by Becky Taylor
Further developments along these lines were slowed down owing to the changing situation brought about by the invasion of Poland. Initially it was planned to deport all 30,000 Austrian and German Gypsies to occupied territory as part of the wider resettlement of 160,000 Poles and Jews. In preparation for this removal all Gypsies were forbidden to move from their current residence, but organizational difficulties intervened. In the spring of 1940 only 2,500 were moved into Poland, mainly to pre-existing Jewish ghettos such as Łódź, as well as to forced labour and concentration camps. That the majority of Gypsies and Sinti were not deported meant the movement ban remained in force for several years, leading to all temporary, private and official sites used by Gypsies turning overnight into long-term stopping places. This inevitably resulted in highly unsatisfactory and rapidly declining conditions, where overcrowding, water shortages and inadequate sanitation were the norm.81 Camp inmates were assigned work in forced labour brigades, carrying out often gruelling and dangerous work, sustained by inadequate and increasingly limited rations. These conditions then fed into a self-fulfilling prophecy: Gypsies were seen as dirty and criminal, and conditions in which they were forced to exist ensured diseases spread rapidly amongst the undernourished population, confirming to the wider population the justice of treating them in this manner.
Preparations for and subsequent invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 gave some pause to the advance of anti-Gypsy regulations in Germany at least. In contrast, Austria, in the months following the Anschluss, moved rapidly against its Gypsy population, most of whom were concentrated in the Burgenland. This was the area that up until 1919 had been part of Hungary, and where Gypsies had been settled under the imperial assimilation schemes. As early as June 1939 the region’s 8,000 Gypsies were taken into ‘preventive custody’, with some sent directly to Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps, or the newly created Ravensbrück women’s camp. Others were sent to the Mauthausen Gypsy camp, which opened in November 1940, and where conditions were described as being comparable to those in concentration camps.82
The combination Ritter’s work, that of the central police department and the experiences in Austria and Poland fed into a decisive change in policy within Germany in December 1942. A decree issued by Himmler on 16 December ordered the internment of all Roma and Sinti in the newly created Gypsy Family Section (B-IIe) in Auschwitz–Birkenau. Deportations began at the end of February 1943 and were virtually completed by the end of the month. Not exterminated immediately on arrival, the inhabitants of the Gypsy camp who did not die through malnourishment, summary execution or medical experiments became forced labourers for the next seventeen months. During its existence the camp housed around 23,000 people and of these 20,078 died. Numbers were reduced from May 1944 and on 3 August 1944 the camp was cleared overnight. The remaining 2,897 men, women and children were gassed in order to make room for a new consignment of Hungarian Jews.
The extension of Nazi control and ideology across the Continent from 1938 was by no means total, as although German invasion meant some parts were under its direct control, other parts of Europe were ruled indirectly through collaborator or puppet governments, and the ever-shifting and increasingly troublesome Eastern Front created a huge and shifting zone of military and political flux. This meant that the politics of place and time were vital aspects of the lives and chances of survival of Roma, Sinti and other Gypsy groups across Europe during the war years. Across Europe as a whole there are 219,700 documented Roma and Sinti deaths, although the actual number is thought to be around 500,000.83 These deaths were concentrated in Germany, Austria, Serbia, Romania and Hungary, and although their total populations were smaller, almost the entire Croatian, Latvian and Estonian Gypsy populations were exterminated.
