By Jonathan Lee CW genocide, ethnic violence Between 1936 and 1945 the Nazis wiped out over 50% of Europe’s Romani people. Whether they were choked to death in the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birk…
The Romani people who were the easiest to record and exterminate were those who were the most integrated in society. Like the Jews, these people existed on census records, military rosters, and school files. The decimation of this Romani middle-class meant that there were few strong voices who were in a position to speak up about the Romani genocide after 1945.
There were no Sinti or Roma called to testify at the Nuremberg trials. There were no Romani scholars, no Romani lawyers, no civil servants. No one left to document the atrocities committed against Romani people alongside the Jews – the only two peoples specifically targeted by the Nazis’ Final Solution to ensure German racial purity.
Whereas census data for Jews can be compared before and after the Holocaust, this is rarely the case for Sinti and Roma, meaning the total loss of Romani life is extremely difficult to piece together. Estimates vary somewhere between 500,000 and 1.5 million people. In 1939, around 30,000 people referred to as ‘Gypsies’ lived in what is now Germany and Austria. The total population living in Greater Germany and its occupied territories is unknown, though scholars Donald Kenrick and Grattan Puxon have provided a rough estimate of 942,000. Of the Sinti and Roma living in Germanic Central Europe, only 5,000 are thought to have survived.
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