by Becky Taylor
FIVE Into the Flames
1 The term porrajmos (‘tearing apart’ or ‘devouring’ in Romani) has emerged as one way of describing the experience of Roma and Sinti during the Second World War. However, it is rejected by major segments of the Roma community as completely unacceptable because in a number of Romani dialects it is ‘a term associated with rape; is obscene; is unmentionable in mixed company; and is regarded as highly inappropriate in the context of memorializing the events of mass murder’. See C. Cahn, ‘The Roma: A Minority in Europe. A Review’, Romani Studies 5, XIX/1 (2009), p. 72. Consequently I use the term Roma Holocaust. There has been increasing scholarly interest in this subject, most recently A. Weiss-Wendt, The Nazi Genocide of the Roma: Reassessment and Commemoration (Oxford and New York, 2013). Susan Tebbutt’s ‘History and Memory. The Genocide of the Romanies’, in D. Kenrick, The Gypsies During the Second World War:3 The Final Chapter (Hatfield, 2006), pp. 179–95 offers a good introduction to the fraught debates within this field. The leading work in German is M. Zimmermann’s Rassenutopie und Genozid: Die nationalsozialistische ‘Lösung der Zigeunerfrage’ (Hamburg, 1996), with a summary of his main arguments provided in M. Zimmermann, ‘The National Socialist Persecution of the Jews and Gypsies: Is a Comparison Possible?’, trans. B. Templer, in Kenrick, The Final Chapter, pp. 135–48. More controversial is G. Lewy’s The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies (Oxford, 2000). The Interface collection’s The Gypsies During the Second World War, Vols 1–3 edited by Donald Kenrick provides an excellent examination of the situation in different countries, as well as life in the local authority camps and the extermination camps.
2 See D. Crowe, A History of the Gypsies of Eastern Europe and Russia (Basingstoke, 2006), pp. 84–5.
3 Report on Habitual Offenders etc. (Scotland), xxxii. Section 118 of the 1908 Act required these children to attend school, or the parents be fined 20 shillings, with the additional possibility of the child being sent to an Industrial School.
4 ‘Education of Gypsy Children’, Surrey Advertiser (21 December 1912); National Archives of Scotland, Edinburgh (hereafter NAS), HH55/237, Letter from Home Office to under-secretary of state for Scotland, 19 November 1918.
5 Highland Council Archive, Inverness, CI/5/7/9, Staff Committee notes, 10 June 1914.
6 ‘Report of the Departmental Committee on Tinkers in Scotland, 1918’ (Edinburgh, 1918), p. 16.
7 ‘Tinkers in Scotland’, p. 16.
8 P. Panayi, Ethnic Minorities in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Germany: Jews, Gypsies, Poles, Turks and Others (London, 2000), p. 97.
9 A. Fraser, The Gypsies (Oxford, 1995), p. 250.
10 J. Perkins, ‘Continuity in Modern German History? The Treatment of Gypsies’, Immigrants and Minorities, XVIII/1 (1999), p. 70; L. Lucassen, ‘The Clink of the Hammer was Heard from Daybreak until Dawn: Gypsy Occupations in Western Europe (Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries)’, in L. Lucassen, W. Willems and A-M. Cottaar, Gypsies and other Itinerant Groups: A Socio-historical Approach (London and New York, 1998), pp. 153–73.
11 E. Sitou, ‘L’affaire des Gitanos: Chronique d’une flambée raciste à Toulouse à la fin du XIXe siècle’, Etudes Tsiganes, XXX/1 (2008), p. 16. More generally, the uncertainties of the period and the conditions within the mining towns of the north are captured in Zola’s Germinal. See also L. P. Moch, ‘France’, in The Encyclopedia of Migration and Minorities in Europe from the Seventeenth Century to the Present, ed. K. Bade et al., p. 55. For an introduction to the Dreyfus trial and its wider impact see E. Cahm, The Dreyfus Affair in French Society and Politics (London, 1996).
