NS Persecution
Romani and Sinti people were racially persecuted in Germany and in the occupied countries. They were victims of segregation, deportations, forced sterilization, forced labor, mass executions, Massacres and murder in concentration camps. In Germany, the country in which the persecution started, all Sinti or Romani people families were affected by the racist persecution and lost relatives during the Nazi regime. In Europe, Romani people were equally racially persecuted and were also targeted by the Nazis and their allies as citizens, of occupied countries and when they participated in the resistance struggle. Many fought against the German occupation in the respective national resistance movements, such as the partisans in Eastern and Southeastern Europe, in Russia or in the Resistance in France.
Historical experts quote different numbers of Romani and Sinti people murdered during the Nazi regime. This is due, first of all, to the still very limited research on the genocide of Romani and Sinti people. From some concentration camps, partly very detailed records about the people in the camps have been preserved, hidden by the perpetrators but also by the internees. The situation is different in places where mass shootings took place, as was predominantly the case in Eastern Europe. Many mass graves here are still unknown to this day, as are the identities of the murdered. For the large concentration camps such as Jasenovac in Croatia, there are also different figures on how many people were ultimately killed here. In addition to the missing or incomplete records of the perpetrators, the rudimentary historical research on the genocide of Romani people and Sinti also leaves large gaps for posterity. Nevertheless, historical accounts regularly contain estimates of the number of people killed. Numbers are very ambivalent: For those affected, it makes no difference at first how many people were killed in total, if even one victim was a family member or a close caregiver. However, the dimension of genocide becomes clear on a collective level, even though knowledge, language, professions and crafts of the people have also been lost as a result of the murder, so that generations are still directly affected by the consequences of this destruction.
The racist persecution of Romani and Sinti people was based on close cooperation between various social actors, disciplines and institutions. In science, so-called race research was carried out, classifying people according to their worthiness and experimenting on people. Politically, laws were increasingly passed that restricted freedom of movement, prohibited marriages between Germans and Sinti or Romani people, provided the basis for forced camps, forced labour and deportations. The police carried out the arrests and deportations of people to camps. The Wehrmacht participated in the crimes in other countries, mainly in Eastern Europe and Russia. Germany occupied the various countries in different ways, while some were considered Germanic, as the Danes, the Netherlands, Finns and a Nazification of society should be achieved by propaganda, the people of Eastern Europe and Russia were persecuted, exploited and murdered on a racist basis. Other countries, including Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Croatia, joined the original Tripartite Pact (1940) of Germany, Japan and Italy. They were also involved in the Holocaust, terrorizing and murdering Romani and Sinti, Jews and also persecuting the resistance movements of their countries. They also participated in the occupation of other countries with their own armies.
Besides the state institutions of persecution, survivors and eyewitnesses also tell of neighbours, teachers, bus drivers, shop assistants, acquaintances, former friends and even family members who remained silent in the face of injustice, who denounced them, discriminated against them and took financial and material advantage of the misery of racially persecuted people. Apart from the direct violence of deportation, forced labour and murder, the loss of family and friendships as well as the hardships of flight – many hid for days in forests, starved, fell seriously ill – caused immeasurable suffering.
In various Romanes linguistic varieties, the experience of this comprehensive extermination, the genocide of Romani and Sinti people, is named with its own terms:
Samudaripen has been introduced in former Yugoslavia and is composed of the words: “All” and “Killing” and is used in the sense of “total destruction”.
Pharrajmos was introduced in the 1990s in the USA by the Romani activist and scientist Ian Hancock as a porajmos and means “devour”. However, there was also linguistic criticism of the term, as it also includes other connotations. This is why the Romani activists and scholars Ágnes Daróczi and János Bársony later proposed the term “Pharrajmos”, meaning “destruction” or “annihilation”, in order to clearly limit the term to the Nazi genocide.
Manchengromarepen is an expression that many Sinti from Germany use and which translates as “human murder” and how “crimes of humanity” can be understood. The term was introduced to Sinti-Romanes by the civil rights activist and former employee of the Documentation Centre of German Sinti and Roma, Reinhold Lagrenne.
Genocide is a legal term and a criminal offense in international law defined by the intention to destroy all or part of a national, ethnic, “racial” or religious group. The difference with other murders and war crimes is the intention to destroy an entire group of people.