by Becky Taylor
All these factors pushed for a more settled lifestyle, and we have evidence, for example, of an increase in the number of semi-permanent encampments in the New Forest, which rapidly became the target of the mission efforts of the YMCA.35 Similarly, in Perthshire, a Central Committee on the Welfare of Tinkers began organizing regular ‘Saturday meetings’, Sunday services, small loans and ‘friendly visitations’ to the Traveller households of the city.36 We cannot, however, assume that this work was necessarily conducted out of any sympathetic desire to improve their lives, with one volunteer admitting her motivation was ‘to advance the Kingdom of God amongst the tinkers . . . she was driven entirely against her will into the work. She hated it’.37
If most Gypsies in Europe found life harder simply because their already difficult life was worsened by the conflict and the conditions it imposed, in France this was compounded by active persecution on the part of the authorities. France’s preoccupation with issues of identity and loyalty were further heightened by the crises of the war, and the state of siege declared on 2 August 1914 created sweeping internment powers targeting marginal and foreign populations. Previously such legislation had been applied only to immediately threatened border areas, but now modern total war saw the authorities make use of a much wider reach, while the 1912 law made it easier to identify nomades.38 Alsatians living throughout France were interned alongside ‘foreigners’, other suspect individuals and Gypsies. In total 70 internee camps were created, of which at least eleven contained Gypsies, and one of which (in Crest) was specifically for Gypsies born after 1871 in Alsace-Lorraine. Admission records reveal how ideas of the foreignness and dubious loyalty of Gypsies combined with assumptions of criminality and general lawlessness to justify internment. Rationales for internment included statements such as ‘as a general measure’, ‘no fixed abode, no profession’, ‘stealing’, ‘foreigner resident in the army’s zone’ and ‘moving around at night without the army’s authorization’. Nine months into the war, it was decided to revive the law of 9 August 1849, giving military authorities the power to ‘expel from the army’s zone all nomads to be found there or who try to gain entry’.39
The camp at Crest opened in July 1915 with 112 ‘Alsatian romanichels’, a number that rose to 159 by December. Following the spirit of the law of 1912, the authorities’ sights were on nomades in the broadest sense, and internees included Gypsies, Jenische, fairground people as well as vagabonds and itinerant artists.40 Men who were conscripted into the French army from the camps could see their families released, but many found themselves locked up for the duration of the conflict and beyond. The experience of the Friemann family from Alsace-Lorraine is illustrative both of the difficulties faced by the interned and of their resistance. After some time in detention in Nevers, the Friemanns complained to the prefect of the département of the difficult conditions in which they were being forced to live. They were backed up by a Franco-Swiss medical team that on visiting the camps noted how inmates suffered from ‘disabilities, wounds, sickness, lesions’. The complaints did not make the family popular: records note Nicolas Friemann had ‘an intelligent indiscipline which provokes his comrades to continual revolt’ and advised that he be ‘very closely watched’. Their appeal failed, causing the family to attack a guard and attempt to escape. As rumours of the imminent end of the war spread, discontent followed and a ‘revolt’ was recorded on 27 July 1918, with inmates refusing to obey camp orders. Nicolas was blamed for this, which resulted in a recommendation to send him to a high-security camp. Finally, he and his family were liberated along with the remainder of the camp in July 1919, with the local newspaper Le Crestois expressing satisfaction at being rid of ‘these undesirable guests’.41 No doubt the feeling was mutual.
The landscape into which not only the Friemanns, but Europe, emerged after 1918 was very different to that of four years previously. Both the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires were in tatters; the Russian Tsarist Empire had been overthrown by the Bolsheviks, who also had their sights on the ruins of imperial Germany; France, while not experiencing revolution, struggled with the challenge of absorbing three million disabled veterans on top of the deaths of 1.4 million men; while across the Continent economic dislocation and political uncertainty caused mass unemployment, inflation and strikes. Politically the Treaty of Versailles redrew Europe’s boundaries to Germany’s loss and France’s gain, created a number of independent countries from the old empires and expanded British and French imperial holdings in the Middle East and Africa. As ever, for Gypsies, appearing at the margins of these events, these changes had significant implications.