As German control over Poland became consolidated, the Nazis began tackling the issue of the presence of Gypsies within its borders. Chełmno extermination camp became the base for death trucks using carbon monoxide to kill Gypsies who had been rounded up from a range of places – some were Germans who had been part of the original deportations from Germany, and included some who had survived the typhus epidemic in Łódź ghetto, while others were recently interred Polish Gypsies.84 As the Wehrmacht advanced across the Ukraine and into Russia Gypsy populations were caught up in fighting and also became targets for mass executions: 176 Roma from three Romani showcase kolkhozes around Smolensk were shot or buried alive in a mass killing in 1942, with emerging evidence convincingly demonstrating that this was the typical reaction of SS units whenever they came across Roma communities as they advanced.85
On the Western Front, in France, the growth of concerted state control of nomads, use of the anthropometric identity cards and the increasing restrictions on foreign Gypsies would all seem to point towards providing a basis from which the racist policies of the Third Reich could take hold. Indeed the Germans profited from both the anthropometric identity cards and recent legislation: two and a half months before the French surrender the government banned movement by nomades for the duration of the war, requiring them to remain in an assigned area under police surveillance on the grounds of their supposed security risk.86 In Limousin the initial response of the authorities when receiving the April decree was to increase policing at its borders to prevent any new groups of Gypsies entering its jurisdiction, so that it would not have to expend extra resources on them. As food shortages intensified and evacuees and refugees came into the region, thefts of wood, food and fuel increasingly came to be blamed on nomades. Though evidence shows all sectors of the population regularly engaged in such thefts, long-standing stereotypes of ‘thieving Gypsies’ were deployed in order to concentrate blame on people already deemed antisocial outsiders.87
So while the German ordinance of 4 October 1940, which described Gypsies as ‘of an ethnic character which is particular to the romanichels’, was racially defined, it also included those who ‘pretended’ to have an occupation and built on pre-existing French legislation. Those classified as such were sent to internment camps and forbidden from crossing between the occupied and unoccupied zones: overall 6,500 were interned, 4,650 of these in the occupied zone and 1,400 in Vichy France.88 Originally internees were dispersed between a number of smaller camps, but over the course of 1941–2 these were rationalized so that Montreuil-Bellay, which was the largest in the occupied zone, held around 1,000 internees at any one time, while by March 1942 in the Vichy zone inmates were concentrated in Saliers in Bouches-du-Rhône.89
The fact that nomades conformed neither to generally accepted standards of behaviour nor ideals of ‘work, family, fatherland’ promoted by the Vichy regime’s National Revolution meant that there was widespread public support for the internment of Gypsies. Significantly, within both the justification for internment camps and daily life in them, French state insistence on ‘reform’ through changing behaviour and encouraging sedentarization remained more important than racial categorizations. French bureaucrats saw the camps as an opportunity to teach nomades trades that would help them to settle and to provide schooling for the children.90 In camps, theoretically at least, if they changed their work habits and acquired the ideals of family and society as pushed by the National Revolution, they could re-enter the French national community.91 In fact, despite the plans of architects to turn Saliers into a ‘concentration camp [with] the look and feel of a village and of allowing family life there’, deplorable living conditions led to persistent escape attempts.92 Indeed, all surviving accounts of the French camps indicate unforgiving living conditions: inmates burnt furniture to keep warm; while the population of Montreuil walked out to the camp on Sundays to throw bread to inmates for the entertainment of watching starving people throw themselves on the bread and fight for it.93 A Swiss nurse, Friedel Bohny-Reiter, describes roasting summers and freezing winters with a ceaseless wind at the camp at Rivesaltes; overall, camps lacked food, hygiene, bedding and clothing, and residents suffered persistent infestations of vermin.94
> While much of the story of the war in France centres around the creation of internment camps, it is important to stress how significant numbers of Gypsies were involved in the resistance. This included such prominent people as Jean Beaumarie, who worked with the Maquis, as did his brother who was caught and hanged. Armand Stenegry, later president of the Manouche Gypsy Association, and well known musician, became a guerrilla officer. With his unit, which included other Gypsies, he participated in partisan attacks carried out in coordination with the Normandy landings in 1944.95 There is also evidence of more general involvement in the resistance, as some groups of Gypsies joined partisan groups living in forested and mountain areas. Exchanging live-in caravans for farm wagons and adopting local peasant dress they ran explosives, transported fugitives and British agents, as well as participating in raids, arson attacks and combat situations.96
Despite the apparent malleability of French attitudes towards Gypsies to Nazi ends, in fact the position was not so clear cut. As we have already seen, the law of 1912 applied to nomades rather than ‘Gypsies’, and so settled Gypsies did not require them while non-Gypsy nomads did. The French state’s concentration on settlement and regular employment as the means by which Gypsies might be ‘turned into Frenchmen’ stymied an easy ‘racial’ separation of Gypsies and non-Gypsies. Although offering no protection to its Jewish population, in this case the French republican tradition of resistance to ethnic differentiation played a crucial part in ensuring that Himmler’s December 1942 order that all Gypsies to be sent to Auschwitz–Birkenau was not enforced in France.97 French Gypsies may have been interned for the duration of the war, where they faced privation and social isolation, but this was in contrast to the experiences of those living in the Nazi-controlled Nord département. Interned in far higher numbers than in Vichy France on 15 January 1944, 351 interned Belgian and French Gypsies made up Convoy z, which went straight to the Gypsy camp at Auschwitz–Birkenau.
