most systems would be considered Aryan.

Huttenbach argues that the Nazis planned to eliminate the Romani, one way or another, from as early as 1933; they announced on July 14, 1933, the goal of preventing lebensunwertes Leben (see Life unworthy of life) from reproducing. The Department of Racial Hygiene and Population Biology began to experiment on Romani to determine criteria for their racial classification.

Nazi racialist Hans F. K. Günther added a socioeconomic component to the theory of racial purity. While he conceded that the Romani were descended from Aryans, he noted that they were of poorer classes and had mingled with the various “inferior” races they encountered during their wanderings. He believed that this influence accounted for their extreme poverty and nomadic lifestyle. While he conceded that there were some groups that were "purely Aryan", he contended that most Romani posed a threat to Aryan homogeneity because of their historic racial mingling.

The Nazis established the Racial Hygiene and Demographic Biology Research Unit (Rassenhygienische und Bevölkerungsbiologische Forschungsstelle, Department L3 of the Reich Department of Health) in 1936. Headed by Dr. Robert Ritter and his assistant Eva Justin, this Unit was mandated to conduct an in-depth study of the "Gypsy question (Zigeunerfrage)" and to provide data required for formulating a new Reich "Gypsy law". After extensive fieldwork in the spring of 1936, consisting of interviews and medical examinations to investigate genealogical and genetic data, the Unit determined that most Romani posed a danger to German racial purity and should be eliminated. No decision was made regarding the remainder (about 10 percent of the total Romani population of Europe), primarily Sinti and Lalleri tribes living in Germany. Several suggestions were made. Heinrich Himmler suggested deporting the Romani to a remote reservation, as had been done by the United States for its Native Americans, where "pure Gypsies" could continue their nomadic lifestyle unhindered. According to him: "...The aim of measures taken by the State to defend the homogeneity of the German nation must be the physical separation of Gypsydom from the German nation, the prevention of miscegenation, and finally, the regulation of the way of life of pure and part-Gypsies."

Nine representatives of the Romani community in Germany were asked to compile lists of pure-blooded Romanis to be saved from extermination. The Germans often ignored these lists and some individuals identified on them were still sent to concentration camps.

Loss of citizenship
On November 14, 1935, Germany passed the law for the "Protection of Blood and Honour", a supplementary extension to the Nuremberg Laws. This law forbade Aryans from marrying non-Aryans. Criteria defining Romani individuals were twice as strict as those defining any other group. The second Nuremberg law, "The Reich Citizenship Law," stripped "non-Aryans" of their citizenship. Romani, like Jews and Blacks, lost their right to vote on March 7, 1936.

Extermination
The Third Reich government began persecution of the Romani as early as 1936 when they began to transfer the people to municipal internment camps on the outskirts of cities, a prelude to their deportation to concentration camps. Notable internment and concentration camps include Dachau, Dieselstrasse, Marzahn (which evolved from a municipal internment camp) and Vennhausen. The Society for Threatened Peoples estimates the Romani deaths at 277,100. Martin Gilbert estimates that a total of more than 220,000 of the 700,000 Romani in Europe were killed, including 15,000 (mainly from the Soviet Union) in Mauthausen in January–May 1945. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum cites scholars who estimate the number of Sinti and Roma killed as between 220,000 and 500,000. Dr. Sybil Milton, a historian at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Research Institute, estimated the number of lives lost as "something between a half-million and a million-and-a-half".

Initially the Romani were herded into ghettos, including the Warsaw Ghetto (April–June 1942), where they formed a distinct subclass in relation to the Jews. Ghetto diarist Emmanuel Ringelblum speculated that Romani were sent to the Warsaw Ghetto because the Germans wanted:"...to toss into the Ghetto everything that is characteristically dirty, shabby, bizarre, of which one ought to be frightened, and which anyway has to be destroyed."

Initially there was disagreement within the Nazi circles about how to solve the "Gypsy Question". In late 1939 and early 1940, Hans Frank, the General Governor of occupied Poland, refused to accept the 30,000 German and Austrian Roma which were to be deported to his territory. Heinrich Himmler "lobbied to save a handful of pure-blooded Roma" for his "ethnic reservation", but was opposed by Martin Bormann, who favored deportation for all Roma. The debate ended in 1942 when Himmler signed the order to begin the mass deportations of Roma to Auschwitz. During Operation Reinhard (1941–43), an undetermined number of Roma were killed in the extermination camps, such as Treblinka.

The Nazi persecution of Roma varied from country to country and region to region. In France, between 3,000 and 6,000 Roma were deported to Dachau, Ravensbrück, Buchenwald, and other camps. Further east, in the Balkan states and the Soviet Union, the Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing squads, travelled from village to village massacring the inhabitants where they lived and typically leaving few to no records of the number of Roma killed in this way. In a few cases, significant documentary evidence of mass murder was generated. Timothy Snyder notes that in the Soviet Union alone there were 8,000 documented cases of Roma murdered by the Einsatzgruppen in their sweep east.

In return for immunity from prosecution for war crimes, Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski stated at the Einsatzgruppen Trial that "the principal task of the Einsatzgruppen of the S.D. was the annihilation of the Jews, Gypsies and Political Commissars". Roma in Slovakia were killed by the local collaborating auxiliaries. Notably, in Denmark and Greece, local populations did not participate in the hunt for Roma as they did in the Baltics. Bulgaria and Finland, although allies of Germany, did not cooperate with the Porajmos, just as they did not cooperate with the Shoah.

On December 16, 1942, Himmler ordered that the Romani candidates for extermination should be deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. For the Romani people of Europe, this order was equivalent to the January 20 decision of that same year, made at the Wannsee Conference, at which Nazi bureaucrats decided on the "Final Solution" to the "Jewish problem". On November 15, 1943, Himmler ordered that Romani and "part-Romanies" were to be put "on the same level as Jews and placed in concentration camps".

Sybil Milton has speculated that Hitler was involved in the decision to deport all Romani to Auschwitz, as Himmler gave the order six days after meeting with Hitler. For that meeting, Himmler had prepared a report on the subject Führer: Aufstellung wer sind Zigeuner. Organized Jewish resistance occurred in nearly every large ghetto and concentration camp (Auschwitz, Sobibor, Treblinka, Ravensbrück, and Buchenwald, among many others), and the Roma similarly attempted to resist the Nazis' extermination. In May 1944 at Auschwitz, SS guards tried to liquidate the Gypsy Family Camp and were "met with unexpected resistance—the Roma fought back with crude weapons—and retreated". A few months later the SS succeeded in liquidating the camp, and ultimately murdered 20,000 Roma there.

Persecution in other Axis countries
Romani were also persecuted by the puppet regimes that cooperated with the Third Reich during the war, especially the notorious Ustaše regime in Croatia. Tens of thousands of Romani were killed in Jasenovac concentration camp, along with Serbs and Jews. Yad Vashem estimates that the Porajmos was most intense in Yugoslavia, where around 90,000 Romani were killed. The Ustaše government also deported around 26,000. Serbian Romani are parties to the pending class action suit against the Vatican Bank and others in U.S. federal court seeking return of wartime loot.

The governments of some Nazi German allies, namely Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria, also contributed to the Nazi plan of Romani extermination, but most Romani in these countries survived, unlike those in Ustaše Croatia or in areas directly ruled by Nazi Germany (such as Poland). The Hungarian Arrow Cross government deported between 28,000 and 33,000 Romani out of a population estimated between 70,000 and 100,000.

The Romanian government of Ion Antonescu did not systematically exterminate Roma on its territory. Instead, resident Roma were deported to Romanian-run concentration camps in occupied Transnistria. Of the estimated 25,000 Romani inmates of these camps, 11,000 (44%, or almost half) died.

According to eyewitness Mrs. de Wiek, Anne Frank, a notable Jewish Holocaust victim, is recorded as having witnessed the prelude to the murder of Romani children at Auschwitz: "I can still see her standing at the door and looking down the camp street as a herd of naked gypsy girls were driven by, to the crematory, and Anne watched them going and cried."

In the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, Romani internees were sent to the Lety and Hodonín concentration camps before being transferred to Auschwitz-Birkenau for gassing. What makes the Lety camp unique is that it was staffed by Czech guards, who could be even more brutal than the Germans, as testified in Paul Polansky’s book Black Silence. The genocide was so thorough that the vast majority of Romani in the Czech Republic today are actually descended from migrants from Slovakia who moved there during the post-war years in Czechoslovakia. In Nazi-occupied France, between 16,000 and 18,000 were killed.

The small Romani population in Denmark was not subjected to mass killings by the Nazi occupiers, but classified as simply "asocial". Angus Fraser attributes this to "doubts over ethnic demarcations within the travelling population". The Romanis of Greece were taken hostage and prepared for deportation to Auschwitz, but were saved by appeals from the Archbishop of Athens and the Greek Prime Minister.