In the nations formed from the old empires, new constitutions commonly guaranteed rights to all citizens irrespective of their ethnic background. This was frequently more the product of a concern to make viable national entities out of often disparate groups than it was a reflection of the desire to genuinely support the needs of different ethnicities. So, for example, the new Czechoslovakian constitution contained a Bill of Rights for National Minorities that guaranteed ‘the same civil and political rights without distinction of race, language or religion’, as well as full economic and employment rights and the right to the ‘free use of any language’. There was also provision for education in a minority language where the minority made up more than 20 per cent of the population, which in reality meant only the country’s German population. Despite these guarantees, as in Bulgaria in the late nineteenth century, the impact for the country’s Roma population was rather different. Too small anywhere to make up a fifth of the population (overall the Roma population was around 31,000 in 1930 against a national population of nearly 14.5 million), they received no special attention from the state, and if they made any gains at all it was as Slovakian peasants rather than as Roma. Contemporary reports of the period suggested that it ‘often happens that a Gypsy without resources commits a crime only to escape the pangs of hunger’ through imprisonment.42
And yet there were some positive developments, such as the Gypsy school in the Slovakian town of Užhorod, which seemingly was a joint state and Gypsy initiative. Unlike British Gypsy schools, where the focus was on assimilation and low-level educational achievement, this school emphasized academic learning: ‘Their knowledge of arithmetic and the principles of general science is truly amazing. They answer questions clearly and straightforwardly, and are obviously accustomed to school life.’ The adults had shown their active support of the project from the outset, carrying out the building work themselves and supplying the materials, and also becoming involved in a theatre group and forming a football team. A visitor to the school thought that the success of the project came from the fact that the motto and underlying principle of the institution was, ‘the Gypsy is also human’ and that it was motivated by a ‘principle of equality’.43
While there were countries in Europe which, if not promoting equality, did not make moves against their Gypsy populations in the inter-war period – in both Poland, and perhaps more surprisingly Mussolini’s Italy Gypsies remained largely ignored by the state – for any more evidence of proactive measures we must turn to Soviet Russia. As with the wider population, the turmoil of the Civil War, economic collapse and social change prompted by the Bolshevik revolution resulted in rapid impoverishment and the deterioration their position. As a response to this chaos many Roma who had become more settled in towns took up itinerant lifestyles as a way of coping with the difficulties. By the mid-1920s, however, as the Communist Party was able to establish its hold on Russian society it was able to turn its attention to drawing Roma into its revolutionary project.44
Gypsies were seen as a separate national group within Russian society, and one that needed particular support in order to engage more fully in Communism. This was part of a far wider Leninist policy of korenizatsiia: avoiding antagonizing the still-potent force of separatist nationalism through the mass recruitment of non-Russians as cadres within the Communist Party and bestowing of material benefits.
This policy informed all Party dealings with ethnic minority groups from 1923 until it was scaled back and then reversed by Stalin’s ‘Friendship of the People’ approach from 1932–5 onwards.45 Consequently the All-Russian Union of Gypsies was established in order to unite them, to draw them into socially useful labour through creating cooperatives and communes and encouraging itinerant Roma to settle. Under its auspices these years saw the flowering of state-sponsored Gypsy cultural activities: Communist-funded organizations such as Nikolai Kruchinin’s Gypsy Choir, the Romen Gypsy Theatre and the Touring Gypsy Theatre rapidly assimilated the Gypsy musical elites of Moscow and Leningrad, thereby drawing them into local Party hierarchies. In addition the Union put on evening classes and Sunday Schools, ran clubs and libraries, created Romani-language newspapers, books, textbooks and propaganda material. These developments went hand in hand with attempts to draw Gypsies into formal education, through actively training Gypsy teachers, creating designated schools and classes and running educational programmes for adults.
