Gypsies - Sinti and Roma

"The Gypsy cannot, by reason of his inner and outer makeup (Konstruktion), be a useful member of the human community."

~ Staatsrat Turner, chief of the civil administration in Serbia

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The Gypsies, like the Jews, were singled out for racial reasons. The Gypsies were one of the groups considered to be inferior, and there was no room in Adolph Hitler's world for them. They were labeled as being asocial, lazy non-persons. In 1937, Heinrich Krantz, who headed the Institute for the Preservation of Race, Heredity and Heath explained a new plan for "Combating the Gypsy Menace." This allowed for Gypsies in Germany and German-occupied states to be deported to Jewish ghettos in Poland, where the Einsazgruppen promptly shot thousands of them while they were naked and facing their mass graves, already dug for them. "In December of 1942, Himmler signed an order for the deportation of all Roma in Germany". The Gypsies in Germany were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. 

The Gypsies were identified by        Group of Gypsies deported to the Belzec camp, Poland

a black triangle patch worn on

their uniforms.

Gypsy couple at the Belzec concentration camp.

Jewish Virtual Library

Inside Auschwitz-Birkenau, there was a special area for them. There were many problems with disease like typhus and smallpox. There were about 23,000 Roma sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Of these, approximately 19,000 were murdered there in the gas chambers. The rest of those in the camp faced firing squads, "scientific" experimentation, and lethal injections, along with the daily work load and indignities suffered by all groups with in the concentration camps. Because there was a question as to whether the Roma were actually descendents of Germans, the Nazis also subjected the Roma to experiments aimed at proving that their blood was fundamentally different from pure German blood.

Roma who were married to Germans, and Roma children older than twelve years were not sentenced to concentration camps, but they were sterilized to keep them from passing on their impure, undesirable genetics.

Estimates indicate that the Nazis killed between 25 and 50 percent of the Roma living in Europe, placing the death toll at least 200,000 up to a possible 600,000.

For Further Reading: 

Learn more about the Roma.