Alexander Watson wrote that in 1418, Zurich’s wealthy burghers were startled by the sudden appearance of foreigners camping outside the city's walls. The new arrivals were, according to a later chronicler, strange and never before seen there. Although their clothes were ragged, they paid for their own food and wore much gold jewellery. People believed them to be exiles from Egypt. Over the decades, tales of these exotic travellers came from cities as far apart as Barcelona (1447) and Vilnius (1501). These accounts recorded the arrival of the Roma people, and the beginnings of their troubled 600-year history in Europe.
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Many Romani families left Hungary and Romaniain 1880s-90s, relocating to Germany because of the country’s prosperity. Unfortunately among the German states, Bavaria proved the most zealous in its anti-Roma measures.
The Holocaust Museum reported Roma were among the groups that the Nazi regime (1933–45) and its allies singled out for persecution before and during WW2, because they believed Roma were racially inferior. With German victory over Poland assured in 1939, Reinhard Heydrich planned to deport 30,000 German and Austrian Roma. In fact German authorities DID deport Roma from the Greater German Reich to occupied Poland. In May 1940, the SS and police deported c2,500 Roma from the Rhineland, western and NW Germany to the Lublin District in the General Government. SS and police authorities locked them into forced-labour camps, working in often lethal conditions.
In 1941, German police authorities deported 5,007 Roma from Austria to Lodz Jewish ghetto Poland, housing them in a segregated block. Many Roma died from typhus in the first months after arriving, and Nazi SS and police sent those who survived these dreadful conditions to Poland’s Chelmno Extermination Camp in 1942, in gas vans.
Local Germans hated the camps, demanding the expulsion of the Roma to safeguard real Germans’ public morals, public health and security. Local police used these complaints to appeal to SS chief Heinrich Himmler for the resumption of deportations of Roma to the east. In Dec 1942, Himmler ordered the deportation of all Roma from the Greater Reich.
c23,000 Roma were deported to Auschwitz. SS medical researchers assigned to the Auschwitz complex eg SS Dr Josef Mengele was authorised to select subjects for scientific medical experiments from among the prisoners. Mengele chose twins and dwarves as subjects of his experiments. 90% of the Roma sent to Auschwitz died there.
The SS also shot c30,000 Roma in the Baltic States and elsewhere in the German-occupied Soviet Union, where Einsatzgruppen and mobile killing units killed Roma, whenever the SS killed Jews and Russians. The same in Serbia. Five other nations joined the Axis during WW2: Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia and Croatia. Romania, an Axis partner, did not systematically annihilate the Roma population living on Romanian territory. Instead the Romanian military deported them to S.W Ukraine, under Romanian administration. The authorities of Croatia, another Axis partner of Germany and run by the militant separatist and terrorist Ustasa, annihilated virtually the entire Roma population there: c25,000 people.
The Romas’ fate closely paralleled that of the Jews, although Roma pre-WW2 populations were not precisely known; perhaps 1.25 million. Note also that many European Roma communities were totally destroyed, survivors suffering from psychological and physical traumas of deprivation, abuse and destruction of family. Thus it was almost impossible to reconstruct Roma cultural networks post-war.
In 1982 Chancellor Helmut Schmidt formally acknowledged that German Roma had been victims of genocide. However Romanis, one of the largest ethnic minorities in the EU, still face limited access to quality education and to the labour market, leading to further poverty and social exclusion, poor healthcare and hate-motivated harassment.
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Gypsy Family 1930s
living in a mobile van
Credit: Historical Association.
The Bogdal* volume was about European prejudice against Roma. This approach was necessary because the Roma, largely as a nomadic people with an oral culture, left few traces for historians. From very early on, myth and prejudice saturated these accounts. The Roma's image was defamed first by medieval chroniclers and rulers' decrees, and later by C18th anthropologists, C19th ethnographers and early C20th criminologists and ruthless racial pseudo-scientists.
The newcomers were swathed in mystery. Nobody, not even the Roma, knew from whence they came. Their dark skin led some to assume that they were Tatars, or African. The derogatory English term gypsies derived from the early rumour that they were Egyptians, condemned by God to wander.
By 1800, anthropologists found the Roma language was related to Sanskrit, making India the likely origin. Roma misfortune was to reach Europe as it embarked upon a tumultuous path toward modernity. Their way of life was seen as backward and parasitic, against the standard with which real Europeans measured their own progress and civilisation.
Bogdal drew on literature from across Europe, to trace how exclusion and prejudice were perpetuated across six centuries. Even when portrayed positively by early C19th Romantics Roma, in sharp contrast to Europe's other long persecuted minority, were always regarded as primitive. Bohemian artists' celebrated Roma as noble savages, merely reinforcing deep-rooted, hostile tropes of gypsies as wild, lazy, deceitful and sexually wicked. Once racial pseudo-science appeared, Roma were seen as degenerate, inferior and congenitally criminal, especially half breeds.
