Himmler Orders Romani Persecution: Gypsies Targeted with Jews

Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS and architect of the Nazi genocide machine, issued a decree ordering that Roma and Sinti people be classified "on the same level as Jews" and placed in concentration camps. The order formalized a persecution that had been building for years and accelerated the Porajmos, the Romani Holocaust, which would claim between 220,000 and 500,000 lives across Nazi-occupied Europe. The persecution of Roma in Germany predated the Nazi regime. Weimar-era laws had already restricted Romani movement and employment. When Hitler came to power in 1933, existing prejudices were given bureaucratic teeth. The 1935 Nuremberg Laws, primarily aimed at Jews, were interpreted to include Roma as racially undesirable. Dr. Robert Ritter's Research Unit for Racial Hygiene compiled genealogical records on nearly every Romani person in Germany, creating the administrative infrastructure for mass internment. Himmler's 1943 decree led directly to the deportation of thousands of Roma families to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where a dedicated "Gypsy Family Camp" was established in Section BIIe. Conditions were among the worst in the camp complex. Disease, starvation, and medical experiments by Josef Mengele, who was fascinated by Romani twins, killed thousands before the camp was liquidated on August 2, 1944, when the remaining 2,897 inmates were gassed in a single night. Across occupied Europe, the pattern was grimly consistent. In Croatia, the Ustasha regime murdered tens of thousands of Roma at the Jasenovac concentration camp. In Romania, between 25,000 and 36,000 Roma were deported to Transnistria, where most perished. In the occupied Soviet Union, Einsatzgruppen shot Romani communities alongside Jewish ones.