„Frankfurt Ausch

The Nazi racist treatment of Sinti and Roma

From 1933 onwards Sinti and Roma in the German Reich were exposed to intensified dis-crimination and harassment, which in its essentials did not differ all that much from the “Gypsy policy” of the Weimar Republic. But this changed in 1936 when the “Central Reich Office for Combating the Gypsy Nuisance” was set up in order to give the police effective control over the Roma and Sinti on the territory of the German Reich. Also in 1936 the psy-chiatrist Robert Ritter was made head of the “Research Institute for Racial Hygiene and Population Biology”. His task was to clarify the question of “asocials”, a category that in-cluded the “Gypsies”. The long-term aim was to annihilate the latter by sterilization, on anal-ogy with the “Law on the Prevention of Hereditary Diseases in Future Generations”. Ritter’s institute studied Sinti and Roma according to the criteria of “racial hygiene” up until 1941.

The expert testimony provided by Ritter enabled the police authorities to persecute the “Gyp-sies of mixed race” as asocial and criminal. In the insane ideology of the Nazis hardly any of them were considered to be “racially pure Gypsies of Aryan origin” who represented no dan-ger to the German race. This absurd and inhuman distinction later lost its significance behind the barbed-wire fences of the concentration and extermination camps. From 1936 onwards various municipalities began to herd Roma and Sinti into camps, where they were kept under guard and could later be made available for forced labour.

The persecution of Sinti and Roma in Frankfurt – the Dieselstrasse Camp

Early in 1936 the Frankfurt police authorities launched a hate campaign against Roma and Sinti with the aim of creating a pogrom-like atmosphere, thus creating a basis for introducing harsher regulations concerning Roma and Sinti. The campaign found an echo across the whole German Reich. The official pretext was a slight violation by two Roma of the “Law on Foreign Currency Controls”, which had only been in force for a year. Police raids and false reports deliberately planted by the Frankfurt police and Nazi press enabled this minor offence to be blown up into an “exchange rate manipulation scandal” in which many Roma and Sinti were supposedly involved.

In August 1937 a camp was set up in Frankfurt’s Dieselstrasse and moved to the Kruppstrasse in 1942. On 18 August 1937 the Public Health Board with the assistance of the police sent 55 Roma and Sinti to the Dieselstrasse camp. That this was a coercive measure can be clearly seen from the fact that the Public Health Board noted that the families there would be subject to “constant supervision” by a police picket. The city authorities of Frankfurt am Main then began forcibly to intern in the camp people living not only in caravans, but also in apartments.

At the turn of the year 1937/38 families who had been living in council flats had their leases cancelled, and they were sent to the Dieselstrasse Camp. This was not so easy in the case of Roma and Sinti who were living in private apartments. The police were called upon to help, which they did by requesting a list of these families. The situation in the camp was wretched. The only building put up for the inmates was the toilet facility, while the camp overseer Himmelheber had a whole house on the premises. As regards the accommodations for the inmates, it was felt that the only type of residence “suitable for Gypsies” was a cara-van. Yet many of the families did not possess a caravan, having previously lived in flats. For such people the city bought furniture vans and converted them into caravans. Sometimes up to three families lived in such furniture vans, which were six metres long and two metres wide and had no water, lighting or toilet facilities. Those families who had no caravan of their own had to pay rent for the municipal caravans, which in 1941/42 came to 10-20 Reichsmarks a month.

The number of inmates of the Dieselstrasse Camp rose steadily, although the police were always sending some of them to concentration camps. In 1941 there were 160 of them. For the camp in the Kruppstrasse no figures are available, but we may assume that the comple-ment continued to grow slightly. One Sinto reported a total of 180 people in early 1943. Eve-ryday life for the people in the camp was determined by restrictive regulations, a brutal camp overseer, and forced labour in Frankfurt factories. It was only possible to leave the camp to go to work, attend school, or just to buy food and the like. Anyone who was not back by 8 p.m. from October to March or by 9 p.m. in summer had to reckon with sanctions, such as confinement to camp for up to four weeks, for example. The camp overseer abused the in-mates verbally, maltreated them physically, and constantly threatened them with being “sent off to the concentration camps”. In a number of cases he caused the deportation of Sinti and Roma by reporting violations of camp regulations or other rules to the police.

Deportation and annihilation of Roma and Sinti in Auschwitz

In 1939 the forced sterilizations, the persecution and arrests of individuals culminated in the first transports of larger groups of Roma and Sinti to Poland. In December 1942 Heinrich Himmler ordered the deportation of Sinti and Roma to Auschwitz. On the basis of a few so-called “privileges” the “Gypsy camp” at Auschwitz-Birkenau was held up as a model, al-though the food was dreadful and the enfeebled bodies of the inmates had been drained of all resistance to the diseases that were rife in the camp. Over 13,000 people died as a result of these living conditions – a mortality rate well above the Auschwitz average.

