Gypsy Family 1930s
living in a mobile van
Credit: Historical Association.
The Bogdal* volume was about European prejudice against Roma. This approach was necessary because the Roma, largely as a nomadic people with an oral culture, left few traces for historians. From very early on, myth and prejudice saturated these accounts. The Roma's image was defamed first by medieval chroniclers and rulers' decrees, and later by C18th anthropologists, C19th ethnographers and early C20th criminologists and ruthless racial pseudo-scientists.
The newcomers were swathed in mystery. Nobody, not even the Roma, knew from whence they came. Their dark skin led some to assume that they were Tatars, or African. The derogatory English term gypsies derived from the early rumour that they were Egyptians, condemned by God to wander.
By 1800, anthropologists found the Roma language was related to Sanskrit, making India the likely origin. Roma misfortune was to reach Europe as it embarked upon a tumultuous path toward modernity. Their way of life was seen as backward and parasitic, against the standard with which real Europeans measured their own progress and civilisation.
Bogdal drew on literature from across Europe, to trace how exclusion and prejudice were perpetuated across six centuries. Even when portrayed positively by early C19th Romantics Roma, in sharp contrast to Europe's other long persecuted minority, were always regarded as primitive. Bohemian artists' celebrated Roma as noble savages, merely reinforcing deep-rooted, hostile tropes of gypsies as wild, lazy, deceitful and sexually wicked. Once racial pseudo-science appeared, Roma were seen as degenerate, inferior and congenitally criminal, especially half breeds.
The newcomers were swathed in mystery. Nobody, not even the Roma, knew from whence they came. Their dark skin led some to assume that they were Tatars, or African. The derogatory English term gypsies derived from the early rumour that they were Egyptians, condemned by God to wander.
By 1800, anthropologists found the Roma language was related to Sanskrit, making India the likely origin. Roma misfortune was to reach Europe as it embarked upon a tumultuous path toward modernity. Their way of life was seen as backward and parasitic, against the standard with which real Europeans measured their own progress and civilisation.
Bogdal drew on literature from across Europe, to trace how exclusion and prejudice were perpetuated across six centuries. Even when portrayed positively by early C19th Romantics Roma, in sharp contrast to Europe's other long persecuted minority, were always regarded as primitive. Bohemian artists' celebrated Roma as noble savages, merely reinforcing deep-rooted, hostile tropes of gypsies as wild, lazy, deceitful and sexually wicked. Once racial pseudo-science appeared, Roma were seen as degenerate, inferior and congenitally criminal, especially half breeds.
Roma after Bergen Belsen's liberation
credit: German Federal Archives.
This important book vividly exposed intellectual and societal trends in Europe that over centuries led to exclusion, dehumanisation and ultimately genocide by the Nazis. It warned powerfully that how we portray people matters: the alien, threatening Gypsy figure was imposed on a marginalised community with few opportunities to shape its own image. These malign stories persist against Romas today.
Many Romani families left Hungary and Romania in 1880s-90s, relocating to Germany because of the country’s prosperity. Unfortunately among the German states, Bavaria proved the most zealous in its anti-Roma measures.
The Holocaust Museum reported Roma were among the groups that the Nazi regime (1933–45) and its allies singled out for persecution before and during WW2, because they believed Roma were racially inferior. With German victory over Poland assured in 1939, Reinhard Heydrich planned to deport 30,000 German and Austrian Roma. In fact German authorities DID deport Roma from the Greater German Reich to occupied Poland. In May 1940, the SS and police deported c2,500 Roma from the Rhineland, western and NW Germany to the Lublin District in the General Government. SS and police authorities locked them into forced-labour camps, working in often lethal conditions.
In 1941, German police authorities deported 5,007 Roma from Austria to Lodz Jewish ghetto Poland, housing them in a segregated block. Many Roma died from typhus in the first months after arriving, and Nazi SS and police sent those who survived these dreadful conditions to Poland’s Chelmno Extermination Camp in 1942, in gas vans.
Local Germans hated the camps, demanding the expulsion of the Roma to safeguard real Germans’ public morals, public health and security. Local police used these complaints to appeal to SS chief Heinrich Himmler for the resumption of deportations of Roma to the east. In Dec 1942, Himmler ordered the deportation of all Roma from the Greater Reich.
c23,000 Roma were deported to Auschwitz. SS medical researchers assigned to the Auschwitz complex eg SS Dr Josef Mengele was authorised to select subjects for scientific medical experiments from among the prisoners. Mengele chose twins and dwarves as subjects of his experiments. 90% of the Roma sent to Auschwitz died there.
The SS also shot c30,000 Roma in the Baltic States and elsewhere in the German-occupied Soviet Union, where Einsatzgruppen and mobile killing units killed Roma, whenever the SS killed Jews and Russians. The same in Serbia. Five other nations joined the Axis during WW2: Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia and Croatia. Romania, an Axis partner, did not systematically annihilate the Roma population living on Romanian territory. Instead the Romanian military deported them to S.W Ukraine, under Romanian administration. The authorities of Croatia, another Axis partner of Germany and run by the militant separatist and terrorist Ustasa, annihilated virtually the entire Roma population there: c25,000 people.
The Romas’ fate closely paralleled that of the Jews, although Roma pre-WW2 populations were not precisely known; perhaps 1.25 million. Note also that many European Roma communities were totally destroyed, survivors suffering from psychological and physical traumas of deprivation, abuse and destruction of family. Thus it was almost impossible to reconstruct Roma cultural networks post-war.
In 1982 Chancellor Helmut Schmidt formally acknowledged that German Roma had been victims of genocide. However Romanis, one of the largest ethnic minorities in the EU, still face limited access to quality education and to the labour market, leading to further poverty and social exclusion, poor healthcare and hate-motivated harassment.
Ceremonial inauguration of the Roma Memorial
in Berlin opposite the Reichstag, 2012
Credit: Central Council
Bulldozers destroy makeshift Roma camp near Lyon, 2013.
Credit: Daily Sabah
Read Klaus-Michael Bogdal*, Europe and the Roma: A History of Fascination and Fear, 2023
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22 comments:
I found this a damn good read about stuff I know nothing about but reading and learning new stuff is something that keeps the brain working
I recently watched a film called The Forgotten Genocide: Europe's Gypsies in WW2. It was extremely disturbing. It told, amongst other stories, of gypsy children being taken from the classrooms in The Netherlands by Dutch police on the instructions received from Hitler. The gypsy children were taken and never returned home from school at the end of the day. The parents were separately rounded up. They were all taken to concentration camps. One or two gypsy children escaped to farms and lived to tell the story. I can't remember where I watched it but it was either on Netflix or Prime. The film was made several years ago and there were interviews with survivors as well as present day gypsies who have never forgotten and how they remember it today. Thank you for the post.
This is a piece of nasty history about ethnic cleansing.
What sort of treatment did the gypsies receive in Britain?
Roughly 605 years and exclusion and prejudice still abound :(
Jo-Anne
I have been lecturing in European and British Empire history for a long time, and like you, I still knew very little about oppression of the Romas. Sometimes I think blogs are a great way to introduce new material to keen readers. If you have time, read "Europe and the Roma: A History of Fascination and Fear"
Rachel
Many thanks for the reference to "The Forgotten Genocide: Europe's Gypsies in WW2", 2019. This is the first documentary film that tells the forgotten story of the annihilation of the Gypsies by the Nazis and their allies from one end to the other of Europe. With Interviews of the survivors and archival footage never seen before the film points out the architects of this terrifying genocide and goes through all territories where the extermination took place.
https://play.google.com/store/movies/details/The_Forgotten_Genocide_Europe_s_Gypsies_in_World_W?id=z0yuTBGvfMI.P&hl=en_AU&gl=US&pli=1
roentare
I didn't use the term ethnic cleansing because I was afraid people wouldn't know the true meaning. But you are quite correct about the nastiness. The UN said
"rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove persons of given groups from the area. A purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas.”
The coercive practices used to remove the civilian population can include: murder, torture, arbitrary arrest and detention, extrajudicial executions, rape and sexual assaults, severe physical injury to civilians, confinement of civilian population in ghetto areas, forcible removal, displacement and deportation of civilian population, deliberate military attacks or threats of attacks on civilians and civilian areas, use of civilians as human shields, destruction of property etc.
Deb
Roma arrived in Britain in the C16th and Queen Mary of England created a nasty law "Being a Gypsy is punishable by death, as is being found in the fellowship or company of Egyptians". This is the only time that fraternising with an ethnic community has been punishable by death.
Later some were hanged or sent to slave colonies, but it was not like in Europe.
