Context: Roma were among the groups that the Nazi regime (1933–1945) and its partner regimes singled out for [persecution and murder before](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/narrative/6716/en) and during World War II. Roma  are pejoratively referred to as *Zigeuner* in German and as “Gypsies” in English.

Drawing support from many non-Nazi Germans who harbored social prejudice towards Roma,  the Nazis judged Roma to be "racially inferior." Under the Nazi regime, German authorities subjected Roma to arbitrary internment, sterilization,  forced labor in concentration camps, deportation, and mass murder. German authorities murdered tens of thousands of Roma in the German-occupied territories of the Soviet Union and Serbia and thousands more in the killing centers at [Auschwitz-Birkenau](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/narrative/3673/en), [Chełmno](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/narrative/3852/en), [Belzec](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/narrative/3769/en), [Sobibor](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/narrative/3790/en), and [Treblinka](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/narrative/3819/en). In Germany and German-occupied territories, the SS and police incarcerated Roma in the [Bergen-Belsen](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/narrative/4549/en), [Sachsenhausen](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/narrative/6810/en), [Buchenwald](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/narrative/3956/en), [Dachau](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/narrative/4391/en), [Mauthausen](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/narrative/3880/en), Mittelbau-Dora, Natzweiler-Struthof, Gross-Rosen, and [Ravensbrück](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/narrative/4015/en) concentration camps. Both in the so-called Greater German Reich and in the so-called General Government  (*Generalgouvernement*), German civilian authorities managed several forced-labor camps in which they incarcerated Roma. The crimes committed against Roma remained unacknowledged all over Europe in the first decades after World War II.

It is still not known precisely how many Roma  were killed during the period of the [Holocaust](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/narrative/72/en). This reflects the fact that we cannot know for certain how many Roma lived in Europe [before World War II](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/narrative/5123/en); one estimate puts the prewar Romani population at between 1 and 1.5 million. Another reason why the number of victims is uncertain is the late recognition and recording of the genocide. Survivor testimony and forensic evidence are still emerging to testify to local events. On the basis of the evidence available to date, historians estimate that the Germans and their allies killed at least 250,000 European Roma  during World War II. Some scholars estimate that the full death toll may well reach around 500,000.  
In addition to lives lost, numerous European Roma  communities were destroyed. Romani people suffered from the psychological and physical traumas of deprivation, abuse, and the shattering of family. This made it extremely difficult to reconstruct Roma cultural and social networks after the war.

After the war, discrimination against Roma  continued all over Europe. The courts in the Federal Republic of Germany determined that all measures taken against Roma before 1943 were legitimate official measures against persons committing criminal acts, not the result of policy driven by racial prejudice. This decision effectively closed the door to restitution for thousands of Roma victims, who had been incarcerated, forcibly sterilized, and deported out of Germany for no specific crime. The postwar police authorities took over the research files of the Nazi regime, including the registry of Roma who had resided in the Greater German Reich, and police harassment and discrimination continued.

Only in late 1965 did the West German compensation law explicitly [acknowledge that the acts of persecution](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/narrative/10737/en) that took place before 1943 were racially motivated, creating eligibility for most Roma  to apply for compensation for their suffering and loss under the Nazi regime. By this time, many of those who became eligible had already died. In March 1982 Federal Chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, formally stated that German Roma had been victims of [genocide](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/narrative/9275/en).

[https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/genocide-of-european-roma-gypsies-1939-1945](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/genocide-of-european-roma-gypsies-1939-1945)

  
In every country there were those who were able to avoid or evade internment, some through flight or in hiding and some because of loopholes in the regulations or gaps in the police net. But when [the war ended in the spring of 1945](https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/topics/end-world-war-ii-1945), Europe’s Roma were scattered, exhausted, and traumatized. Families had suffered the death or disappearance of loved ones and whole communities had been destroyed. What happened next varied from country to country, as had the patterns of persecution. 

In France, for example, the interned “nomads” were held in the camps and many were not released until June 1946. New research has revealed the participation of Romani men in the French Resistance, but also a shameful story of victimization after the liberation, by neighbors and Resistance activists who “naturally” suspected them of collaboration. Survivors of the Auschwitz “Gypsy Family Camp” were liberated from concentration camps in Germany along with Romani men and women who had survived the war in those camps.

The typical trajectory of Jews and foreign forced and slave laborers in 1945 went through the refugee centres and Displaced Persons (DP) camps operated first by the Allied armies and, from October 1945, by the [United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Organization](https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/united-nations-relief-and-rehabilitation) (UNRRA—later the International Refugee Organization / IRO). However, very few Romani survivors were “displaced” in a legal or even geographical sense. The majority of Romani survivors on German soil were themselves natives of Germany or of the Austrian and Czech territories incorporated into the Reich. As such they were not far from home, although even before the war the German authorities had often questioned their German citizenship and many found themselves formally stateless after the war. These Roma and Sinti qualified as refugees, and would have a fight to reclaim their citizenship rights in the following years, but they had yet to learn that. German Sinti and Roma liberated from camps in Poland also made their way back to Germany as directly as they could.