By the later 1920s cultural approaches to assimilation were combined with measures promoting settlement. In order to attract those willing to farm, Gypsy families were given up to 1,000 roubles and given priority by land allocation committees. At the same time the authorities moved ahead with the creation of Gypsy kolkhozes (cooperative farms), which saw 500 Roma families in Ukraine being settled on nine farms in 1927. Soviet propaganda directed both at mainstream society and Gypsies themselves presented the process of settlement and collectivization as a voluntary, natural process, emerging from their enthusiastic embracing of Communism. The reality was rather more complex. Surviving evidence shows Roma accepting funding and disappearing, or beginning the settlement process, receiving credit, farming machinery and stock, but then selling up and moving to a different region. By 1938 there were only 52 co-operative Gypsy farms, housing around 3 per cent of the total Roma population.
The kolkhozes were part of a wider policy of drawing Gypsies into collectivization: the 4 April 1936 decree on ‘Measures for employment of itinerant [Gypsies] and improvement of the economic and cultural and living standards of working Gypsies’ set out a plan for their inclusion in state farms and industrial enterprises. The largest of these was in Leningrad and employed around 200 people in metalworking, but most were little more than family workshops that were established as part of local settlement programmes. Stalingrad’s Flame of the Revolution Gypsy collective enterprise attracted 464 roubles in free assistance and loans, suggesting that it could be profitable to cooperate with the state. However, as with the collective farms, records show that the numbers of Gypsies drawn into such schemes were small, both absolutely and as a proportion of their total population.
While early Soviet policies towards Gypsies may have had only a limited impact, it is worth reflecting on exactly how revolutionary state attitudes were when compared to either the historical record towards Gypsies, or the actions of their contemporaries in other parts of Europe. The Communist commitment to improving the position of minorities within the Soviet Union, while often grounded in assimilationist ideas and crude propaganda, was based on a presumption that marginalization was caused by material factors rather than innate racial or ‘group’ characteristics. For the first time in their history Gypsies throughout the Soviet Union benefited from their long-standing marginal position in society: they were seen as victims of Tsarism, deserving of proactive Communist attention, a measure of understanding and extra resources. In the poisonous atmosphere of the 1930s purges this meant they were free of the taint of privilege that caused the murder or imprisonment of so many. While there are records of 52 individual Gypsies being executed in the anti-Soviet campaign of 1937–8, the new Roma elite largely escaped the mass purges, unlike other peoples in the USSR, who saw almost an entire class of intelligentsia and party activists wiped out.
The Soviet’s dual emphasis on material disadvantage and the possibility of progress stood in stark contrast to the developing climate across other parts of mainland Europe, where growing intolerance was increasingly expressed in ever-tightening state control. France moved forward with photographing, recording details and distributing anthropometric notebooks to any families who had so far evaded registration. Local authorities not prioritizing this were directed by a circular in 1920 to institute a ‘nomad register’ to improve surveillance. This drive had a number of different consequences: some families chose to settle down, others applied for the more liberal, less demanding forains or marchands ambulants permits instead.46 Miguel Sausa, who applied for the latter in 1922, explained how with the ‘anthropometric notebooks I wasted a lot of time getting it signed in each locality; I only stay sometimes five or six hours in these localities and this loss of time is very onerous for my business’.47 Czechoslovakia, prompted by a high-profile and entirely unfounded prosecution of Roma for cannibalism, instigated a similar ‘nomad pass’ in 1927. All Roma over fourteen years of age had to carry an identity card which included copies of their fingerprints; families needed a licence to travel and required the explicit permission of the mayor to remain in a settlement, and even then leave was rarely granted for longer than a week. The legislation further prohibited Gypsies from entering certain specific communities and regions, particularly spa and holiday resorts. Those who did not register were subject to arrest, and over the next thirteen years nearly 40,000 identity cards were issued.48
