The holocaust; Something almost everyone is aware of. The mass execution of thousands of Jews in Europe. Although Jews were the main targeted race, there were others like the Jews that didn’t fit the “standard” of the Arian race. Others like them were the mentally handicapped, the homosexuals, the Jehovah witnesses, and the Gypsies. My project of genocide is going to focus on the Gypsies of the holocaust.
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| This is a picture of a group of Gypsies waiting at Auschwitz to be told were they will be assigned. |
In the 1930’s Gypsies live in a precarious existence, occupying the lowest ranks in the social classes in Austria and Germany. Some of them continued practicing trades such as weaving and repairing kettles. Most of them lived in quarters on the fringes of villages. Unemployment being high made it a hard life for the Gypsies. It was extremely hard to find work so many subsisted on poor relief. For the Gypsies, writes one student of the history of Austrian Gypsies, “the poorest of the poor, the only way out of a hopeless situation was often begging and theft.” An order was called of the Nation Socialist solution for the Gypsy question, the main goal being the rid of the further growth of the Gypsy population. Gypsies were soon put to work and put into work camps, where man and women were separated to prevent them from procreating. They were to receive shelter, food, and clothing, but no more than that. Any more would make it more attractive for them to stay in Germany.
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| The is a photograph of a little girl before being experimented on. |
In May 1938, it was announce that no longer would there be allowed marriage between Jews and Germans, including Gypsies. They too, were considered part of the alien race. The next step was to try to get rid of the Gypsy children in school. The German’s made a plan to open a school for Gypsy and Negro children. When it would be time to Transport the Gypsies to Auschwitz, these children, so innocent, would be taken to have experiments done on them by Josef Mengele. Nazi’s had taken away Gypsies right to vote and were aiming to take away any other right they were able to. Among these measures, were new regulations be constructed forbidding the nomadic life of the Gypsies and the sterilization of serious repeat offenders. "Altogether, sterilization should be used more frequently, for this evil has to be tackled at its root,” this shows the devotion and the hatred the Nazi’s felt toward them (Guenter Lewy.) In 1939, and again in 1940, was the attempt to deport all Gypsies to the East. Respectively in 1940 and 1941, some 2,500 German and 5,000 Austrian Gypsies had be taken to the General Government and the Warthegau, although most Gypsies had continued to say where they had been sent at the outbreak of the war. On December 16, 1942, Heinrich Himmler, a military commander and leading member of the Nazi party, issued his Auschwitz degree that lead to the deportation of more than 13,000 German Gypsies to a special Gypsy camp in Auschwitz. The end of the war found the Gypsy community in a very weakened condition. Of the more than 13,000 persons deported to Auschwitz perhaps as many as go percent had failed to return alive. All of the 5,000 Austrian Gypsies sent to Litzmannstadt had perished in the ghetto or had been killed in the gas vans. Survivors were traumatized by the ordeal of camp life. The routine of the concentration camps had violated basic Gypsy customs such as the requirements of ritual purity or the prohibition against being seen naked in public. Many of the elders, who had been models of conduct, were no longer alive. “Those who had been sterilized had lost much of their sense of self-worth, for the standing of Gypsy men and women in their families as well as in the larger community depends heavily on fertility,” the loss of lives impacted the Gypsies to an extreme extent (Guenter Lewy). To make things worse, Gypsies often encountered the same treatment at the hands of the new authorities that they had suffered before and during the first years of the Nazi regime.