Similarly, most Italian Roma, slowly released from internment after the fall of Mussolini in 1943, simply fled to rebuild their lives on home soil. For many, their situation was complicated by two circumstances: Italian governments had always denied the existence of Italian “Gypsies,” so that they were legally presumed to be foreigners. Moreover, a significant number of them had lived in Croatian border areas that were handed over to Yugoslavia after the war, and they were caught up in complicated arrangements for re-assigning citizenship and facilitating cross-border migration. For some of them, the changes made it possible to claim refugee status.

A relatively small proportion of Romani survivors presented themselves to the UNRRA/IRO seeking support and resettlement in the immediate post-war period—between 500 and 600 in all in Germany and Italy. Although the official attitude to them was ambivalent—sometimes recognizing them as a victim group and sometimes questioning whether “nomadic” families could be genuinely seeking resettlement as refugees—they were relatively successful.

Once the camps were opened, German Sinti and Roma typically set off for home as soon as they could. Otto Rosenberg, aged 17 in 1945, was one of the many liberated from Bergen Belsen who decided in the first days after the arrival of the British troops to leave the camp and make their way home; Rosenberg simply did not trust either the Germans or the liberators and could not bear to be surrounded by fences any longer. Making his way to Berlin on foot, the first place he went to on arrival was his last address in Berlin: the Marzahn “Gypsy Camp” where his family had been interned in 1936.



In Germany, in the first months after the end of the war, local and regional offices were set up to identify and certify former camp inmates and victims of Nazi persecution. Those German Romani survivors who presented themselves were often recognized and issued the appropriate documents. In subsequent years, “they seem to have just been forgotten”—the words of Alfred Lessing, who had managed to survive and avoid internment in Germany at the cost of being constantly in hiding, disguised or on the run. 

The newsletter of a small organization of Sinti founded in Munich in 1946 to press for recognition and justice was tellingly entitled *Die Vergessenen* (The Forgotten Ones), and the organization itself did not last long. But in fact some authorities very soon found ways of denying help to “Gypsies”; in 1946, the Bremen and Hannover governments made public support for Nazi victims dependent on evidence that they had a permanent job.

In the years that followed, Romani German survivors struggled to gain justice and compensation. The legal cases they brought against those who had collaborated in their persecution, and in particular the race scientists and medical experts who had condemned them to sterilization, internment, and murder, resulted in no convictions. Indeed the same experts were called on to testify that “Gypsies” were inherently untrustworthy witnesses. 

Until 1963, the official position of the West German courts was that their racial persecution (the qualification for compensation) had only begun in 1942, with the deportation to Auschwitz. The harassment, exclusion, internment, sterilization, and slave labor that they had suffered before were all justified by their criminal and antisocial behaviour. And even when the legal position changed, their testimony was often not believed. Discriminatory regulations and police practices continued as though the genocide had never happened.

In other countries, too, the persecution of Roma was a non-subject. In France and Italy, even after internment ended, discrimination continued; as victims of the defeated fascists, the Roma were easily forgotten in national myths of anti-fascist resistance. It was only in October 2016 that French President François Hollande acknowledged national responsibility and apologized for the internment policy. In socialist Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, national narratives of heroic resistance and ideologies of class struggle could not easily accommodate the ways in which the Roma had suffered simply for being Roma. 

While the genocide of the Jews could not be denied, Romani victims of mass killings in Ukraine were simply “peaceful Soviet civilians” in official parlance. Socialist states were generally more ready to grant rights to Roma, and the drive for reconstruction provided work and upward mobility; many Slovak Roma migrated to the more industrial west of Czechoslovakia, replacing the decimated Czech Roma population. But this “integration” nearly always came at the price of the expectation that they settle down, often in segregated communities, and abandon their traditional ways of life.

This denial of their suffering, and delay of justice and compensation, has been described by Romani survivors as a second Holocaust. The reconstruction of the families and communities through which Romani groups defined their identity was burdened by the nature of the trauma they had suffered; sterilization, humiliation, and the insults to their culture made it hard both to share their stories and to communicate their traditions and values. The loss was all the greater as long as the wider society also kept silent about their history (while commemorating other victims and systematically prosecuting the perpetrators). 

To a very considerable extent it was the mobilization of a new generation of Romani Germans in the 1980s, demanding acknowledgement of the genocide, that spurred the development international Roma rights movement. The culmination of their efforts was the recognition by successive German governments of the nature of their victimization and, in 2012, the opening of a Memorial to the Sinti and Roma of Europe Murdered under National Socialism in Berlin’s Tiergarten.

[https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/romani-holocaust-survivors-1945](https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/romani-holocaust-survivors-1945)  






Justice for the Roma