We see some similarities in the position of Roma in Bulgaria, where they became entangled within wider notions of national identity and independence. Although Bulgaria entered the war on the side of the Axis powers in early 1940, and despite King Boris’s personal ease with many fascist policies, what was most notable about Bulgaria’s relationship with the Third Reich was the reluctance with which it engaged both with the war generally, and the racial policies of Nazism specifically.98 Boris consistently resisted Nazi attempts to engage Bulgaria in the Eastern Front and Macedonia, and when from late 1941 the Germans began pressing for more restrictions on Bulgarian Jews, Bulgaria rejected the increasing stigmatization and deportation of its well-integrated Jewish population. Bulgaria’s ability to protect the Jewish population was undoubtedly limited: those in Bulgarian-held Macedonia and Thrace were not shielded from the round of deportations that began in March 1943. However, deportations in Bulgaria itself were staunchly resisted: 40 deputies from the government party signed a petition and condemnation and resistance came from all strata of society, including the Orthodox Church, pro-fascist MPS, trade unions and the (illegal) Communist Party. Backed so strongly by the nation Boris stood firm against the Nazi demands, and the country’s 50,000 Jews survived the war.99
It is in this context that we can place the treatment of Bulgaria’s Roma population, and the implementation of the decrees directed against them. Ordinance 129 included Gypsies along with Jews in prohibiting marrying Bulgarians; while in May 1942 a decree ordered ‘Gypsies to be directed to compulsory employment’; and another allocated them lower ration entitlements than the wider population. This period also saw some hardening of attitudes towards Gypsies, and the summer of 1942 brought an increase in attacks on them encouraged by the discriminatory decrees. The following year, in part because the compulsory labour order had been inconsistently applied, all Gypsies aged between seventeen and 50 ‘found idle’ were mobilized for the harvest, and other public works, prompting raids across Sofia on ‘restaurants, coffee-houses, sweetshops and taverns’. Although this was combined with orders from the Ministry of the Interior to restrict their movements, ‘under the pretext that Gypsies were spreading infectious diseases, especially spotted typhus’, this translated into neither rounding them up into internment camps, as in France, nor deportation to extermination camps.100 Overall, most agree that these decrees were largely ineffective and that many Gypsies found ways to avoid labour mobilizations. Given that the decrees were policed by the Bulgarians themselves, and that the measures had only been passed to placate Germany, turning a blind eye to anti-Gypsy measures was one way for officials to undermine Nazi domination of daily life.101 In their position of relative safety, the Roma of Bulgaria were like those of Albania, an Italian protectorate; Montenegro (divided between Italy and Albania); and Macedonia (divided between Albania and Bulgaria). As in Italy, the Roma living in Italian areas faced relatively few extra restrictions – although there is some evidence of local internment and imprisonment – until the German occupation in August 1943.102
Roma experiences in Serbia were rather different, as the territory became a zone of German military occupation under the collaborationist regime of Milan Nedić from April 1941. Nazi racial policies were swiftly implemented, although the standard definition of who constituted a Roma was changed slightly: Serbian Gypsies able to claim that their families had been sedentary since 1850 and integrated into mainstream life were free from the restrictions applied to those with three or more Romani grandparents. Those unable to prove their exemption, in common with Gypsies across German-occupied territories, lost professional positions, were subject to property confiscations, forced labour and curfews and were barred from most public places. They were also some of the first to be taken and executed as hostages at ratios of 10- or 100-to-1 for reprisal for casualties caused by partisan attacks on German forces. As slave labourers they were forced to construct concentration camps in both Serbia and Croatia, including the notorious Semlin camp, where later as inmates they starved, died of exposure or committed suicide. And yet, despite the restrictions they faced, owing to the high level of integration into the wider community – speaking and looking Serbian, and being primarily settled – it is estimated that only one-third of Serbia’s Roma population were affected by the racial laws. Many ‘fled, evaded, hid and were hidden’ or joined the resistance, either separate Roma groups or Tito’s partisans.103
