The Porajmos: the Nazi genocide of the Roma and Sinti

Roma and Sinti had lived in Germany since the fifteenth century; by the 1930s there were about 30,000 of them, many settled, working as musicians, traders and craftsmen, some decorated veterans of the First World War. Police registers of “Gypsies” already existed before Hitler. The Nazis turned old prejudice into racial science.^•

From registration to the camps

In 1935 officials extended the Nuremberg race laws to Roma, banning marriage with “Aryans”. Before the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Berlin’s Roma were rounded up into a camp at Marzahn. The psychiatrist Robert Ritter’s Racial Hygiene Research Unit measured, photographed and catalogued nearly every Romani person in Germany, classifying them by degree of “Gypsy blood”; his team concluded that “mixed-race Gypsies” were the most dangerous. In December 1938 Heinrich Himmler ordered that the “Gypsy question” be settled “on the basis of race”. Roma were forcibly sterilised, banned from schools and the army, and sent to concentration camps as “asocials”.^•

Killing across Europe

War made murder possible. In May 1940 about 2,500 German Sinti and Roma were deported to occupied Poland. In late 1941 some 5,000 Austrian Roma were deported to the Łódź ghetto and murdered in gas vans at Chełmno early in 1942. In the occupied Soviet Union, the Einsatzgruppen shot Roma alongside Jews. In Serbia, the German army shot Romani men as “hostages”. Germany’s allies joined in: in the fascist Independent State of Croatia, the Ustaša regime murdered most of the country’s Roma, many at Jasenovac; Romania deported about 25,000 Roma to Transnistria in 1942, where around half died of hunger, cold and disease.^•

On 16 December 1942 Himmler ordered the deportation of Roma from the Reich to Auschwitz. About 23,000 men, women and children were held in a “Gypsy family camp” in Birkenau, where many died of typhus, starvation and the medical experiments of Josef Mengele. On 16 May 1944 prisoners armed with tools and stones resisted when the SS came to liquidate the camp, and the SS backed off. On the night of 2–3 August 1944, after moving those fit for labour elsewhere, the SS murdered the remaining prisoners in the gas chambers: about 2,900 people by the museum’s count, while Romani organisations commemorate a figure above 4,000. In the Czech lands, the camps at Lety and Hodonín held Roma before their deportation to Auschwitz; almost all Czech Roma were killed.^•

How many died

No one knows exactly. Records were poor, many Roma were killed in mass shootings far from any camp, and pre-war numbers were uncertain. The USHMM and most historians give estimates in the range of about 200,000 to 500,000, a very large share of Europe’s Roma; some Romani scholars argue for higher figures.^•

The second injustice

After the war, Roma were not called as witnesses at Nuremberg, and their murder was barely mentioned. In West Germany, survivors seeking compensation faced the same police “Gypsy” files used to deport them, and courts ruled that their persecution before 1943 was not racial. It took Sinti civil-rights activists, including a hunger strike at the Dachau memorial in 1980 led by Romani Rose and others, to force recognition: West Germany formally acknowledged the genocide in 1982, and a national memorial opened in Berlin, near the Reichstag, in 2012.^•

The genocide is part of the wider Holocaust, and Roma and Jewish survivors shared the same camps; but the Romani story was told much later, often by survivors such as Ceija Stojka who broke decades of silence. Many Roma still say that their genocide is “forgotten”, and every recognition matters.^•

Why it matters today