The RomaniPořajmos:The Nazi Genocide of Europe's Gypsies

Abstract

The Nazi assault on Gypsies as an undesirable group was launched in the first months of the Third Reich. By the end of 1933, the outlines of a policy of total removal and, if possible, extinction were in place. Over the course of the first year of Hitler's rule, Gypsies had been numbered among those destined for mass sterilization. The goal of preventing their propagation had been pronounced on July 14 when the new cabinet issued a statement (with the force of law) proclaiming the concept ofLebensunwertesleben—life unworthy of living—a category of person that, at the time, specifically and indiscriminately included and embraced all Gypsies. Shortly thereafter, exploratory contacts were made with the League of Nations to assess the practicability of allocating one or two Polynesian islands to which the Gypsies could be deported. By September 1933, the Ministry of Interior announced a more realizable preliminary plan to arrest persons with no fixed and permanent addresses (i.e. primarily Gypsies) and to incarcerate them in special detention camps as a means of removing them from the mainstream of society. There the Gypsies would be rendered preemptively criminally harmless, (since they were described as a potential detriment to the general German population), and biologically “futureless”(zukunftloss)by way of mass sterilization.In retrospect, the central ingredients for a formula of genocide, for the complete extermination of the Gypsies, were all in place: an ideology which deprived them of the basic right to life; a process of law by edict, which subjected them to totalitarian rule; a hypothetical plan to deport them abroad, and a more concrete one to isolate them from the citizenry, by segregating them in prison-like compounds, deprived of all civil rights; and a technology of physical mutilation that would deny them progeny and a link with a biological future, by literally destroying the unconceived next generation. Thus, a skeletal blueprint for the genocide of Gypsies by the racial architects of the Nazi regime had been drawn up by the end of 1933 well before the first Gypsies in Germany were rounded up in January 1934.