Across the border in the Independent State of Croatia, led by the fascist Ustaša under Ante Pavelić (the ‘butcher of the Balkans’), Roma faced one of the most savage regimes of the period. Pavelić’s project of radical ethnic homogenization meant that the genocides committed against Serbs, Jews and Roma were very much intertwined, and overall it is estimated that 10 per cent of Croatia’s total population were killed as a result of racial policies.104 As part of this Croatia constructed some of the strictest racial categorizations – here a Gypsy was anyone with two Romani grandparents – as well as some of the most ruthless concentration camps. Indeed, Gestapo reports to Berlin of its camps commented on their brutality, expressing concern that the ‘excessive viciousness lessened efficiency’. While the largest number killed were Serbs, the annihilation of the Croatian Gypsy population was almost total: up to 30,000 Roma from all over Yugoslavia were killed in Jasenovac extermination camp, and by October 1943 only 1 per cent (200–300 people) of Croatia’s pre-war Roma and Sinti population remained. There are accounts of Roma who, against the odds, escaped Jasenovac under fire by swimming the river, and who subsequently joined the partisans for the rest of the war. However, overall, it is estimated that of the approximately 200,000 Roma killed across what became Yugoslavia the majority were from Croatia.105
Romania’s fascist Iron Guard came up with a different solution to its ‘Gypsy problem’. Dressed up as a preventative public health and anti-crime measure, it saw the deportation of the bulk of its Roma population, alongside its Jews, to Transnistria. In a six-month period in 1942 over 11,000 nomadic Roma were expelled and forced to make thei
r way on foot and with carts to this region of southwestern Ukraine across the river Dniester, where they were to live in ‘colonies’. This was part of an explicit and coordinated racially motivated attempt to annihilate Romania’s Roma population, which built on pre-existing eugenicist preoccupations:
Nomadic and semi-nomadic Gypsies shall be interned into forced labour camps. There, their clothes shall be changed, their beards and hair cut, their bodies sterilised [. . .] Their living expenses shall be covered from their own labour. After one generation, we can get rid of them. In their place, we can put ethnic Romanians from Romania or from abroad, able to do ordered and creative work. The sedentary Gypsy shall be sterilised at home [. . .] In this way, the peripheries of our villages and towns shall no longer be disease-ridden sites, but an ethnic wall useful for our nation.
Overall, it is estimated that 26,000 Roma were deported to the region, with over half dying of starvation, exposure or in the typhus epidemic of the winter of 1942–3.106
The evidence from Hungary similarly confirms the importance not only of Nazi occupation or alliance, but of internal national preoccupations, in whether or not the Roma population were savagely persecuted. As a German ally, Hungary took an active role in the war, with regiments of Hungarian soldiers (including Roma) fighting alongside the Germans on the Eastern Front. Yet it was not until the 1944 coup by Ferenc Szálasi’s fascist Arrow Cross that the way was opened for an active, nationally led racist terror campaign against Roma. The collective persecution they had experienced up until the coup – a mix of racially applied laws, mass arrests, forced labour brigades and continual police harassment – suddenly intensified. Although lasting only a few months – until April 1945 – the closeness of the new regime to the Reich’s ideology and the sophisticated extent of the machinery of annihilation by this point in the war meant that most of the estimated 50,000 Hungarian Roma killed during the war died in these months. In October 1944 orders were given to intern all Gypsies in local camps and other places of confinement; from there they were sent to transit camps such as Komárom castle on the Slovakian border. Here they were held in underground bunkers, experienced torture, starvation, extreme cold and death camp selections. Some, mainly women and young children, were released, but the majority were sent on to concentration and death camps, primarily Ravensbrück and Auschwitz: