The Porajmos: Hitler’s war against the Gypsy people

The Porajmos is a term used by the Roma (Gypsy) people of Europe to describe what happened to them during the Second World War, when they were targeted for annihilation by the Nazi regime. By the end of the war, the Nazis were able to successfully exterminate as many as 2 million Roma people living in Europe.

Reasons why the Roma were targeted:
Simply put, the Roma were seen as an inferior and dirty race compared to the Germans. In the thousand years that nomadic Roma tribes wandered through Europe, they were subject to persecution and humiliation; they were stigmatized as habitual criminals, social misfits, and vagabonds. The Roma posed a problem for Hitler's racial ideologues. The Gypsy language (Romany) is one of the Indo-Aryan languages, originating in northern India. Nazi anthropologists realized that Roma migrated into Europe from India, and were descendants of the Aryan occupants of the subcontinent. In other words, the Gypsies were no less Aryan than the Germans themselves, thus where is the justification for their annihilation? Their answer came from Nazi racialist Hans Günther who added a socioeconomic component to the theory of racial purity. While he conceded that the Roma were, in fact, descended from Aryans, they were of poorer classes that mingled with the various "inferior" races they encountered during their wanderings, such as Dravidians, Semites, and Turkic peoples. This, he explained, accounted for their extreme poverty and nomadic lifestyle. There fore the Roma posed a threat to Aryan hegemony because of their racial mingling. The Nazis now had their justification to get rid of the Roma along with the other “inferior” peoples of Europe.

How the Nazis did it:
Overall the method of Roman extermination matched the one used for the Jews. On January 3, 1936, the Nuremberg laws, prohibiting marriages between Jews and Aryans, was extended to the Roma as well. The Roma, like Jews, lost their right to vote on March 7, 1936. On December 16, 1942, Himmler ordered that the Roma candidates for extermination should be deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau just like the Jews. Himmler then on November 15, 1943 ordered that the Roma and "part-Roma" were to be put "on the same level as Jews and placed in concentration camps."

According to testimonies of Jewish and Nazi witnesses, the Roma sent to the death camps often suffered even worse than Jews. In some instances, the Nazis were so appalled by the sight of Roma arriving in the transports that they would not even let them in the gates of the camps for selection and simply murdered them by the railway platforms. In one remarkable instance, the victims were so terrified that they would be killed on the spot that they actually stormed the gates of the death camp, demanding to be allowed in. They were allowed to come in; however once inside, they were promptly led to the gas chambers, all the while believing that they would find sanctuary there.