-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Eve Rosenhaft, Der Völkermord an den Sinti und Roma und die Bundesrepublik. Der lange Weg zur Anerkennung 1949–1990, German History, 2025;, ghaf020, https://doi.org/10.1093/gerhis/ghaf020
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
A key dimension of scholarly and community understanding of the persecution of Sinti and Roma in the 1930s and 1940s is the dispiriting failure of postwar societies to acknowledge the genocide and the claims of its victims. This delayed Aufarbeitung stands in a dialectical relationship with the discrimination that Romani communities continue to suffer. In West Germany, notoriously, the courts adjudicating on postwar compensation claims submitted by Sinti and Roma maintained until 1963 that whatever they had suffered at the hands of the German state before 1943—internment, immiseration, denial of rights, forced labour, deportation to German-occupied Poland, sterilization, medical experiments—did not qualify them for compensation. This was because it was only at the beginning of 1943 that the mass deportation of Sinti and Roma to Auschwitz began, and in the eyes of the courts the deportation marked the beginning of their persecution on racial grounds. Before that, it was argued, they had suffered as ‘asocials’, ‘morally feeble-minded’, ‘habitual criminals’ and the like—subject to measures that were within the law, not specifically Nazi, and probably deserved. For decades after 1945, the correlate of this in everyday police practice was to treat Sinti and Roma as a special category of potential criminals, working with material and applying the principles that had been laid down even before 1933 and developed by the Nazis into instruments of genocide. It was only in 1982 that Chancellor Helmut Schmidt declared publicly that the Sinti and Roma had been victims of a genocide, and President Roman Herzog’s proclamation fifteen years later that ‘[t]he genocide of the Sinti and Roma was carried out […] with the same intention and the same will to the planned and final annihilation as that of the Jews’ remained controversial even among scholars sympathetic to their case for many years.
