Roma and Sinti Genocide Remembrance Day 2022
August 2nd is Roma and Sinti Genocide Remembrance Day. During the Nazi regime, Roma and Sinti were among the groups that were singled out for persecution and destruction. The Nazis judged Roma and Sinti as racially inferior, drawing support from many non-Nazi Germans who held prejudiced views against this group.
Under the Nazi regime, German authorities subjected Roma to arbitrary internment, sterilization, forced labor in concentration camps, deportation, and mass murder. German authorities murdered tens of thousands of Roma in the German-occupied territories of the Soviet Union and Serbia and thousands more in the killing centers at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Chełmno, Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka. In Germany and German-occupied territories, the SS and police incarcerated Roma in the Bergen-Belsen, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Dachau, Mauthausen, Mittelbau-Dora, Natzweiler-Struthof, Gross-Rosen, and Ravensbrück concentration camps.
On the basis of the evidence available to date, historians estimate that the Germans and their allies killed between 250,000 and 500,000 European Roma during World War II. After the war, discrimination against Roma continued all over Europe. The courts in the Federal Republic of Germany determined that all measures taken by the Nazis against Roma before 1943 were legitimate official measures against persons committing criminal acts, not the result of policy driven by racial prejudice. This decision effectively closed the door to restitution for thousands of Roma victims, who had been incarcerated, forcibly sterilized, and deported from Germany for no specific crime.
Only in late 1965 did the West German compensation law explicitly acknowledge that the acts of persecution that took place before 1943 were racially motivated, creating eligibility for most Roma to apply for compensation for their suffering and loss under the Nazi regime. By this time, many of those who became eligible had already died.
Roma prisoners, Bełżec death camp, 1940. Image courtesy of USHMM.
