Another Darkness, Another Dawn

by Becky Taylor

  Bavaria, which continued to lead the way in these matters, in 1926 passed the Law for the Combating of Gypsies, Travellers and the Workshy. Fundamentally this aimed to make nomadism impossible: it forbade movement without police permission; children could only travel with their parents if ‘adequate schooling’ could be proved to be taking place; people were forbidden to travel or camp in ‘bands’, which was taken to be in any group beyond that of immediate family members; Gypsies might only camp in specially designated sites; while those over the age of sixteen who could not prove ‘regular employment’ could be sent to the workhouse on the grounds of ‘public security’. This combination of controlling movement and concentrating Gypsies in designated sites laid the foundations for early Nazi legislation. Bavaria was aided in its work by the ongoing existence of its police Gypsy department, which by this stage held the biographical information, fingerprints and photographs of 26,000 individuals.57

  Yet even here, with this obsessive cataloguing and constructing of family trees, the Bavarian police and legislators were not able to define in any satisfactory way who constituted a ‘Gypsy’. As much as in the nineteenth century, overlaying racial considerations were those of behaviour. Consequently the ‘workshy’ and those ‘living like a Gypsy’– increasingly labelled Landfahrer – were included in the new measures. The only clear guidance over how the distinction between these different labels might be made was through assessing their conduct: ‘The decisive factor was way of life. Everyone with a fixed abode was exempted . . . it was assumed that Gypsies could never meet these criteria.’58 In fact, a significant number of travelling showpeople and pedlars claiming no Gypsy ancestry but with no fixed address were included within its powers, while the increasing number of Gypsies who had settled owing to the difficulties of gaining the Wandergewerbeschein were technically excluded.59

  In 1927 Prussia made the decision to fingerprint and photograph all adult Gypsies and those travelling nach Zigeunerart (‘in a Gypsy manner’). All those recorded were then to be issued with identity papers, which they needed to carry with them at all times, and in addition one copy was retained by the state and a second sent to Munich.60 And indeed, from 1929 Munich was to become central to the system, as it began to coordinate the control of Gypsies at the national level, reducing from this point onwards the differences between states across Germany. These years provide evidence that while the state’s reach was increasing, it was by no means insurmountable. Records show that family registration documents might still be falsified, or obtained in Alsace, which had been returned to France in 1918 but still saw many German Gypsy families travelling through its territories.61 And still Gypsies might find a measure of protection from the law: in 1930, when 500 Frankfurt residents petitioned the city authorities over the ‘Gypsy Plague’ living in their midst, the magistrate replied that there was no legislation which allowed him to remove them. All the city’s existing measures were based on the assumption that they were nomadic and under the Weimar constitution freedom of residence for all citizens was enshrined in law.62

  What was the effect of these increasing pressures on the everyday lives of German Gypsies? The fact that freedom of residence remained a right in the republic meant that where circumstances permitted Gypsies bought or rented plots of land or houses and carried out their trades from these bases. If private plots offered some measure of independence from state interference, in Bavaria the designated sites formed under the 1926 legislation rapidly became places of rigid supervision and social marginalization. High rents, frequent police raids and a virtual absence of sanitary facilities ensured that many Gypsies, if they could, moved out of the area rather than being subject to the controls they faced.63

  Over a few short years the local authority sites of the 1920s acquired permanent guards and fences, residents moved from being able to choose their employment to being forced into labour units, and gradually their ability to move outside the camps and to buy food and other items was restricted. By the late 1930s the sites had become internment camps acting as a pool of forced labour, and were the stepping stone to the deportation of Gypsies to the Polish ghettos and concentration camps. It is helpful here to separate out the two distinct but complementary processes at work: the ideological justification for the policies, and the bureaucratic measures that gave the ideology its material expression. Together these ensured that Gypsies were sufficiently physically and socially marginalized so that when the order came in December 1942 to intern all Gypsies in a specially created ‘family camp’ at Auschwitz–Birkenau, by the end of February 1943 the vast majority had been deported without resistance or objections from the wider community.

  The Nazi era saw Gypsies positioned between deterministic ideas of antisocial behaviour and racist doctrine: this period is characterized by intense debates over whether ‘Gypsies were predominantly antisocials who had to be sterilized, or member of a separate race who ultimately had to be exterminated’.64 Even after over 30 years of data collection the Munich police bureau exhibited a degree of confusion over this issue. Arguably, however, this is unsurprising, as ever since the sixteenth century Gypsies had been treated as suspect, sometimes because they were ‘foreign’, sometimes because they were vagrants, and sometimes because they were both. While dressed up in the language of pseudo-science, in which reactionary attitudes were lent the cloak of modernism, the Nazis did not fundamentally change the ground on which the arguments were made. If the Jewish experience in the Third Reich can be argued as exceptional for their being the only group targeted solely on the grounds of race, then the Gypsy experience might similarly be positioned as exceptional on the grounds that they were persecuted on both racial and asocial grounds.65

  Essentially Nazi racial ideology towards Gypsies was always bound up within its own internal contradictions. Nazism was clear in seeing Gypsies as a separate racial group, and it devoted effort and resources towards establishing a scientific rationale for this belief. And yet, by its own admission, the acknowledged Indian heritage of the Gypsies meant that they too were ‘Aryan’, which theoretically meant that they could not be discriminated against on racial grounds. Consequently the designation of Gypsies as a group as Asoziale (antisocial) was an ideological sleight of hand: while apparently condemning Gypsies for their way of life – assumed to be both nomadic and criminal – in fact the designation of an entire people as antisocial on the grounds of assumed biological characteristics made it clear that this was underpinned by racial thinking. Fundamentally doctrines of race meant that there was no ameliorative hope for these asocials: at this point the way was paved to sterilization and murder.

