The largely forgotten Gypsy (Roma) Holocaust in Nazi Germany.
Latest hand-picked WWII news. See also: Nazi Holocaust Archives, WWII Archives, WW2 Journalists, Nazi Guards, Comfort Women.
Roma survivor leads Berlin remembrance on the 66th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz (photos)
Zoni Weisz, a Roma man whose parents were killed in the Auschwitz concentration camp, stood before German politicians on Holocaust Day - the first time that a non-Jewish man led these ceremonies - to remind them of the crimes of the past and the discrimination of his people in the present.
During their reign the Nazis exterminated up to 500,000 of the one million Roma in Europe. After nearly two decades of planning, a memorial to Sinti and Roma will be set up in Berlin in 2011.
The article features photographs from several different locations marking the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which occurs annually on January 27.
(dailymail.co.uk)
Roma recall WWII internment in France - Some were kept locked up years after the Nazis were gone
Not much is left of the camp where thousands of French Gypsies were interned in the village of Montreuil-Bellay in the Saumur wine region. Here, hungry children once crowded behind barbed wire, hoping passerby might throw them leftover food. This grim episode of French history cannot be found in the schoolbooks: Under the Nazi occupation, thousands of Gypsies, mostly citizens of France, were rounded up and put in 31 internment camps guarded by their fellow Frenchmen. Perhaps most shameful is that France - which views itself the cradle of human rights - kept some Gypsies locked away until 1946.
(washingtontimes.com)
Gypsy Holocaust victims in the village of Vlasca in Romania speak out
Holocaust Memorial Day (27 Jan.) is a chance for Jews and Roma (Gypsies) to remind the world how their families were persecuted by the Nazis in World War Two. Historians often call the latter "the forgotten Holocaust": Up to 500,000 Roma died in mass shootings and Nazi gas chambers. Recent studies have revealed more of their suffering, but little is known about the Roma targeted by the allies of the Third Reich on the eastern front. The authorities in Romania (ruled by military dictator Ion Antonescu) seized everything: "We lost our carts, horses, all our baggage and all the gold our fathers had hidden in the carts' shafts," Sandu Stanescu recalls.
(bbc.co.uk)
Berlin to honour 500000 killed Roma and Sinti with a memorial
After years of delay and dispute, a groundbreaking ceremony was held in Berlin's Tiergarten park for a memorial to the hundreds of thousands of Roma and Sinti who were killed during the Holocaust. The ceremony took place on the 66th anniversary of the Nazi order under which Sinti and Roma were transported to Auschwitz. Germany is contributing 2 million euros to build the memorial.
(dw-world.de)
Romania apologizes for deportation of Gypsies to Nazi death camps
Romania's president Traian Basescu apologized for the deportation of thousands of Gypsies to Nazi death camps during World War II, the first time a government official has done so publicly. More than 25,000 Gypsies, half of them children, were sent from Romania to extermination camps in the Moldovan region of Trans-Dniester. 11,000 of them died there. A lack of wartime records makes it hard to determine the overall number of Gypsies killed, estimates vary between 220,000 and 500,000.
(nctimes.com)
Historical Amnesia: The Romani Holocaust
Our consciousness of holocaust is seared by the stark images of freight cars transporting Jews to the death camps of Belsen, Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Dachau. In popular cinema, such as Schindler's List and The Pianist, it is represented as the tragedy befalling the Jewish people. There is growing dissent among liberal scholars such as Norman Finkelstein that other holocausts have been suppressed in favour of the dominant discourse of Jewish suffering as being "the only Holocaust". "Were Jews the only victims of The Holocaust, or did others who perished because of Nazi persecution also count as victims?"
(blogcritics)
Half-million Roma victims of Nazi Germany
Roma called for remembrance of the estimated half-million Nazi Germany's Roma victims. An estimated half of the one million Roma living in pre-war Europe were slaughtered by Nazi Germany between 1939-44. Of the 23,000 Roma taken to the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp only 2,000 survived. Roma from Austria, Germany and Nazi-occupied Czech territories were deported to the death camp on orders of Nazi SS head Heinrich Himmler. Some children, were subject to the pseudo-medical experiments of infamous Josef Mengele.
(expatica)
Roma Holocaust in Slovakia
WWII ended more than 60 years ago, but the Roma Holocaust in Slovakia is only now being recognized. Tens of thousands of Roma in Europe were among the victims of the Holocaust, but many Slovaks still don`t know that people other than Jews were victims of persecution during WWII. Only recently, moving stories of Roma survivors have begun to emerge. Those survivors are finally seeing their pain acknowledged in memorials, and some have even received compensation. The Roma Holocaust is called Baro Porrajmos in the Roma language, which literally means large losses of human lives or `the Devouring.`
(tol)
No-one in this world has a monopoly on victimhood
Even though European Jewry bore the brunt of the Third Reich's crazed blood-lust, and the word "holocaust" has become synonymous with the premeditated extermination of their millions of innocents. Holocaust Memorial Day is an annual service to honour the victims of the holocaust "and other genocides" - of which there are tragically all to many. The European Holocaust alone included, apart from some six million Jews, hundreds of thousands of Roma and Sinti (Gypsies), Russians and other Slavic peoples, Poles, Communists and political dissidents, the mentally or physically disabled, random intelligenzia, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Lutherians and even Catholic clergy.
(icnorthwales)
The genocide of the Gypsies at the hands of Nazi Germany (Article no longer available from the original source)
About one million Gypsies lived in those parts of Europe that were occupied by Germany. To the Nazis, the Gypsies were a marginal nuisance that they did not know how to handle, since the Gypsies were actually the only Aryans in Europe, as their ancestors are from northwest India. In a letter to Martin Bormann dated December 6, 1942, Heinrich Himmler concluded that the "mixed-blood Gypsies" had to be eliminated, while purebred Gypsies should be allowed to live a nomadic life outside of Germany.
(Haaretz)
Gypsies win right to sue IBM over role in Holocaust
A Swiss appeals court ruled that the US computer giant IBM may have helped Adolf Hitler pursue mass murder more quickly and more efficiently than would otherwise have been possible, opening up the prospect of a $12bn lawsuit against the company by Gypsy organisations. IBM's pioneering punch cards and prototype computer systems were used by the Nazis to systematise and collate information on the Jewish population and others under the Third Reich from the 1930s, an operation that oiled the wheels of the Holocaust.
(guardian)
See also:
Nazi Holocaust Archives
WWII Archives
WW2 Journalists
Nazi Guards
Comfort Women.