During WW2 the Britain government built caravan camps for Gypsies serving in the forces or doing vital farm work, closed down as soon as the war finished. Roma, Sinti and other Gypsies were stripped of all human rights by the Nazis in Europe, but I cannot find anything like a Roma holocaust in Britain.
We fear what we do not understand and destroy what we fear. Thus is genocide engendered. Minorities everywhere are persecuted and I fwar they always will be. 'Might is right' rules the world.
River
the Council of Europe reported that the Roma and Traveller communities are still one of the most discriminated and disadvantaged groups in Europe, facing hatred and human rights abuses every day. Roma are refused access to decent housing, evicted without notice and left open to attack by prejudiced neighbours. They are blocked from the jobs market and from opportunities to get better education and vocational training. Roma children are bullied at school, or sent to schools meant for people with learning difficulties. Roma women have been sterilised against their will.
We may not have gas ovens or hangings, but otherwise the world hasn't progressed very far.
jabblog
Sadly, I agree. But of all the minorities in the world that could be persecuted, why pick on Romas? And how could they be accurately separated out from other citizens? They worked hard on the land! They had handsome, slightly olive-y skin and had no tattoos! They have their own joyous music and dancing! They live in very close families! They are largely committed Catholics!
I am of a certain age and I can only think of them as gypsies because of my white person culture. It's just an unloaded name to me. I certainly know in the north east of England where people can be very racist do not call them that but travellers. Jews, the Roma, disabled and homosexuals were all the same in Hitler's and his henchmen's eyes, undesirable breeders or defective humans.
However, you have made me think a bit more carefully and considerately about the Romany.
Good morning!! I am also blogging with you.
កីឡាបាល់ទាត់
In my home town in Romania I went to school with Roma (gypsies) kids. They were few, and their school life a short-lived one. The authorities made no effort to bring them back. The gypsies were located on the 'maidan',maidan is the word for open space on the edge of the town; that's where they kept their huts, carts and horses.
They were considered thieves, but were no violent,as far as I can remember, and this fact enabled them for years to live peacefully among the local people.
You still see Roma in parts of Europe, but I wonder how many of them are "begging" (as I've seen) and how many have made it into mainstream life. I've wondered about them, and it's interesting to read about their history. Thanks. Enjoy what's left to your weekend.
Andrew
the oppression of Roma started hundreds of years ago, long before the Nazis thought of ridding Europe of defective human beings.
There were VERY old laws and practises degrading Roma, but the "science" seeing this community as degenerate and congenitally criminal led to isolation at the turn of the century and savage camps and deaths by the mid 1930s.
It is still very difficult to find truthful histories from most European nations. Denial is everywhere.
Sports-KH
do you have any books or journal articles you can recommend to other bloggers about Roma history?
DUTA
India is usually nominated as the source of most roma communities, yet Romania was one of the countries with a substantial number of roma families - perhaps 5% of the national population. Romanian roma may have been treated very badly until the mid 19th century, and although they were still identified as a marginalised minority, there was no major exile until after WW1.
So it is ironic that the period of Romanian democracy led to a blooming of Romani cultural flourishing, at least until the early 1940s. Only by 1942 did mass deportations led to starvation and executions.
Erika
Thank you for your balanced comment. Although life for European Roma these days is not the equal of non-Roma, I would have thought that begging on the streets for food money was improbable. Yet recent reports have shown that the majority (66%) of those begging on Brussels' streets are Roma people, coming from Romania. What about other cities?
Read "Poverty, networks, resistance: Economic sociology of Roma migration for begging" by
Jon Horgen Friberg, 2020
its interesting to contemplate how much their nomadic lifestyle made it difficult for them to "integrate" into "normal" society . It seems that no or little acceptance and adjustment has been made to meet their cultural needs by society in general and they have probably clung to their traditions which have seen them through centuries of being treated as aliens and "the other". They have both chosen and been forced to be separate. That combined with intergenerational trauma is probably what continues to make their lives difficult . It reminds me a lot of the situation for indigenous groups throughout the world.
mem
let us look at "nomadic" separately from "not living in integrated communities". Romas needed mobile vans because they were agricultural workers. As soon as seasonal work ended, they moved off to find work elsewhere, with their family, clothes and tools already packed up. Or to visit fairs. Makes perfect sense.
But not living in integrated housing with non-Romas had more to do with having very close families to raise and to protect. Or because non-Romas didn't want to have the Travellers in integrated housing. It is quite true, therefore, that the Roma have both chosen and been forced to live separately.
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