  We should, however, be wary of granting the Nazi regime the dignity of a fully thought-out and coherent programme of action. The political style of Hitler and other Nazi leaders was to issue general guidelines, based on broad ideological or strategic precepts, and to expect subordinates to find the ways to realize them. This meant that participants in Nazi crimes, both before and during the war, acted as ‘creative conformists’, navigating the different policies of persecution and destruction as the evolving conditions of the war allowed, in order to implement what they believed to be their superiors’ wishes.66 Consequently just as we should not be surprised that there were often contradictions between actions at the local level in different places, we should know that there were many paths to the death camps.

  Directly after the Nazis came to power, in March 1933 the Agreement by the States to fight the Gypsy Plague was passed which harmonized anti-Gypsy legislation across Germany, bringing all states in line with Bavarian regulations. Two months later laws were passed authorizing sterilization on eugenic grounds, which were further reinforced with the outlawing of the propagation of Lebensuntwertes Leben (‘lives not worthy of life’). Between them these framed the twin approach taken by the Nazi towards Gypsies over the next decade: as laws governing their ‘antisocial’ habits tightened, so too did the racial justification for their oppression.

 
; Central to the Nazi regime’s racial project against Gypsies was their inclusion in the supplementary decree to the Nuremburg Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour issued in November 1935. This made it clear that those of ‘racially alien blood’ included ‘members of other races whose blood is not related to German blood, as, for example, Gypsies and Negroes’. In order to be able to close the gap between existing racial legislation and the knowledge the regime held about its population, the Race Hygiene and Population Biology Research Centre was founded in 1936, under Dr Robert Ritter and with Himmler’s direct support. Its aim was ‘to reveal with exact methods the root cause of social developments in the biological’, in order to begin the eradication of the ‘unintegrated and the unproductive’. Seen as being ‘the first and most easily resolvable part of the problem, the Gypsy Question was taken up’ by Ritter.67

  The first step was to resolve who might constitute Gypsy or ‘part-Gypsy’ through deploying a combination of genealogical, ‘biological’ and anthropometric methods, ‘as well as threats and coercion’. Building on the work of the Munich police it began meticulously categorizing people as ‘pure’ Gypsies, various grades of ‘mixed’ Gypsy and sometimes ‘non-Gypsy nomads’.68 In this way, by 1940 Ritter had determined that there were around 30,000 Gypsies in Germany, of whom 90 per cent were deemed to be Zigeunermischling (Gypsy of mixed blood). In Ritter’s view, the Sinti and Roma were ‘primitive Aryans’, but the majority were no longer ‘racially pure’ as their ancestors had mixed with ‘criminal and asocial elements’. Contemporary criminal biology insisted that behaviour and criminality were inherited traits and so mixed-race Gypsies were ‘born criminals and Gypsies at the same time, their blood doubly tainted . . . [and] doubly inferior’.69 Consequently it was mixed-race Gypsies who were the main target of race scientists’ recommendations for forced labour camps and sterilization, with a view to annihilating them over a generation if not quicker:

  Our investigations have allowed us to characterize the Gypsies as being a people of entirely primitive ethnological origins, whose mental backwardness makes them incapable of real social adaptation . . . The Gypsy Question can only be solved when the main body of asocial and good-for-nothing Gypsy individuals of mixed blood is collected together in large labour camps and kept working there, and when the further breeding of this population of mixed blood is stopped once and for all.70

  Ritter’s Centre was not the only organization interested in this question. Also based in Berlin, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Hereditary and Eugenics, established in 1928 was another key breeding ground for race scientists focusing on links between heredity and criminality. Most notable for our purposes was the assistant of one of its directors, Josef Mengele, Auschwitz’s notorious camp physician. As part of his work he sent the eyes of murdered Gypsies, the internal organs of murdered children and the sera of those deliberately infected with typhoid back to the Institute for analysis.71

  Systematic pseudo-scientific research justifying racial exclusion both fed into and took place against a backdrop of ever-more extreme government intervention. In 1938 the ‘Decree for the Fight against the Gypsy Plague’ declared that ‘based on knowledge gained from race biological research’ it was clear that ‘the solution of the Gypsy Question should be based upon the nature of race’. By this point it had been determined that, unlike Jewishness which was defined as an individual having at least one Jewish grandparent, an individual only needed two great-grandparents to have been part-Gypsy in order to be designated Zigeunermischling. And yet, despite this emphasis on race, its definitions in fact revealed how there was still no clarity over definition, as its terms covered all ‘sedentary and non-sedentary Gypsies and persons travelling as Gypsies’. The decree ordered for the Munich Gypsy department to move to Berlin, so it was better placed to complete its task of registering the details of all Gypsies living in the Reich, and where it was renamed the National Centre for the Fight against the Gypsy Menace.72 From this point everyone covered by the decree was required to be registered both through the local police and with the national centre, while the authorities were ordered ‘to put all sedentary and non-sedentary Gypsies under constant surveillance’.73

