The Gypsy family camp at Auschwitz

In the summer of 1943, in the middle of Auschwitz-Birkenau, between the men’s camp and the prisoners’ hospital, there was a section unlike any other part of the camp. Behind electrified barbed wire, in several dozen wooden stable barracks, lived whole families – men, women, the elderly and babies – in civilian clothes, with unshaven heads and with numbers prefixed by the letter Z tattooed on their forearms. This was the Gypsy family camp (Zigeunerfamilienlager), section BIIe, to which from February 1943 the Germans deported Roma and Sinti from the Third Reich and occupied Europe. According to the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, some 23,000 people were sent there; the overwhelming majority of them did not survive.

War chronologies sometimes record that on 2 August 1943 “2,897 Roma were gassed when their camp at Auschwitz was liquidated”. The year in that statement is wrong. The liquidation of the Gypsy camp and the murder in the gas chambers of 2,897 men, women and children – the figure given in Danuta Czech’s Auschwitz Chronicle – took place on the night of 2/3 August 1944, exactly a year later. In August 1943 the camp had already existed for six months and was at the height of its overcrowding, hunger and epidemics.

The road to Birkenau

The persecution of Roma and Sinti in Germany began long before the war. For years the police had kept files on them, and after the Nazis came to power these were joined by racial studies, compulsory camps on the outskirts of cities and restrictions on freedom of movement. The implementing regulations and official commentaries on the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 classed “Gypsies” – alongside Jews – as a population of “alien race”. In Berlin a research centre was run by the psychiatrist Robert Ritter, which by the end of the war had drawn up, according to researchers, some 24,000 “racial opinions” dividing people into “pure Gypsies” and “mixed-bloods”. It was on the basis of these files that the criminal police would later decide whom to deport.

After the outbreak of war, Roma began to be removed from the Reich. In May 1940 some 2,500 people were deported to the General Government; in the autumn of 1941 more than 5,000 Roma and Sinti from the Austrian Burgenland were sent to a separate “Gypsy camp” in the Łódź Ghetto, and those who survived the typhus epidemic there were murdered at Chełmno nad Nerem at the beginning of 1942. In the occupied territories of the Soviet Union, in Serbia and in Poland, the Einsatzgruppen, the police and the gendarmerie shot Roma on the spot.

On 16 December 1942 Heinrich Himmler issued an order, known in the literature as the “Auschwitz decree” (Auschwitz-Erlass), under which “Gypsy half-breeds”, Roma and Sinti from the Reich were to be sent with their entire families to a concentration camp. The detailed implementing regulations of 29 January 1943, issued by the Reich Security Main Office under the head of the criminal police, Arthur Nebe, named Auschwitz as the destination. The regulations provided for exceptions – among others for people deemed “socially adjusted” and for Wehrmacht soldiers – but in practice local police offices applied them arbitrarily, and many of those spared deportation were subjected to forced sterilisation. Among those sent to Auschwitz were also men who until recently had worn Wehrmacht uniform, some of them decorated for fighting at the front.

Section BIIe

Section BIIe was not yet finished when the first transport from the Reich arrived there on 26 February 1943. The camp leader (Lagerführer) was SS-Oberscharführer Bruno Pfütze. The elongated rectangular site – according to various studies about 600 by 120 or about 1,000 by 80 metres – was occupied by wooden stable-type barracks, originally designed for horses, with no windows apart from skylights under the roof, an earth floor and no heating. Whole families slept on three-tier bunks, however many children they had; according to accounts, as many as a thousand people were crammed into a single barrack. To the south the camp bordered the railway ramp where arriving Jews underwent selection, and the crematoria stood nearby.

The Roma and Sinti differed fundamentally from the other prisoners of Birkenau in that they were not subjected to selection on arrival and their families were not separated. They were allowed to keep their civilian clothes and their heads were not shaved. They were entered in separate registers, numbered with the letter Z (Zigeuner), and marked with the black triangle of “asocial” prisoners. These apparent “privileges” did not stem from any concern for the people. The Nazi “race researchers” regarded the Roma as a group to be “secured” and studied, and the SS saw them as a reservoir of prisoners for whose lives it bore no responsibility whatever. Most were not assigned to regular work outside the section; the men and children carried stones for the construction of the camp road, the ramp and the drainage ditches.