12 European Roma Rights Centre (hereafter ERRC), Always Somewhere Else: Anti-Gypsyism in France (Budapest, 2005), p. 49.
13 J-M. Berlière, ‘La république et les nomades (1880–1914)’, Etudes Tsiganes (2004), p. 59.
14 Archives Nationales de France, Paris (hereafter ANF), C7487/5739, Rapports faits au nom de la Commission relative à la répression du vagabondage et de la mendacité, 13 June 1910, ‘Vagabondage et medacité: rapports Réville (cf. 9e législature).
15 ANF, C7415/2500-2505, Urgence déclaré ‘Vagabondage et medacité: assistance, répression, nomades’, n.d.
16 Quoted in C. Delclitte, ‘Nomades et nomadisme: le cas de la France 1895–1912’, unpublished MA thesis, Université de Paris VIII, 1994, p. 101. As in Britain, which saw the creation of the Showmen’s Guild, fairground workers managed to escape the most stringent surveillance of the law through self-organization. In the run-up to the 1912 law they ran a campaign under the banner of ‘Equality for All’.
17 E. Aubin, ‘A propos d’un texte de Marcel Waline: “Un problème de sécurité publique: les Bohémiens”’, Etudes Tsiganes, VII/1 (1996), p. 37.
18 Information was required in the following categories: height, size of chest; width, length and size of head; bizigomatic (face) diameter; length of right ear; length of the middle and little fingers of the left hand; left elbow and left foot; and eye colour. Fingerprints and photographs (front and profile) were also required. Children under thirteen were not included in this, as their details could fluctuate too much – they were ‘only’ fingerprinted.
19 ERRC, Always Somewhere Else, p. 50.
20 Berlière, ‘La république et les nomades’, pp. 63–4.
21 Estimates put the numbers of Gypsies across all of Germany at the beginning of the twentieth century at around 2,000, increasing rapidly to 8,000 in 1906 owing to migration from the Balkans.
22 A. Dillmann, Zigeuner-Buch (Munich, 1905); H. Heuss, ‘German Policies of Gypsy Persecution, 1870–1945’, in K. Fings et al., From ‘Race Science’ to the Camps. The Gypsies During the Second World War (Hatfield, 1997), p. 23.
23 L. Lucassen, ‘Harmful Tramps: Police Professionalization and Gypsies in Germany, 1700–1945’, in L. Lucassen, W. Willems and A-M. Cottaar, Gypsies and other Itinerant Groups: A Socio-historical Approach (London and New York, 1998), p. 86.
24 HStAD, R12 U Nr. 210, The Regional Prosecutor of the Grand Duchy Higher Regional Court, to Civil Servants of the Regional Prosecution Department, letter ‘The Gypsy pest’, Darmstadt, 18 November 1911. Emphasis added.
25 Lucassen, ‘Harmful Tramps’, p. 85.
26 Fraser, The Gypsies, p. 250.
27 See Andreas, Gypsy Coppersmiths in Liverpool and Birkenhead (Liverpool, 1913) and E. O. Winstedt, ‘The Gypsy Coppersmiths Invasion of 1911–13’, JGLS, new series, VI/4 (1913), pp. 244–303.
28 Lucassen, ‘Harmful Tramps’, p. 87.
29 Z. Barany, The Eastern European Gypsies: Regime Change, Marginality and Ethno-politics (Cambridge, 2002), p. 95.
30 D. Yates, My Gypsy Days, Recollections of a Romani Rawnie (London, 1953), pp. 110–11; Whyte, The Yellow on the Broom (Edinburgh, 1979), p. 2; F. Cowles, Gypsy Caravan (London, 1948), p. 111.
31 Crowe, History of the Gypsies, p. 43.
32 NAS: HH55/237, Letter from Rev. George A. Jeffrey to the Secretary of Scotland, 4 December 1916.
33 For example see ‘Gypsy’s Fire’, Sussex Express (3 November 1916).
34 NAS: HH55/237, Eva Campbell Colquhoon, ‘Welfare of Tinkers: An explanatory booklet’, Munro Press (Perth, n.d., probably 1918).
35 O. Brown and D. McNab, ‘The Shack Dwellers of the New Forest’, Journal of the Royal Sanitary Institute, VI (1952), p. 717.