Because of the inhuman conditions and the transfer of some of their number to other camps no more than 6,500 Sinti and Roma were left at Auschwitz-Birkenau in the summer of 1944 (in 1943 the figure had sometimes risen to 14,000). Of these some able-bodied Roma and Sinti were transferred to the main camp, as were identical twins required for the cruel ex-periments conducted by the camp doctor, Josef Mengele. The adults and children who sur-vived the inhuman experiments were killed. The remaining 2,897 inmates of the “Gypsy camp” at Auschwitz were murdered on 2 August 1944 following a revolt in May of the same year when for a brief period they successfully defended themselves against the mass gas-sing that awaited them. On 10 October 1944 another 800 Sinti and Roma children sent back from Buchenwald were murdered. After that the camp authorities dissolved the “Gypsy camp” at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Absence of criminal prosecution

In 1947 the “race researcher” Robert Ritter was appointed head of the “Youth Observation Centre for Emotional and Nervous Disorders and Child Psychiatry” by the head of the social welfare department, a man called Prestel. In the Nazi period Prestel had been responsible for the Gypsy camps in the Krupp- and Dieselstrasse. Ritter owed the success of his applica-tion to his views on the question of whether environmental influences or character features were responsible for asocial behaviour. He recommended that Gypsies, the majority of whom were criminal, should be kept in camps and separated from their asocial progeny.

At Ritter’s request Dr. Eva Justin, a child and criminal psychologist, was appointed as his assistant and made a name for herself by her studies aimed at determining whether a per-son’s criminal nature could be deduced from his appearance. Court proceedings initiated against Justin by Roma and Sinti in the 1950s came to nothing. It was not until the early 1960s that Justin was transferred under public pressure to the Bonames location, whose residents included Roma and Sinti. She briefly did research into the social situation of the inhabitants and later worked at Frankfurt’s university hospital. She no more had to answer for the crimes she had committed against the Roma than did Ritter, who died in the 1950s.

Compensation

On the question of compensation for Sinti and Roma the individual compensation authorities came to the conclusion that those affected were not, unlike Jews, persecuted for racial rea-sons, but arrested and placed in camps for their “asocial” or “criminal” nature. In the late 1940s some compensation authorities recommended that applications from Roma and Sinti be treated with particular caution and considered in the light of information supplied by the relevant police departments.

There was a particularly lively exchange with the Vagrant Information Centre in Munich, which issued recommendations concerning applications for compensation based on docu-ments from the Nazi period. Applications were often turned down on grounds of supposed asociality, implying that the applicants had only themselves to blame. Only those who were deported after the Auschwitz decree of December 1942 could claim persecution for racial reasons. Post-war officialdom carried on the racist ideology of the Nazis, in which “Gypsies” were regarded as asocial and criminal to begin with, i.e. ethnic identity by itself constituted sufficient grounds for arresting Sinti and Roma even without the Auschwitz decree, as it meant they were “potentially criminal” or “work-shy”. By rejecting the applications the respon-sible departments were acting on the very assumptions that had led to racially-motivated persecution in the first place. A 1956 judgement issued by the Wiesbaden compensation authority contains the following passage, for example:

“… on 20 May 1940 the applicant was deported to the former General Government with her parents and siblings in the course of the general resettlement of Gypsies. But this resettle-ment operation was a measure taken exclusively out of military and security-police consid-erations. It was only Himmler’s Auschwitz decree of 16 December 1942 and 29 January 1943 that ushered in a basic change in the attitude of the Nazi authorities to the Gypsy ques-tion. The Federal Supreme Court has therefore ruled that only Gypsies detained in the Gen-eral Government in the period after 1 March 1943 – the key date for the implementation of the decree – remained in custody [...] for racial reasons.”

To assert that a “basic change in the attitude of the Nazi authorities” to Sinti and Roma did not take place until 1943 is not only to make a mockery of those affected and their fate – it is just plain wrong. There was no need for any change since the attitude had been evident right from the start, as the forced sterilizations and the studies of racial hygiene had shown all too clearly. The Federal German judiciary confirmed the compensation practice of the competent authorities. In another ruling issued in 1956 that stated that racial persecution could only be seen as a reason for deportation from 1943 onwards, the Federal Supreme Court justified this view as follows:

“The Gypsies have a tendency to criminality, especially to theft and fraud. They often lack the moral instinct to respect the property of others, as like primitive man they are driven by an unbridled cupidity (Okkupationstrieb).”

Only in 1963 did the Federal Supreme Court revise its judgement of 1956 and identified the year 1938 as marking the beginning of the racial persecution of Sinti and Roma. This revision came too late for some of those entitled to compensation, who had died in the meantime. And only after the civil rights movement of the Sinti and Roma aroused public attention in the years 1979 and 1980 did the government of Helmut Schmidt recognize the genocide inflicted on the Sinti and Roma as being racially motivated, and a Hardship Fund was set up. Many Roma and Sinti felt the way German officialdom had treated their fate as a second persecu-tion.