  If then the ideological underpinning of Nazi actions continued to confuse racial and behavioural stereotypes, and hence exhibit a surprisingly old-fashioned anti-Gypsyism, what had undoubtedly changed was the means of the state to carry out its intentions. Throughout history, states repeatedly expressed the desire for Gypsies to be removed from their borders or societies, but far more rarely did governments have the capacity to implement these intentions. Nazism combined both the desire and a determination to back up ideology with action. A number of historians of the Nazi period have emphasized the bureaucratic, almost mundane nature of the Holocaust, in which Kristallnacht was the exception rather than the rule. It was not mob chaos in the throes of violent emotion that killed the majority of those who died as a result of Nazi policies, but rather obedience and a highly focused bureaucratic system.74 And indeed, when we look at the detail of police interactions with Gypsies in the first years of the Nazi regime what comes across most strongly is the ever tighter control by the state over their lives.

  The years between 1933 and the passing of the decree of 1938 saw a proliferation of regulations governing the minutiae of Gypsies’ lives, including banning public displays of dancing bears and monkeys, as well as the decision that Gypsies could not have visits from kinsmen after arrest, and women in particular should have no opportunity to make eye contact with kinsmen ‘to avoid consultations’ of a supernatural nature.75 This period also saw the first Gypsies being sentenced to concentration camps, typically on the grounds of their ‘criminality’: as early as September 1933 a group were arrested for begging and sent to Buchenwald, Dachau and Sachsenhausen. One of the most high-profile actions against Gypsies in the first period of the Nazi regime came as a result of the Berlin Olympics of 1936. All nomadic Gypsies in the city were relocated by the police to a camp in the Marzahn suburb in order to remove them from public sight, where they remained after the close of the Games, acting as a pool of forced labour.76

  And yet archival material from this period also sheds light on the multitude of bureaucratic difficulties the regime created for itself in the course of trying to enact its policies. The police in the small town of Gross-Umstadt in 1934 recorded the problems of Gypsies begging, complaining how, as they often arrived in town late at night, it was impossible to deport them. More vexing however was the fact that many of them were in possession of the Wandergewerbescheine, which stated that ‘fällt nicht unter das Zigeunergesetz’ (‘Gypsy Law does not apply’) because they were defined as Halbzigeuner (half-Gypsy).77 Three years later the police were becoming preoccupied by the issue of the high costs of deporting Gypsies and the lack of available public funds. Policemen were urged to check that any damages to Gypsy families’ modes of transport were not caused deliberately, and were advised that ‘if there is no other option it is better to pay five Reichsmark for fixing a broken wheel than to spend twenty Reichsmark organizing deportation by the police’.78 This gives us a valuable glimpse into the bureaucratic challenges of implementing higher-level decrees and also, crucially, of everyday strategies of resistance that Gypsies deployed in the face of repression. The holders of the Wandergewerbescheine had obviously managed to comply with the regulations, despite apparently also appearing as Gypsies to the local police (and here we also get a sense of ongoing official confusion over who was or was not a Gypsy); late arrival in town in order to go begging was perhaps a strategy developed to try and maintain a livelihood; while deliberate breaking of caravan wheels to prevent deportation was a time-honoured tactic for slowing down evictions. Personal testimonies from this time also show how many Sinti and Roma responded to the worsening climate by trying to be as unobtrusive as possible:

  After 1933 we behaved as my father told us to: ‘Don’t attract attention, behave correctly
, do not provoke anyone! You see how it is.’ We heeded our parents. We kept a low profile . . . We were dressed no differently from others, but we were dark skinned. You could really sense the looks boring into our backs.79

  After the decree of 1938 the option of being unobtrusive became far more difficult. One common local-authority response to the new regulations was to interpret ‘constant surveillance’ as requiring the creation of a specific Gypsy camp, if they had not already established one. So, in Gelsenkirchen, for example, Sinti and Roma from private caravan plots and rented lodgings were interred in a single Gypsy camp initially located in Crangerstrasse. Here, 42 families comprising 220 people were accommodated in 50 caravans and huts. The following year they were moved to a new camp:

  Reginenstrasse had to be closed to traffic and is barred with barbed wire barricades. The caravans are set in a row and consecutively numbered and in front of every window there is a list of the residents of the caravan divided into adults and children. Up to September 1st [1939] the camp was continually checked by SA brigades [during the day] and at night.80

  Where camps were already in existence their regulations became more stringent, so those running the Berlin Marzahn camp, for example, decided to introduce ‘severe camp regulations on the [harsher] model of a concentration camp’.