Any interesting facts on gypsies in the holocaust?

Question

in doing a report for this is school & im presenting it tomorrow & i dont have very much information- please help me!

Answer 1

I have more than you could possibly want.

Just go to this link and read some of the articles on this page:

http://www.geocities.com/Paris/5121/holcaust.htm

I shall tell you a little bit:

In Romanes (the language of the Romani), the Holocaust is called "O Porrajmos".

Very few people know that the Rromani were in the Holocaust. The figures of exactly how many are not set in stone, not by a long shot. The lowest estimate is 200,000 to 500,000, but that is ridiculously low because those were the Romani RECORDED in the Holocaust. I shall explain why this is inaccurate. Scholars guesstimate somewhere well over a million, possibly millionS. A good 80% of the Romani population was exterminated. I am lucky that none of MY family was killed.

Now, for why the low guestimates are ridiculous:

Most Rromani could not write, in fact, the most part. In the Camps they were either recorded with only a check mark or were not recorded at all..

There is no way to tell.

Romani were considered an inferior race, as were the Jews. The same plans for complete extermination were carried out on us as were on the Jews. However, most scholars just forget us and, in fact, deny that we were exterminated. There is an ongoing rather large ruckus about this.

If you would like a little factoid, Josef Mengele had, in Aushwitz, what was called the "Gypsy Family Camp". What this little lovely was was a group used specifically for "medical" experiments. Those that were not exterminated in the experiments, of course, were gassed. "Medical" experimentation was a particularly horrific way to die.

Gypsies wore the brown triangle.

There is a passage in Djelem Djelem (our national anthem.... that is very hard to explain because we have no "nation" as in lands. Our nation is wherever WE reside)

"Vi man sas ek bari familiya,
Murdadas la e kali legiya*

In English that means:

"I once had a great family,
The Black Legions murdered them"

... and the Black Legions were the Nazis and that, plus the rest of the verse, was in rememberence of the concentration camps.

I am going to leave it up to you to read some from the link I provided. Trust me... you shall learn much.

Answer 2

For Nazi Germany the Gypsies became a racist dilemma. The Gypsies were Aryans, but in the Nazi mind there were contradictions between what they regarded as the superiority of the Aryan race and their image of the Gypsies...

At a conference held in Berlin on January 30, 1940, a decision was taken to expel 30,000 Gypsies from Germany to the territories of occupied Poland...

The reports of the SS Einsatzgruppen [special task forces] which operated in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union mention the murder of thousands of Gypsies along with the massive extermination of the Jews in these areas.

The deportations and executions of the Gypsies came under Himmler's authority. On December 16, 1942, Himmler issued an order to send all Gypsies to the concentration camps, with a few exceptions...

The deported Gypsies were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where a special Gypsy camp was erected. Over 20,000 Gypsies from Germany and some other parts of Europe were sent to this camp, and most of them were gassed there.