Romani Holocaust

September 04, 2025

Romani Holocaust

A Roma or Sinti girl imprisoned in Auschwitz. Pictures taken by the SS for their files [Wiener Holocaust Library Collections]

Source: https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2019/10/30/roma-holocaust-amid-rising-hate-forgotten-victims-remembered

"They were among the 250,000 to 500,000 Roma and Sinti people – between 25 and 50 percent of the minority’s entire population in Europe at the time – murdered by Nazis and their collaborators during the second world war. "

- Source: https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2019/10/30/roma-holocaust-amid-rising-hate-forgotten-victims-remembered

Margarete Kraus, a Czech Roma, photographed after the war by Reimar Gilsenbach. Her Auschwitz tattoo is visible on her left arm [Wiener Holocaust Library Collections]

Source: https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2019/10/30/roma-holocaust-amid-rising-hate-forgotten-victims-remembered

"The details are horrifying. In testimony given after the war, a Jewish Holocaust survivor outlines the “liquidation” of the Gypsy camp at Auschwitz in August 1944, when all the prisoners there were gassed."

- Source: https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2019/10/30/roma-holocaust-amid-rising-hate-forgotten-victims-remembered

Prisoners after the liberation of the Auschwitz (Photo: CTK)

Source: https://english.radio.cz/devouring-a-look-romani-holocaust-8095359

Antonin Hlavacek (Photo: Jana Sustova)

Source: https://english.radio.cz/devouring-a-look-romani-holocaust-8095359

"The transports would come in when it was dark. We weren't allowed to go outside but heard it all. They'd pull everyone out of the train, pile up their clothes and belongings on the floor and send most of them straight to the 'showers'. Instead of water, it was gas that came out of the pipes. There was also a group of prisoners, selected every three months, that was given more food and made to work in what we thought was a bakery. Only much later did we realise it was a crematorium, where they burned people. The toilet was just one big hole with a piece of wood over it and in order to get to it, we had to move aside dead bodies because they were only taken away every three days."

- Source: https://english.radio.cz/devouring-a-look-romani-holocaust-8095359

"While the fate of the Roma — a dark skinned people who largely lived on the margins of European society and had known persecution for centuries — may now seem inevitable, in the earliest days of the Third Reich, the Roma and Sinti people, then commonly referred to collectively as "Gypsies," posed a problem for Hitler's racial ideologues. The Nazi anthropologists knew that the Roma had arrived in Europe from India and believed them to be descendents of the original "Aryan" invaders of the subcontinent, who returned to Europe.

So Nazi racialist Hans Gunther found a justification for measures already long in place to control "the Gypsy plague": if the Roma were no less "Aryan" than Germans, he theorized, then their supposed "inherent criminal character" must have stemmed from their having mingled with "inferior" races over centuries of nomadic life."

- Source: https://english.radio.cz/devouring-a-look-romani-holocaust-8095359

A Gypsy couple at the Belzec concentration camp.

Source: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/holocaust/time1943n01.html

More: https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/664656/files/dpj_ii.pdf.

The Holocaust

and the United Nations

Outreach Programme

(155 pages pdf document)

"On 27 January 1945 the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration

camp was a salvation for 7,000 camp prisoners that managed to survive torture, starvation, diseases, medical experiments, executions

and gas chambers. There were no Roma and Sinti among those survivors. Half a year before the liberation, on the night of 2 August

1944, the remaining 2,897 Roma women, old men and children

from the so called “Zigeunerlager” (Gypsy camp) established by

Himmler’s decree in December 1942, who by then already suffered

all possible atrocities, were killed in gas chambers. Around 23,000

Roma and Sinti altogether were detained in Auschwitz, some 13,000

from Germany and Austria and others from countries under the rule

of the Third Reich or collaborating with it. Between April and July

1944 about 3,500 Roma and Sinti were transferred to other camps.

...

For many decades Roma and Sinti survivors of Nazi persecution

were silent and rarely voiced their stories or reported their experiences and observations. And because remembrance depends on

people’s memories, survivors’ testimonies, research, historiography

and official recognition, the Roma and Sinti suffering went largely

unnoticed. After 1945 many countries did not acknowledge and

condemn their racial persecution; furthermore, they for decades

pursued discriminatory practices against Roma and Sinti, including

in the restitution process"

- Source: Roma and Sinti — a Key to Fighting Modern-day Racism (page 11 from The Holocaust and the United Nations Outreach Programme 155 pages pdf document) download from here: https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/664656/files/dpj_ii.pdf.

A group of Roma pose for a photograph, 1930s. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Kore Yoors.

Source: https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/genocide-roma

"Nazi policies toward Roma in Germany and occupied territories developed gradually during the regime’s rule, eventually culminating in the genocide of over 250,000 people.[1] The genocide of the Roma is sometimes referred to as the Porajmos (the “devouring”) or Pharrajimos (“cutting up” or “destruction”) in the Romani language.[2] The Nazis also targeted other groups, perpetrating a genocide against European Jews in which six million people were murdered, as well as killing over three million Soviet prisoners of war, nearly two million Poles, over 250,000 people with disabilities, over 1,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses, hundreds of men accused of homosexuality, and other victims."

- Source: https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/genocide-roma

Map of a select number of ghettos and camps that Roma were sent to during World War II. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Source: https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/genocide-roma

View of the Romani section of the Łódź Ghetto. This image was taken by Walter Genewein, the head of the Łódź Ghetto economy and a Nazi Party member. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Robert Abrams.

Source: https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/genocide-roma

On August 2, 1944, nearly 3,000 Roma and Sinti women, men and children were murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Source: https://sfi.usc.edu/news/2017/08/17266-history-and-significance-august-2-roma-holocaust-memorial-day

"Brooks said that while the Roma and Sinti experience in the Holocaust mirrored that of the Jews (in Western Europe, they were deported to concentration and death camps, and in Eastern Europe they were shot and buried in mass graves; some populations were decimated, with more than 90 percent dying at the hands of the Nazis and their allies), it has taken nearly 80 years to achieve even basic recognition of the Nazi crimes against them."

- Source: https://sfi.usc.edu/news/2017/08/17266-history-and-significance-august-2-roma-holocaust-memorial-day

"Because the Roma and Sinti experience during the Holocaust has been so critically under-represented in modern discourse, testimonies of survivors are especially crucial for keeping memory alive and educating people today about the genocide. USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive has 406 testimonies of Roma and Sinti survivors, which Brooks said were “mind blowing” when she first discovered them."

- Source: https://sfi.usc.edu/news/2017/08/17266-history-and-significance-august-2-roma-holocaust-memorial-day