The Holocaust, Nazi Germany’s (largely successful) attempt to exterminate the Jews of Europe, has become the benchmark by which all other genocides are measured. The images of crematoria, gas chambers, and skeletal bodies heaped ten feet high have gone beyond horror and into cliché:  according to one tongue-in-cheek Internet dictum, the longer a discussion continues on Usenet, the greater the chance that someone will mention Hitler or compare his opponent to the Nazis.  There are innumerable sources available on the scope and mechanics of the Holocaust: http://www.nizkor.org and http://www.yad-vashem.org.il are particularly recommended.  It would be difficult for this humble writer to add to the testimony of eyewitnesses like Elie Weisel and Primo Levi.  The best I can do is to speak for one group whose suffering during that period has been less well documented.

At the beginning of the 14th century the Roma arrived in Europe from India; almost immediately the dark-skinned, non-Christian people encountered persecution. In the Balkan principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, Gypsies were slaves brought and sold by monasteries and large estate holders (boyars) until 1864, when the newly formed nation of Romania emancipated them. By the 19th century, “scholars” declared the Roma to be genetically inferior beings whose very presence posed a threat to Aryans. The Eradication of Lives Undeserving of Life, a 1920 tome by Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche, declared that Romani “criminality” was a transmitted genetic disease, and even the relatively tolerant Weimar republic enacted laws aimed at solving the “Gypsy problem.”

When Hitler came to power, the “Gypsy laws” were immediately expanded.  In November 1933, the “Law Against Dangerous Habitual Criminals” was passed. Under this law, the police began arresting Romani along with others labeled “asocial.”  In June 1936, a Central Office to “Combat the Gypsy Nuisance” opened in Munich.  That July, the police arrested 600 Gypsies and brought them, in 130 caravans, to a new, special Gypsy internment camp (Zigeunerlager) established near a sewage dump and cemetery in the Berlin suburb of Marzahan. The camp had only three water pumps and two toilets; in such overcrowded and unsanitary conditions, contagious diseases flourished. Police and their dogs guarded the camp. Similar Zingeunerlager also appeared in 1939, at the initiative of municipal governments and coordinated by the Council of Cities (reporting to the Ministry of Interior), in Cologne, Düsseldorf, Essen, Frankfurt, Hamburg, and other German cities.  By the summer of 1938, large numbers of German and Austrian Romani were rounded up and sent to concentration camps. There they wore black triangular patches (the symbol for “asocials”) or green patches (the symbol for professional criminals) and sometimes the letter “Z.”  The outbreak of war in September 1939 radicalized the Nazi policies towards the Romani. Their “resettlement to the East” and their mass murder closely parallel the systematic deportations and killings of the Jews. 

At Auschwitz-Birkenau, officials set up a separate "Gypsy family camp" for Gypsies in Section B-IIe of Birkenau. From the wooden barracks, the gas chambers and crematoria were clearly visible. During the seventeen months of the camp's existence, most of the Gypsies brought there perished. They were killed by gassing or died from starvation, exhaustion from hard labor, and disease (including typhus, smallpox, and the rare, leprosy-like condition called Noma.) Others, including many children, died as the result of cruel medical experiments performed by Dr. Josef Mengele and other SS physicians:  many of Mengele’s infamous “twin experiments” were performed upon Romani twins. The Gypsy camp was liquidated on the night of August 2-3, 1944, when 2,897 Roma were killed in the gas chambers. Some 1,400 surviving men and women were transferred to Buchenwald and Ravensbruck concentration camps for forced labor.

The estimates of Romani exterminated in the Porrajmos (Romani word for the Nazi slaughter) range from 220,000 to 500,000:  the Nazi records of their destruction were less meticulous than those kept for the Jews.  Persecution of the surviving Romani persists to this day throughout Eastern and Central Europe, where they remain a favorite target both of police and of neo-Nazi skinheads.  As Yehuda Bauer has written, “in sheer demonic cold-blooded brutality the tragedy of the Romanies is one of the most terrible indictments of the Nazis. The fact that their fate is hardly ever mentioned and that the mutilated Romani nation continues to be vilified and persecuted to this day puts all their host nations to shame.”