NB: The victims of the death camps whom most of us don’t know or talk about. DS
Ian Hancock
Di zelbike zun vos farvayst di layvnt,farshvartst oykh’m Tsigayner. – “The same sun that whitens the linen also turns the Gypsy black.” – Yiddish proverb
“One exhibit [at the Holocaust Museum at Buchenwald] quotes SS chief Heinrich Himmler on December 8th, 1938, as calling for the ‘final solution of the Gypsy question,’ and cites his order of December 16th, 1942, to have all Gypsies remaining in Europe deported to Auschwitz.” Sheldon Rantz (1995:11)
While Holocaust scholars are rapidly adding to their knowledge of the details of the fate of the Romani people in Hitler’s Germany, and while it is now generally acknowledged that together with Jews, the Romani victims were the only ethnic/racial population selected for total annihilation according to the genocidal policy of the Final Solution2 (Friedlander, 19953; Hancock, 1996), far less has been written about the reasons for the Nazi policy of ethnic cleansing as it was directed at that population. Tenenbaum, who forty years ago defined the Final Solution as the “physical extermination of Jews and Gypsies in the great death camps” (1956:373) nevertheless called the German persecution of Gypsies “one of the major mysteries of Nazi racialism” (1956: 399).
Earlier discussions of the Third Reich have usually assumed that the so-called Zigeuner were merely regarded as asocials, misfits in the Nazi’s new spartan order, and were targeted on those grounds alone (see e.g. Bauer, 1980:45; 1994:441); but an examination of the historical roots of antigypsyism in Germany (what Tenenbaum refers to as Hitler’s “gypsomania”) demonstrates very clearly that the notion that Romanies were a racial threat to national stability extends to the time of their initial entry into that country in the early 1400s. Elsewhere I have provided a chronology of the Holocaust as it relates to Sinti and Romanies4 (Hancock, 1989), where a list of some of the events in Germany’s history which preceded it is also included. In the present essay the focus is on the pre-1933 period in more detail, and also to examine the reasons for anti-gypsyism, since it is here that we can find the origins of Hitler’s policy of extermination as it affected Romanies and Sinti; but I will also demonstrate that it is for exactly the same reasons that the Romani people in Europe are today the most vilified and discriminated against of all ethnic or national populations, and the most victimized by racist violence and discriminatory governmental policies.
The Historical Roots of Antigypsyism
Reasons for the institutionalized prejudice against the Romani people may be traced to a number of factors:
a) The association of the first Romanies in Europe with the encroachment of the Asiatic invaders and of Islam, reflected in a number of contemporary exonyms applied to Romani populations, such as Saracens, Tatars, Gypsies (from “Egyptians”), Turks, Heathens, &c. Romanies, who entered Europe following the holy wars which resulted from the occupation of the Byzantine Empire by the Muslims, were everywhere regarded as being a part of the western infringement of Islam, and were persecuted as a result. The Ottomans not only posed a threat to the Christian establishment and had occupied the Holy Land, but they had also blocked off routes to the East, thereby also affecting trade and the European economy.
b) The association in mediaeval Christian doctrine of light with purity and darkness with sin. The earliest church records documenting the arrival of Romanies alluded to the darkness of their complexion C moreso the case seven hundred years ago than today C and the inherent evil which that supposedly demonstrated. “The conviction that blackness denotes inferiority and evil [was] well rooted in the western mind. The nearly black skins of many Gypsies marked them out to be victims of this prejudice” (Kenrick & Puxon, 1972:19). Hobson expands upon this (1965:338): “association with darkness and dirt is a convenient hook on which to hang certain projections, especially if [the target] is a relatively unknown visitor from a far-off country with a strange culture, or if he threatens important economic and other social, vested interests. He is also clearly ‘not me.’ While the association between darkness and evil is a purely metaphorical one, its effects have been devastating.” Philip Mason (1968:61) has emphasized that “hardly any white man has overcome the confusion between biological accident and symbolic metaphor.”
The persona of the Romani as non-white, non-Christian outsider became incorporated into Christian European folklore, which served to justify and encourage the prejudice against him. Like Asahuerus, the Jew doomed to wander through eternity because he refused to allow Jesus to rest on his way to Calvary, Romanies were accused of forging the nails with which Christ was crucified. And while Jews were accused of drinking the blood of Christian babies in hidden rites to which no outsider was privy, Romanies were likewise charged with stealing and even eating those babies. Parallelling even more closely the Asahuerus myth is the belief that the original sin of the Romanies was their refusal to give Mary and the baby Jesus shelter during their flight fro King Herod into Egypt (Scheier, 1925, vol. II, p.77).
c) Romani culture, called Rromanìja or Rromanipe, does not encourage close social relationships with non-Romani populations5, who are referred to as gadñe in Romani and sometimes gentiles in English. Such an exclusivist society can create an assumption on the part of those who are excluded that it is furtive, and must therefore be hiding something. A common accusation in mediaeval Germany, for instance, was that Romanies were spies, a charge which was also repeated by the Nazis many times. The maintenance of cultural and/or religious restrictions which keep outsiders at a distance must certainly be seen as a factor, historically, in both antigypsyism and antisemitism.
d) Because of laws forbidding Romanies to settle anywhere, various means of livelihood had to be relied upon which could be easily and quickly gathered up when it became necessary to move out of an area. One such was fortune-telling, but this only helped reinforce the image of mystery and exoticism which was growing in the European mind. Romanies in turn exploited this image as a means of protection, since one is less likely to show hostility towards a person whom one believes to have some measure of control over, or knowledge of, one’s destiny. The fact that Romanies are, fundamentally, an Asian population in Europe, speaking an Asian language which serves as the vehicle of a culture and world-view rooted in Asia, has also created conflict. Fortune-telling is a highly regarded profession in India, but drew no such respect in Europe; begging is likewise viewed very differently in Hindu and Islamic society, but has no such special status in Europe….
G.J. Colijn & M. S. Littell (eds.); Confronting the Holocaust: A Mandate for the 21st Century (1997)
https://radoc.net/radoc.php?doc=art_b_history_rootsofprejudice&lang=es
After the truth-shower 