36 Brown and McNab, ‘The Shack Dwellers’.
37 NAS: HH55/240, notes of meeting between Scottish Board of Health, Joint Scottish Churches, Scottish nspcc, Miss Eva Campbell Colquhoun and others in regard to welfare of Tinkers, 4 June 1925.
38 H. Mauran, ‘Un camp d’Alsaciens-Lorrains romanichels dans la Drôme (Crest, 1915–1919)’, Etudes Tsiganes, XIII/1 (1999), pp. 90–119.
39 E. Filhol, ‘“Le prix de la liberté” itinéraire d’une famille tsigane internée: dans les camps français durant la Première Guerre Mondiale’, Etudes Tsiganes (2004), pp. 18–19 and 67–8.
40 Mauran, ‘Un camp d’Alsaciens-Lorrains romanichels’, pp. 92–
4.
41 Quoted in Filhol, ‘Le prix de la liberté’, p. 76.
42 Crowe, History of the Gypsies, p. 45.
43 Anon, ‘Užhorod, January 1933’, Lidové Noviny, 27 January 1933, trans. S. E. Mann, quoted verbatim as ‘In a Gypsy School’, JGLS, 3rd series, XIII/2 (1934), pp. 117–19.
44 The following account is taken from E. Marushiakova and V. Popov, ‘Roma History: Soviet Union Before World War Two’, http://romafacts.uni-graz.at, accessed 15 May 2013.
45 For this broader context see T. Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca, NY, 2011).
46 J-M. Berlière et al., Fichés? Photographie et identification 1850–1960 (Paris, 2011), p. 97; ‘Vos Papiers! Identités de papier dans les Basses-Alpes de 1789 à 1944’ (2012); Dignes les Bains: Catalogue de l’exposition Archives départementales des Alpes-de-Haute-Provence 26 January–26 May 2012.
47 A. Sutre, ‘“Les Bohémiens du pays”: une inscription territoriale des Bohémiens dans le Sud-Ouest de la France au XIXème et au début du xxème siècle’, unpublished MA thesis, EHESS, 2010, pp. 96 and 101.
48 Crowe, History of the Gypsies, p. 45.
49 The ICPC was founded in 1923 at the Second International Police Congress in Vienna as the International Criminal Police (ICP). Founding members were Poland, Austria, Belgium, China, Egypt, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Romania, Sweden, Switzerland and Yugoslavia. The United States joined in 1923 and the United Kingdom joined in 1928. Following the Anschluss in 1938, the organization was controlled by Nazi Germany, and its headquarters were moved to Berlin in 1942.
50 TNA, MEPO 3/2047, tenth session of ICPC, Vienna, 17–21 September 1934, statement ‘Fight Against the Gypsies’.
51 TNA, MEPO 3/2047, ICPC outline from International Central Office, n.d., possibly January 1936.
52 Panayi, Ethnic Minorities, p. 129. On this period generally see D. Peukert, The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity (New York, 1991) and H. Heiber, The Weimar Republic (Oxford, 1993).
53 HStAD/G15 Schotten, Nr. Q85 ‘The Gypsy Plague’, Oberhessischer Anzeiger und Friedberger Zeitung, 27 April 1926.
54 See for example HStAD/G 15 Schotten, Nr. Q85, Hessian Ministry of the Interior, to all district administrations, Darmstadt, 25 June 1920; and Dieburg Nr. Q4 Dieburg district administration, Hesse, memo to all local police stations, 27 April 1926.
55 I. Hancock, ‘Gypsy History in Germany and Neighbouring Lands. A Chronology Leading to the Holocaust and Beyond’, in The Gypsies of Eastern Europe, ed. D. Crowe and J. Kolsti (New York and London, 1992), p. 14.
56 HStAD/G15 Schotten, Nr. Q85, letter from Hessian Ministry of Labour and Economy to district administrators, 13 February 1925.
57 Panayi, Ethnic Minorities, p. 144.
58 Lucassen, ‘Harmful Tramps’, p. 88.
59 Ibid.
60 HStAD/G15 Schotten, Nr. Q 85 Ministry of the Interior to district administrators, 16 November 1927. Gypsy children over the age of six were fingerprinted but not photographed.