Right across Europe we see further moves to build on pre-First World War attempts at international cooperation controlling the cross-border movement of Gypsies. While the dominance of Germany and Austria in this process was crucial, it is worth reflecting on how this was part of a phenomenon that reached far beyond either Gypsies or the increasingly racial preoccupations of these nations. This was an era in which the League of Nations and other international organizations not based on empires started to emerge on the world stage. The foundation of the International Criminal Police Commission (later Interpol) was part of this trend. A strong theme of its work in this period, pushed very much by the Munich Gypsy police, was the control of Gypsies between countries.49 In this it was building on the legacy of the bilateral agreements of the pre-war era, but the creation of a formal international structure meant that, following pressure from Munich and Austria, it was able to establish an International Gypsy Central Bureau based in Vienna. This collected information on those who passed between states, as part of a wider plan to compile a ‘genealogical tree’ of ‘international Gypsies’ which would act as ‘an excellent weapon in the fight against Gypsies’.50 By 1936 the Central Bureau had sent each country an outline identification form to be filled in by immigration officials upon the entry or exit of a Gypsy. As well as basic biographical information it asked for the names, nicknames and aliases of individual family members and companions, along with details of all crimes committed. Revealing of its preoccupations, it asked for information regarding the ‘gait’ and ‘carriage’ of the person, the ‘shape of face . . . eyebrows . . . forehead . . . chin . . . teeth’.51
The central role of Austria and Germany – particularly Bavaria – in pushing the work of the ICPC was indicative of the growing preoccupation in this part of Europe with the ‘Gypsy problem’. The turmoil of Germany in the aftermath of the First World War is well known and not to be underestimated: Germany went from being an expanding, dominant world force, supported by a rapidly industrializing economy, sophisticated education system and cultural innovation, to the brink of collapse in a few short years. Surrender and the Treaty of Versailles were followed by waves of unrest, revolutionary movements and coup attempts from both the left and the right. These reactions were intensified by an economic crisis of hyperinflation, currency collapse, crushing unemployment and endemic food shortages. Unemployment became one of the central features of the inter-war years, reaching an official total of six million by the time the Nazis gained power in 1933.52
As early as August 1918 the myth of the ‘stab in the back’, which
asserted that domestic enemies – primarily Jews and ‘Bolsheviks’ – had caused Germany’s defeat, had gained popular currency. While Gypsies were largely excluded from this particular form of xenophobic hostility – although there were claims that they had profiteered as currency dealers and horse traders – the turbulence of the period ensured that in common with other minorities within Germany, these years saw the intensification of publically articulated suspicion against them. A not untypical newspaper article, in language reminiscent of Tetzner’s ‘locusts’, described Gypsies as descending like a ‘plague’ on villages, going from door to door asking for money. It closed with advice to its reader to ‘give them nothing and show no sympathy’, as that way they would leave the area faster.53 The 1920s also saw circulars being issued within states alerting civil servants and the police of current ‘Gypsy tricks’ by horse traders and the ‘charlatanism of Gypsy women’.54
Across Germany, matters were to move very rapidly from circulars of this kind to more explicit physical restrictions on both movement and settlement. However, as the Weimar Republic continued to be federally organized, crucial pieces of legislation affecting Gypsies and Landfahrer (Travellers) were enacted at state rather than national level. This led to important regional differences, and makes it hard to talk of national policy in this period. As early as 1922 Baden introduced something similar to France’s pre-war anthropometric identity cards.55 In many states camping became permitted only in areas approved by the police, where it was generally limited to 24 hours, with authorities continuing the pre-war Prussian tactic of heavily restricting the all-crucial Wandergewerbeschein (pedlar travel licence). In Hesse officials were instructed not to issue them to any ‘foreign Gypsies’, and were reminded that ‘usually there will be a reason to deny domestic Gypsies the licence’. Such reasons might include ‘dubious personality’, being unable to provide a permanent address, proof of the means to support children or evidence of the education of children.56