Estimated number of victims
According to Ian Hancock, director of the Romani Archives and Documentation Center at the University of Texas at Austin, there also existed a trend to downplay the actual figures. He surmised that almost the entire Romani population was killed in Croatia, Estonia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. Rudolph Rummel, a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Hawaii who spent his career assembling data on collective violence by governments towards their people (for which he coined the term democide), estimated that 258,000 must have been killed in Nazi Germany, 36,000 in Romania under Ion Antonescu and 27,000 in Ustaše-controlled Croatia.

The following figures are from The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust.


 * In a 2010 publication, Ian Hancock stated that he agrees with the view that the number of Romanies killed has been underestimated as a result of being grouped with others in Nazi records under headings such as "remainder to be liquidated", "hangers-on", and "partisans". He notes recent evidence such as the previously obscure Lety concentration camp in the Czech Republic and Ackovic's revised estimates of Romani killed by the Ustaše as high as 80,000–100,000. These numbers suggest that previous estimates have been grossly underrepresented.
 * Zbigniew Brzezinski has estimated that 800,000 Romanies died as a result of Nazi actions.

Medical experiments
Another distinctive feature of the Porajmos and the Holocaust was the extensive use of human subjects in medical experiments. The most notorious of these physicians was Dr. Josef Mengele, who worked in the Auschwitz concentration camp. His experiments included placing subjects in pressure chambers, testing drugs on them, freezing them, attempting to change eye color by injecting chemicals into children's eyes and various amputations and other brutal surgeries. The full extent of his work will never be known because the truckload of records he sent to Dr. Otmar von Verschuer at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute were destroyed by von Verschuer. Mengele's own journals, consisting of some 3,300 pages, are likely never to be published, and they are suspected to contain denials of the Holocaust. Subjects who survived Mengele's experiments were almost always killed and dissected shortly afterwards.

He seemed particularly keen on working with Romani children. He would bring them sweets and toys, and would personally take them to the gas chamber. They would call him "Onkel Mengele". Vera Alexander was a Jewish inmate at Auschwitz who looked after 50 sets of Romani twins:

"I remember one set of twins in particular: Guido and Ina, aged about four. One day, Mengele took them away. When they returned, they were in a terrible state: they had been sewn together, back to back, like Siamese twins. Their wounds were infected and oozing pus. They screamed day and night. Then their parents—I remember the mother's name was Stella—managed to get some morphine and they killed the children in order to end their suffering."

Recognition and remembrance
The German government paid war reparations to Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, but not to the Romani. There were "never any consultations at Nuremberg or any other international conference as to whether the Sinti and Roma were entitled like the Jews to reparations.” The Interior Ministry of Wuerttemberg argued that "Gypsies [were] persecuted under the Nazis not for any racial reason but because of an asocial and criminal record." When on trial for his leadership of Einsatzgruppen in the USSR, Otto Ohlendorf cited the massacres of Romanis during the Thirty Years War as a historical precedent.

West Germany recognised the genocide of the Roma in 1982, and since then the Porajmos has been increasingly recognized as a genocide committed simultaneously with the Shoah. The American historian Sybil Milton wrote several articles arguing that the Porajmos deserved recognition as part of the Holocaust. In Switzerland, a committee of experts investigated the policy of the Swiss government during the Porajmos.

Formal recognition and commemoration of the Roma persecution by the Nazis has been difficult in practical terms due to the lack of significant collective memory and documentation of the Porajmos among the Roma. This is a result both of their tradition of oral history and illiteracy, heightened by widespread poverty and continuing discrimination that has forced some Roma out of state schools. One UNESCO report put the illiteracy rate among the Roma in Romania at 30 percent, as opposed to the near universal literacy of the Romanian public as a whole. In a 2011 investigation of the state of the Roma in Europe today, Ben Judah, a Policy Fellow with the European Council on Foreign Relations, traveled to Romania.

Nico Fortuna, a sociologist and Roma activist, explained the distinction between Jewish collective memory of the Shoah and the Roma experience: "There is a difference between the Jewish and Roma deportees...The Jews were shocked and can remember the year, date and time it happened. The Roma shrugged it off. They said, "Of course I was deported. I'm Roma; these things happen to a Roma." The Roma mentality is different from the Jewish mentality.  For example, a Roma came to me and asked, "Why do you care so much about these deportations? Your family was not deported." I went, "I care as a Roma" and the guy said back, "I do not care because my family were brave, proud Roma that were not deported."

