Himmler's order on the Roma

Under the date 15 November 1943, war chronologies state that Heinrich Himmler ordered that “Gypsies and part-Gypsies be put on an equal footing with Jews and placed in concentration camps”. This sentence, repeated in many chronologies, needs correcting and supplementing. Himmler had taken the principal decision to deport the Roma and Sinti of the Reich to a concentration camp almost a year earlier – on 16 December 1942, in the so-called Auschwitz decree (Auschwitz-Erlass). On the strength of it, whole families were brought from February 1943 onwards to the Gypsy family camp at Birkenau.

The document of 15 November 1943 concerned a different area: the occupied territories of the Soviet Union. Historians, among them the American scholar Guenter Lewy in his monograph on the Nazi persecution of the Gypsies, describe it as a circular of the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, headed by Alfred Rosenberg. The circular distinguished two groups. Sedentary Roma and “part-Gypsies” living a settled life were to be treated in the same way as the local population. Itinerant Roma, however – and only they – were to be “put on an equal footing with Jews” and placed in concentration camps. In case of doubt as to who was a “Gypsy” and who was “itinerant”, the decision lay with the commanders of the Security Police and the SD – that is, with the apparatus under Himmler. This is probably why chronologies attribute the order to the Reichsführer-SS himself. Moreover, from the summer of 1943 Himmler’s trusted associate, SS General Gottlob Berger, who had taken over the ministry’s political department, had considerable influence on the policy of Rosenberg’s ministry.

The Roma under German occupation in the East

In November 1943 the distinction between “sedentary” and “itinerant” Roma was largely a paper one. From August 1941, soon after the attack on the USSR, Roma had been shot by the Einsatzgruppen and other SS and police units, often together with Jews and Communists, as supposed spies and helpers of the partisans. Wehrmacht security divisions handed over to them the “itinerant” groups they detained. In Kiev, Roma were also among the victims of the executions in the ravine of Babi Yar.

In the spring of 1942, with the transition to the mass extermination of the Jews, the killing of Roma became – as recent research based on the records of the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission has shown – systematic. In the Smolensk region soldiers and policemen, using residents’ registers, killed entire Roma families from collective farms and towns; in the Chernihiv region at least 2,000 Roma were killed in a three-day massacre in June 1942. In Crimea part of the Roma population survived only because it was taken for Crimean Tatars.

In the territories of the Reichskommissariat Ostland the initiative was largely taken over by the civil administration. On 4 December 1941 the order police in Liepāja in Latvia shot about a hundred local Roma – with the consent of Reich Commissioner Hinrich Lohse. According to researchers, by 1943 roughly half of the approximately 3,800 Roma living in Latvia had been murdered, and in Estonia more than 90 per cent of the 750–850 there. In Lithuania probably most of the Roma community perished. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates that German army, SS and police units shot at least 30,000 Roma in the Baltic states and the other occupied Soviet territories.

The dispute over the circular’s significance

Within the apparatus of the Third Reich itself there was no complete agreement on how to treat the Roma. Some officials, drawing on the theories of Robert Ritter, regarded above all “part-Gypsies” and “itinerants” as “dangerous”, and for a time Himmler himself wanted to spare small groups of “racially pure” Sinti, in whom he saw descendants of the ancient Aryans. The distinction of 15 November 1943 fits this ambivalence – on paper it limited the repression to Roma without a fixed abode.

Historians, however, assess it in different ways. The German scholar Wolfgang Wippermann called the division into “sedentary” and “itinerant” “as grotesque as it was meaningless”: in practice the Germans killed anyone they could identify as a “Gypsy”, and by the autumn of 1943 they had already murdered so many settled Roma that, as he wrote, it is doubtful whether any were still alive in the occupied eastern territories. Michael Zimmermann, by contrast, stressed that genocidal intent towards the Roma in the East did exist, but was not carried out with the same systematic thoroughness as against the Jews. Recent research into the Soviet records, including that of Martin Holler, indicates that the killings overwhelmingly struck precisely the settled inhabitants of villages and towns.

The circular came, moreover, at a time when the Germans were losing one occupied area after another. Nine days earlier the Red Army had liberated Kiev, and most of eastern Ukraine was already in its hands. In Belarus and Lithuania the repression went on: at the beginning of 1944 between 2,000 and 3,000 Roma were deported from these territories to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Its place in the war

The November circular was one of the links in the genocide of the Roma and Sinti, known today as the Porajmos (Romani for “devouring”). It encompassed both mass executions in the occupied territories of Poland and the USSR and deportations to ghettos and camps. As early as January 1942 the Germans gassed some 4,300 Roma and Sinti from a separate camp in the Łódź Ghetto at Chełmno (Kulmhof). In occupied Poland, according to the current state of research, at least 8,000 Roma were shot outside the camps; one of the best-documented cases is the Szczurowa massacre near Brzesko, where 93 people were killed on 3 July 1943.

In the Gypsy family camp at Birkenau, to which some 23,000 people were sent, prisoners died of hunger, typhus and disease, and the SS doctor Josef Mengele selected victims for his experiments from among them, especially children and twins. The camp was liquidated on the night of 2–3 August 1944, when the SS murdered the roughly 2,900 people still in it in the gas chamber.

Historians estimate the total number of Roma victims in Europe, depending on method and the range of sources, at between about 200,000 and half a million; the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum gives at least 250,000, noting that the real figure may have reached 500,000. For many years after the war the victims remained in the shadows – in the Federal Republic of Germany Roma and Sinti were often regarded as having been persecuted for “criminal” rather than racial reasons, which deprived them of the right to compensation. Only in March 1982 did Chancellor Helmut Schmidt officially state that the German Roma and Sinti had been victims of genocide. The occupied Soviet territories to which the circular of 15 November 1943 applied long remained a blank spot in research on the Porajmos; documenting them became possible only after the archives were opened following the collapse of the USSR.