The newcomers were swathed in mystery. Nobody, not even the Roma, knew from whence they came. Their dark skin led some to assume that they were Tatars, or African. The derogatory English term gypsies derived from the early rumour that they were Egyptians, condemned by God to wander.
By 1800, anthropologists found the Roma language was related to Sanskrit, making India the likely origin. Roma misfortune was to reach Europe as it embarked upon a tumultuous path toward modernity. Their way of life was seen as backward and parasitic, against the standard with which real Europeans measured their own progress and civilisation.
Bogdal drew on literature from across Europe, to trace how exclusion and prejudice were perpetuated across six centuries. Even when portrayed positively by early C19th Romantics Roma, in sharp contrast to Europe's other long persecuted minority, were always regarded as primitive. Bohemian artists' celebrated Roma as noble savages, merely reinforcing deep-rooted, hostile tropes of gypsies as wild, lazy, deceitful and sexually wicked. Once racial pseudo-science appeared, Roma were seen as degenerate, inferior and congenitally criminal, especially half breeds.
Roma after Bergen Belsen's liberation
credit: German Federal Archives.
This important book vividly exposed intellectual and societal trends in Europe that over centuries led to exclusion, dehumanisation and ultimately genocide by the Nazis. It warned powerfully that how we portray people matters: the alien, threatening Gypsy figure was imposed on a marginalised community with few opportunities to shape its own image. These malign stories persist against Romas today.
Many Romani families left Hungary and Romaniain 1880s-90s, relocating to Germany because of the country’s prosperity. Unfortunately among the German states, Bavaria proved the most zealous in its anti-Roma measures.
The Holocaust Museum reported Roma were among the groups that the Nazi regime (1933–45) and its allies singled out for persecution before and during WW2, because they believed Roma were racially inferior. With German victory over Poland assured in 1939, Reinhard Heydrich planned to deport 30,000 German and Austrian Roma. In fact German authorities DID deport Roma from the Greater German Reich to occupied Poland. In May 1940, the SS and police deported c2,500 Roma from the Rhineland, western and NW Germany to the Lublin District in the General Government. SS and police authorities locked them into forced-labour camps, working in often lethal conditions.
In 1941, German police authorities deported 5,007 Roma from Austria to Lodz Jewish ghetto Poland, housing them in a segregated block. Many Roma died from typhus in the first months after arriving, and Nazi SS and police sent those who survived these dreadful conditions to Poland’s Chelmno Extermination Camp in 1942, in gas vans.
Local Germans hated the camps, demanding the expulsion of the Roma to safeguard real Germans’ public morals, public health and security. Local police used these complaints to appeal to SS chief Heinrich Himmler for the resumption of deportations of Roma to the east. In Dec 1942, Himmler ordered the deportation of all Roma from the Greater Reich.
c23,000 Roma were deported to Auschwitz. SS medical researchers assigned to the Auschwitz complex eg SS Dr Josef Mengele was authorised to select subjects for scientific medical experiments from among the prisoners. Mengele chose twins and dwarves as subjects of his experiments. 90% of the Roma sent to Auschwitz died there.
The SS also shot c30,000 Roma in the Baltic States and elsewhere in the German-occupied Soviet Union, where Einsatzgruppen and mobile killing units killed Roma, whenever the SS killed Jews and Russians. The same in Serbia. Five other nations joined the Axis during WW2: Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia and Croatia. Romania, an Axis partner, did not systematically annihilate the Roma population living on Romanian territory. Instead the Romanian military deported them to S.W Ukraine, under Romanian administration. The authorities of Croatia, another Axis partner of Germany and run by the militant separatist and terrorist Ustasa, annihilated virtually the entire Roma population there: c25,000 people.
The Romas’ fate closely paralleled that of the Jews, although Roma pre-WW2 populations were not precisely known; perhaps 1.25 million. Note also that many European Roma communities were totally destroyed, survivors suffering from psychological and physical traumas of deprivation, abuse and destruction of family. Thus it was almost impossible to reconstruct Roma cultural networks post-war.
In 1982 Chancellor Helmut Schmidt formally acknowledged that German Roma had been victims of genocide. However Romanis, one of the largest ethnic minorities in the EU, still face limited access to quality education and to the labour market, leading to further poverty and social exclusion, poor healthcare and hate-motivated harassment.
Ceremonial inauguration of the Roma Memorial
in Berlin opposite the Reichstag, 2012
Credit: Central Council
Bulldozers destroy makeshift Roma camp near Lyon, 2013.
Credit: Daily Sabah
Read Klaus-Michael Bogdal*, Europe and the Roma: A History of Fascination and Fear, 2023