For the Jews it was a total and everyone knew this—from bankers to pawnbrokers. For the Roma it was selective and not comprehensive. The Roma were only exterminated in a few parts of Europe such as Poland, the Netherlands, Germany and France. In Romania and much of the Balkans, only nomadic Roma and social outcast Roma were deported. This matters and has an impact on the Roma mentality."

Ian Hancock has also observed a reluctance among Roma to acknowledge their victimization by the Third Reich. The Roma "are traditionally not disposed to keeping alive the terrible memories from their history—nostalgia is a luxury for others". The effects of the illiteracy, the lack of social institutions, and the rampant discrimination faced by Roma in Europe today have produced a people who, according to Fortuna, lack a "national consciousness...and historical memory of the Holocaust because there is no Roma elite."

Acts of commemoration
The first memorial commemorating victims of the Romani Holocaust was erected on May 8, 1956, in the Polish village of Szczurowa commemorating the Szczurowa massacre. Since 1996, a Gypsy Caravan Memorial has been traveling among the main remembrance sites in Poland, from Tarnów via Auschwitz, Szczurowa and Borzęcin Dolny, gathering the Romani and well-wishers in the remembrance of the Porajmos. Several museums dedicate a part of their permanent exhibition to documenting that history, such as the Museum of Romani Culture in Czech Republic and the Ethnographic Museum in Tarnów. Some political organisations have tried to block the installation of Romani memorials near former concentration camps, as shown by the debate around Lety and Hodonin in the Czech Republic.

On October 23, 2007, Romanian President Traian Băsescu publicly apologized for his nation's role in the Porajmos, the first time a Romanian leader has done so. He called for the Porajmos to be taught in schools, stating that, "We must tell our children that six decades ago children like them were sent by the Romanian state to die of hunger and cold". Part of his apology was expressed in the Romani language. Băsescu awarded three Porajmos survivors with an Order for Faithful Services. Before recognizing Romania's role in the Porajmos, Traian Băsescu was widely quoted after an incident on May 19, 2007, in which he insulted a journalist by calling her a "stinky gypsy". The president subsequently apologized.

On January 27, 2011, Zoni Weisz became the first Roma guest of honour at Germany's official Holocaust Memorial Day ceremony. Dutch-born Weiz escaped death during a Nazi round-up when a policeman allowed him to escape. Nazi injustices against the Roma were recalled at the ceremony, including that directed at Sinto boxer Johann Trollmann.

On May 3, 2012 the world premiere of the Requiem for Auschwitz, by composer Roger Moreno Rathgeb, was performed at the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam by the The Roma and Sinti Philharmoniker directed by Riccardo M Sahiti. The Philharmoniker is a pan-European orchestra of Roma and Sinto musicians generally employed by other classical orchestras; it is focused on the contribution of Roma culture to classical music. Dutch-Swiss Sinto Moreno Rathgeb wrote his requiem for all victims of Auschwitz and Nazi terror. The occasion of the premiere was coupled to a conference, Roma between Past and Future. The requiem has since been performed in Tilburg, Prague, Budapest, Frankfurt, Cracow, and Berlin.

On 24 October 2012 the Memorial to the Sinti and Roma victims of National Socialism was unveiled in Berlin. since 2010, ternYpe - International Roma Youth Network, organizes a commemoration week called "Dikh he na bister" (look and don't forget) about August 2 in Kraków and Auschwitz-Birkenau. In 2014 they organised the largest Youth Commemoration Ceremony in history, attracting more than 1000 young Roma and non-Roma from 25 countries. This initiative of ternYpe Network was held under the European Parliament's High Patronage granted by President Martin Schulz.

Depiction in films

 * In 2009, Tony Gatlif, a French Romani film director, directed the film Korkoro, which portrays the Romani Taloche's escape from the Nazis, with help from a French notary, Justes, and his difficulty in trying to lead a sedentary life. The film's other main character, Mademoiselle Lise Lundi, is inspired by Yvette Lundy, a teacher who worked in Gionges, La Marne and was active in the French Resistance.
 * The 1988 Polish film, And the Violins Stopped Playing, also has Porajmos as its subject. It was criticized for showing the killing of Roma as a method of removing witnesses to the killing of Jews.


 * A scene in the French-language film Train de Vie (Train of Life), directed by Radu Mihaileanu, depicts a group of Romani singing and dancing with Jews at a stop en route to a concentration camp.