The transports came in very rapidly. According to the surviving registers, in March 1943 alone 11,339 people were brought in 23 transports, in April 2,677 in ten transports and in May 2,014 in eleven. Later, smaller groups arrived, right up to July 1944. According to historians’ figures, more than 60 per cent of the prisoners came from Germany and Austria, about 22 per cent from the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and about 6 per cent from occupied Poland; there were smaller groups from France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Yugoslavia, the USSR, Lithuania and Hungary, and individuals from Norway and Spain. Among those deported from Austria was nine-year-old Ceija Stojka, who survived Birkenau, Ravensbrück and Bergen-Belsen and years later described and painted what she had seen.

Hunger and epidemics

From the very first weeks, conditions in the Gypsy camp were catastrophic even by the standards of Birkenau. The ground was clayey and waterlogged, and for most of the year it was covered in mud. Water for washing – when there was any – came from tin tanks filled in the morning and evening; the latrines were rarely emptied and the water was contaminated. The food rations fell well short of what even adults needed; almost nothing was provided for small children. Throughout the camp’s existence hunger was a constant experience, one that recurs in every survivor’s account.

In such conditions scabies, measles, dysentery, starvation diarrhoea, tuberculosis and, above all, typhus spread. Among the starving children there was noma (cancrum oris), a gangrene of the facial tissues which under normal conditions is almost unknown in Europe. In the spring of 1943 some thirty prisoner-doctors and several dozen orderlies worked in a few hospital barracks, each holding several hundred patients, almost without medicines or dressings. Among the prisoner-doctors were the Prague paediatrician Berthold Epstein, who studied noma on the orders of the SS, and the Berlin physician Lucie Adelsberger, who after the war described the dying of children in the camp. The death rate was so high that, according to researchers, the great majority of the victims of the Gypsy camp died not in the gas chambers but of hunger, disease and exhaustion.

The gas chambers in 1943

The SS “fought” the epidemics in the Gypsy camp in the same way as in other parts of Birkenau – by killing the sick. On 23 March 1943 some 1,700 men, women and children brought from the area around Białystok, among whom typhus was suspected, were murdered in the gas chambers without even being entered in the camp registers. On 25 May 1943, 507 men and 528 women – 1,035 people in all, mainly Roma from the Białystok region and from Austria – who were sick or suspected of having typhus were sent to the gas chambers; their dates of death were blurred in the registers. Both crimes, as the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum has established, were committed before the arrival at the camp of Josef Mengele, to whom they are sometimes attributed.

Mengele, posted to Auschwitz on 24 May 1943, served from 30 May as camp doctor in section BIIe. He took over the method already in use against typhus: he had barracks emptied one after another, the sick sent to the gas chambers and the remaining prisoners deloused and moved. Every day he went through the lists of the sick with the prognoses drawn up by the prisoner-doctors under him; according to survivors, a prognosis of treatment lasting more than a few weeks was tantamount to a death sentence.

The Gypsy camp, which held whole families, became Mengele’s main “research material”. Commissioned by and in collaboration with the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics in Berlin, he carried out anthropological measurements and studies of twins, of people with eyes of different colours, with dwarfism and other traits he found interesting, as well as research on noma. The “kindergarten” (Kindergarten) set up in the camp for children under six served largely as a back-up for this research. Many of the experiments (PL) ended with the victim being killed and dissected, and specimens – including eyeballs – were sent to Berlin.

The camp in August 1943

By the beginning of August 1943, the date under which some lists wrongly place its “liquidation”, most of the roughly 23,000 people who passed through section BIIe in the course of its existence had already been brought there. The great transports of spring 1943 had filled the barracks beyond all measure, and the typhus and dysentery epidemics did not abate. People died every day, and every morning the bodies were carried out in front of the barracks for roll call. At the same time, in the neighbouring sections of Birkenau, the mass extermination of Jews brought in transports from all over occupied Europe was under way – including from the Białystok Ghetto, liquidated in August 1943.

The rhythm of camp life was set by roll calls, at which – as in other sections – the sick and the old also had to stand, by queues for food and water, and by inspections carried out by SS doctors. The camp leaders changed very often – there were nine of them in seventeen months. From June 1943 the post was held by Gerhard Palitzsch, earlier known as an executioner who had shot prisoners at the Death Wall in the main camp; in August he was replaced in turn by Ludwig Plagge and Friedrich Harder. The commandant of the whole Auschwitz complex until November 1943 was Rudolf Höss, who in his memoirs called the “Gypsies” – after the Jews and the Soviet prisoners of war – the next great group of victims of the camp.