61 HStAD/G15 Schotten, Nr. Q85. Forwarded letter from the State Police of Baden to Hessian district administrators, police departments, etc., 20 August 1928.
62 Panayi, Ethnic Minorities, p. 143.
63 F. Sparing, ‘The Gypsy Camps’, in Fings et al., From ‘Race Science’ to the Camps, p. 40.
64 Lucassen, ‘Harmful Tramps’, p. 90.
65 A helpful introduction to the highly fraught issue of the uniqueness of the Holocaust and the position of Jews and other groups within this can be found in A. S. Rosenbaum, ed., Is the Holocaust Unique? Perspectives on Comparative Genocide, 3rd edn (Boulder, CO, 2009). See also D. Stone, ed., The Historiography of Genocide (Basingstoke, 2010).
66 On this argument see P. Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (Oxford, 2010), and T. Snyder, ‘A New Approach to the Holocaust’, The New York Review of Books (23 June 2011).
67 Sparing, ‘The Gypsy Camps’, pp. 58–9.
68 Gypsies were classified according to how ‘racially pure’ they were deemed to be with a scale ranging from Z (Zigeuner – ‘pure Gypsy’), through ZM+, ZM, ZM- (Zigeunermischling, with the plus and minus indicating if gypsy blood was dominant or not), to NZ (Nicht-Zigeuner).
69 W. Wippermann, ‘Compensation Withheld: The Denial of Reparations to the Sinti and Roma’, in Kenrick, The Final Chapter, p. 174.
70 B. Muller-Hill, Murderous Science: Elimination by Scientific Selection of Jews, Gypsies, and Others in Germany, 1933–1945 (Oxford, 1988), p. 57.
71 M. Burleigh and W. Wipperman, The Racial State: Germany, 1939–45 (Cambridge, 1991), p. 54.
72 HStAD/G15 Schotten, Nr. Q85, Nr. 22 Ausgabe B, Ministerial Paper of the Reich- and Prussian Ministry of the Interior, 25 May 1938.
73 Sparing, ‘The Gypsy Camps’, pp. 58–9.
74 Z. Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Cambridge, 1989), is a good introduction to this argument. On the basis that around 100 people were killed as a result of Kristallnacht he calculated that it would have taken 200 years for six million Jews to be killed through pogroms.
75 HStAD/G15 Dieburg Nr. Q4, President of Hesse State Police to district administrators, 10 July 1933; and G28 Butzbach G451 Hessian Police Department, Darmstadt to local police stations, 12 May 1936.
76 Panayi, Ethnic Minorities, pp. 175–6.
77 HStAD/G15 Dieburg Nr. Q4 Gross-Umstadt Police to district administration, 7 October 1934.
78 HStAD/G15 Schotten, Nr. Q85 Reichsstatthalter in Hesse to district administrators and police departments re deportation costs of Gypsy families, 23 September 1937.
79 W. Winter, Winter Time: Memoirs of a German Sinto who Survived Auschwitz, trans. S. Robertson (Hatfield, 2004), p. 24.
80 Sparing, ‘The Gypsy Camps’, pp. 59–60.
81 These Gypsies and Sinti came from Cologne, Dusseldorf, Hannover, Bremen, Frankfurt and Stuttgart. See Sparing, ‘The Gypsy Camps’, pp. 60–62.
82 See Fraser, The Gypsies, p. 261; Sparing, ‘The Gypsy Camps’, pp. 64–5; E. Thurner, Nationalsozialismus und Zigeuner in Österreich (Vienna, 1983), pp. 174–9. Of the 130,000 female prisoners in Ravensbrück, 15,000–32,000 survived. Owing to the burning of camp records in the final days of the war, the exact numbers are not known.
83 D. Kenrick and G. Puxon, The Destiny of Europe’s Gypsies (London, 1972), pp. 183–4; G. Puxon, ‘Forgotten Victims: Plight of the Gypsies’, Patterns of Prejudice (1977), pp. 11 and 26.
