The Genocide of the Roma and Sinti: Europe’s Overlooked Holocaust

On 22 May 1940, police in the German town of Asperg assembled around 500 Sinti and Roma men, women, and children and marched them to the railway station. A photographer from the Reich’s own archives recorded the scene: families carrying suitcases, flanked by uniformed guards, walking toward trains bound for occupied Poland. The photographs survive because the perpetrators saw nothing to hide. In their eyes, this was administration — the orderly removal of people the state had classified as racially dangerous.

Those deportations were an early step in a genocide that would ultimately claim between 220,000 and 500,000 Roma and Sinti lives across Nazi-occupied Europe — by some estimates a quarter to a half of the entire Romani population of the continent. Many Roma call it the Porajmos, “the devouring.” Others use Samudaripen, “the mass killing.” For decades after 1945, almost no one outside the Romani community called it anything at all.

Racial Science and Registration

Roma and Sinti had lived in Europe for more than five centuries when the Nazis came to power, and they inherited a long history of discrimination. What National Socialism added was pseudo-scientific rigor. The 1935 Nuremberg race laws, drafted against Jews, were quickly interpreted to apply to “Gypsies” as well. In 1936, the Racial Hygiene and Demographic Biology Research Unit was established in Berlin under Dr. Robert Ritter. Ritter’s staff traveled the country measuring skulls, tracing genealogies, and taking blood samples, ultimately compiling racial classifications of tens of thousands of Roma and Sinti. These files did not sit in drawers. They became the administrative backbone of deportation.

Marzahn and the First Camps

Weeks before the 1936 Berlin Olympics, police swept hundreds of Roma and Sinti off the city’s streets and confined them to a so-called Rastplatz in the suburb of Marzahn — a bleak field wedged between a cemetery and sewage disposal grounds. Officially a “resting place,” Marzahn was in practice a forced camp: guarded, unsanitary, and inescapable. Similar municipal camps followed in Cologne, Frankfurt, and other cities. In December 1938, Heinrich Himmler issued his decree on “Combating the Gypsy Plague,” which ordered the registration of all Roma and Sinti in the Reich on explicitly racial grounds. The infrastructure of persecution was complete before the war began.

Deportation and Murder in the East

The May 1940 deportations sent some 2,500 Sinti and Roma from western Germany into the Generalgouvernement in occupied Poland, where they were subjected to forced labor and left to hunger and disease. In the autumn of 1941, roughly 5,000 Austrian Roma were deported to a sealed section of the Lodz ghetto; within months, nearly all who survived the ghetto’s conditions were murdered in the gas vans of Chelmno — among the first victims of the first killing center of the Holocaust.

In the occupied Soviet Union, Roma were shot alongside Jews by the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing squads that followed the German army east. At ravines and anti-tank ditches from the Baltics to Crimea — including Babi Yar — Romani families were executed on the same grounds and often on the same days as their Jewish neighbors. Because these killings were scattered across hundreds of sites and sparsely documented, the true death toll in the East will never be precisely known.

The Zigeunerlager at Auschwitz

On 16 December 1942, Himmler ordered the deportation of Roma and Sinti from the Reich to Auschwitz. Beginning in February 1943, around 23,000 men, women, and children were registered in a special section of Birkenau designated B IIe — the so-called Zigeunerfamilienlager, or Gypsy family camp. Families were kept together, a fact that deceived no one for long. Starvation, typhus, and the medical experiments of Josef Mengele killed thousands. On 16 May 1944, when the SS first moved to liquidate the camp, prisoners armed with tools and stones barricaded themselves in their barracks, and the SS withdrew — an act of resistance still commemorated by Roma today. The reprieve was temporary. On the night of 2–3 August 1944, the remaining 4,200–4,300 people in the family camp were gassed. In total, some 21,000 of the 23,000 Roma and Sinti deported to Auschwitz were murdered or died there.

The Long Road to Recognition

Liberation did not end the injustice. Postwar German authorities routinely denied Roma survivors compensation, ruling that they had been persecuted as “criminals” or “asocials” rather than on racial grounds — often citing the very files Ritter’s institute had compiled. Some of the police officials who had organized the deportations continued their careers in the postwar civil service. Not until 1982 did Chancellor Helmut Schmidt formally acknowledge that the Nazi persecution of the Sinti and Roma constituted genocide.

In 2012, a memorial to the murdered Sinti and Roma of Europe was finally dedicated in Berlin, a dark reflecting pool within sight of the Reichstag. Since 2015, the European Parliament has recognized 2 August — the anniversary of the liquidation of the family camp at Birkenau — as European Holocaust Memorial Day for Roma and Sinti. Remembering the Porajmos is not a footnote to Holocaust education; it is part of understanding how a modern state defined entire peoples out of humanity, one file and one decree at a time — and how long the world can look away, even after the killing ends.