Resistance in May 1944

The camp existed for another year. In the spring of 1944, as the SS was preparing Birkenau to receive hundreds of thousands of Jews from Hungary, the decision was taken to liquidate it; historians have not established conclusively who took it and when. In April 1944 some of the prisoners fit for work were taken to Buchenwald and Ravensbrück. On 16 May 1944 the SS sealed off section BIIe and began leading people out to the gas chambers – according to various sources some 6,000–6,500 people were to be killed. The Roma, who had been warned beforehand – according to some accounts by the camp leader Georg Bonigut – did not come out of their barracks. Armed with spades, crowbars, knives and stones, they barricaded themselves inside. The SS withdrew, fearing that the resistance would spread to other sections – and among the prisoners, after all, were former Wehrmacht soldiers. Today 16 May is marked in Roma communities as the day of Roma resistance.

In the following weeks the SS broke up the camp step by step. On 23 May 1944 some 1,500 prisoners were moved to the main camp and from there to other concentration camps – Flossenbürg and Ravensbrück; many of them survived the war. Some of the barracks of section BIIe were taken over as a transit camp for unregistered Jews from Hungary.

The night of 2/3 August 1944

On the evening of 2 August 1944, at around 7 p.m., armed SS men surrounded section BIIe. That same day a further 1,400 or so prisoners deemed fit for work had been taken by goods train to Buchenwald. The rest – according to Danuta Czech’s Auschwitz Chronicle, 2,897 men, women and children – were loaded onto lorries and driven to a gas chamber, in most accounts that of Crematorium V; attempts at resistance were brutally crushed. Among those directing the operation were the leader of the men’s camp at Birkenau, Johann Schwarzhuber, and the head of the crematoria, Otto Moll. The bodies were burnt in pits next to the crematorium. On the morning of 3 August the SS men tracked down and murdered those who had managed to hide in the barracks. On the basis of more recent research, the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum estimates the number murdered that night at 4,200–4,300. It is this crime – a year after the date given in some chronologies – that is remembered as the end of the Gypsy camp.

A few weeks earlier Tadeusz Joachimowski, a Polish political prisoner working in the camp office, together with two fellow prisoners, had smuggled out and buried the registers of the Gypsy camp. Dug up in January 1949, damaged but legible, they became the main source from which historians reconstructed the names, origins and dates of death of thousands of victims.

The toll

Historians differ on details, but their findings converge. According to Franciszek Piper of the Auschwitz Museum, 20,982 prisoners of the Gypsy camp were registered – 10,094 men and 10,888 women, including children born in the camp – and some 2,000 deportees were killed without being registered. The Museum takes the view that of some 23,000 Roma and Sinti deported, about 21,000 died. The German historian Michael Zimmermann puts the number of prisoners at about 22,600 and the number who died or were murdered at more than 19,300, of whom more than 5,600 died in the gas chambers and more than 13,600 of hunger, disease and exhaustion. Auschwitz was thus the place where one of the largest groups of victims of the Porajmos – the genocide of the Roma and Sinti – perished; historians estimate the total number of its victims across Europe, depending on the method, at between some 200,000 and half a million.

Remembrance

The survivors waited a very long time for this crime to be acknowledged. In 1956 the Federal Court of Justice of West Germany ruled that the deportations of Roma before 1 March 1943 – the date the Auschwitz decree came into force – had not been racially motivated but aimed at “combating the Gypsy plague”, which deprived the victims of the right to compensation; the ruling was not reversed until 1963. Neither Robert Ritter nor his associates, including Eva Justin, were ever punished for their part. The West German government recognised the persecution of the Roma and Sinti as a racially motivated genocide only in 1982, after years of campaigning by Roma activists, among whom Romani Rose stood out.

In 2001 a permanent exhibition devoted to the extermination of the Roma and Sinti was opened in Block 13 of the main camp. In 2011 the Polish Sejm established 2 August as the Day of Remembrance of the Extermination of the Roma and Sinti, and in 2015 the European Parliament recognised the day as a European day of remembrance for the victims of the Roma genocide. Every year commemorations attended by survivors, their families and representatives of various states are held on the site of the former section BIIe at Birkenau.

Its place in the war

The Gypsy family camp was part of the same system that in 1943 turned Auschwitz into the largest site of mass extermination in occupied Europe. Its history shows that the racial policy of the Third Reich was not confined to the Jews: the Roma and Sinti were hunted down on the basis of the same criteria of “blood”, the same police files and the same opinions of “scientists”, and their deaths – from hunger, from disease, in the gas chambers and in experiments – were the foreseeable result of decisions taken in Berlin. The six months of the camp’s existence up to August 1943 were enough for thousands of its prisoners to have died already. The last chapter of its history, the night of 2/3 August 1944, was played out when the Red Army was already standing on the Vistula and the Uprising was under way in Warsaw.