84 Figures for Chełmno are hard to come by, but it is possible that only three people survived this camp.
85 See for example M. Tyagly, ‘Nazi Occupation Policies and the Mass Murder of the Roma in Ukraine’, and M. Holler, ‘The Nazi Persecution of Roma in North-western Russia: The Operational Area of the Army Group North, 1941–1944’, in Weiss-Wendt, The Nazi Genocide of the Roma. Some survivors from this massacre joined partisan units, including Jefrosinja (Ruzha) Tumarshevic, whose husband and daughter were executed. See V. Kalinin, ‘Roma Resistance in the Soviet Union’, in Kenrick, The Final Chapter, pp. 112–13.
86 Quoted in J. Sigot, ‘Camp Allemand ou Camp Français?’, Etudes Tsiganes, VI/2 (1995), p. 37.
87 S. Fogg, ‘They Are Undesirables’: Local and National Responses to Gypsies during World War II’, French Historical Studies, XXXI/2 (2004), pp. 327–58.
88 D. Peschanski, Les Tsiganes en France 1939–1946 (Paris, 1994), p. 27.
89 M. C. Hubert, ‘Les Tsiganes pendant la Seconde Guerre Mondiale’, in Cercle d’étude de la déportation et de la Shoah, La persécution des Tsiganes: histoire et mémoire (Paris, 2005), pp. 3–12.
90 Anon., ‘Role de la sedentarisation dans l’adaptation des Tsiganes’, Etudes Tsiganes, 1 (1961), pp. 26–7.
91 Fogg, ‘They Are Undesirables’, p. 353.
92 Cited in M. Pernot, ed., Un camp pour les Bohémiens: Mémoires du camp d’internement pour les nomades de Saliers (Arles, 2001), p. 5. This is the ful
lest account of conditions at the Saliers camp.
93 J. Sigot, ‘Le Camp de Montreuil-Bellay (Maine-et-Loire)’ in Cercle d’étude de la déportation et de la Shoah, La persécution des Tsiganes: histoire et mémoire (Paris, 2004), p. 29.
94 M. Debelle, ‘Les persécutions des Tsiganes en Languedoc-Roussillon: pendant la seconde guerre mondiale’, Etudes Tsiganes XXIII–XXIV/3–4 (2005), p. 213.
95 Kenrick and Puxon, The Destiny of Europe’s Gypsies, p. 107.
96 The fullest first-hand account of this comes in J. Yoors, Crossing. A Journal of Survival and Resistance in World War Two (London, 1971).
97 Fogg, ‘They Are Undesirables’, pp. 355–7.
98 R. J. Crampton, Concise History of Bulgaria (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 165–6.
99 Although most Jews were effectively hounded out of the country in 1948. The most accessible account of Jews during the war in Bulgaria is M. Bar-Zohar, Beyond Hitler’s Grasp: The Heroic Rescue of Bulgaria’s Jews (Holbrook, MA, 1998). See also A. Wachtel, The Balkans in World History (Oxford, 2008), p. 110.
100 Crowe, History of the Gypsies, p. 19.
101 K. Kanev, ‘Law and Politics on Ethnic and Religious Minorities in Bulgaria’, in Communities and Identities in Bulgaria, ed. A. Krasteva (Ravenna, 1999), p. 69; D. Kenrick, The Romani World (Hatfield, 2004), pp. 43–4; Marushiakova and Popov, ‘Ciganska politika i ciganski izsledvania v Bulgaria’ (1919–89), in Marushiakova and Popov, Studii Romani, vol. 7 (Sofia, 2007), pp. 122–3.
102 Evidence over the experiences of Roma in Italy during the war remains fragmented and more research needs to be done. The current best overview is Giovanna Boursier’s work that can be found at http://romafacts.uni-graz.at, accessed 19 May 2013.
103 D. Reinhartz, ‘The Genocide of the Yugoslav Gypsies’, in Kenrick, The Final Chapter, pp. 87–95.
104 The best overview of this period can be found in0 A. Korb, In the Shadow of the World War: Mass Violence by the Ustaša Against Serbs, Jews and Roma in Croatia, 1941–45 (Hamburg, 2013).
105 Wachtel, The Balkans, p. 109; Reinhartz, ‘The Genocide of the Yugoslav Gypsies’, pp. 92–4, and D. Kenrick, ‘Resistance’, p. 106, both in Kenrick, The Final Chapter.