Downplaying the Porrajmos:

The Trend to Minimize the Romani Holocaust

A review of Guenther Lewy,

The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies, Oxford University Press, 2000

By Ian Hancock

When OUP [Oxford University Press] sent me the manuscript of The

Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies for evaluation, I returned it in some
dudgeon, barely critiqued, saying only that it represented to me another
example of the growing body of literature devoted to diminishing the
place of the Romani people (“Gypsies”) in the Holocaust, and whatever I
had to say in a review of the manuscript would probably go unheeded.
Lewy’s agenda was clearly already in place and the published work has
demonstrated that. This is a book which seeks not only to exclude the
Nazis’ Romani victims from the Holocaust-which is not anything new-
but goes a step further to say that they were not even the targets of
attempted genocide. Heavily reliant on Zimmermann (1996), it adds little
to that author’s existing documentation but differs considerably in
interpretation.
There are two aspects of this work that must come under scrutiny: firstly the claims it
makes in support of the author’s case against genocide, and secondly, the biased tone in
which those claims are made. I shall summarize the first aspect first. In short, Lewy
states

1) That there was no racially-motivated general plan for a

Final Solution of the Gypsy Question;
2) That the Nazis made a distinction between sedentary
and migratory Romanies in the East and between mixed
and unmixed Romanies in Germany, and spared some
from death because of this;
3) That as a consequence the estimated number of half a
million Romanies murdered is a gross exaggeration, and
that “perhaps the majority” of them in Germany actually
survived, and weren’t even transported to the East; and
4) Because there was no intent to kill all Romanies, and
because policies against them were not motivated by Nazi
race theory, their treatment cannot be compared with that
of the Jews and therefore they do not qualify for inclusion
in the Holocaust-in sum because their treatment did not
constitute a genocide and it was not motivated by a policy
based on Nazi race theory.

I shall address each point in turn, though only briefly; my arguments can

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 be found in more detail in Hancock (1996). Firstly, that there was no
“general plan” is hardly unique to the Romani case; the incarcerations,
deportations and gassings took place nevertheless. We lack numbers of
documented “general plans” for Nazi actions throughout the entire
period, for all categories of victims. In fact “[n]o direct or indirect
evidence . . . has been delivered which could prove the existence of a
formal written order by Hitler to start the mass extermination of the
Jews” (Hornshøy-Møller, 1999:I:313); absence of evidence is not
evidence of absence.
The statement that Nazi policy towards Romanies was not race-based is
patently absurd. The belief that Romani “criminality” was a genetic
defect which caused “hereditarily diseased offspring” is racist in itself,
and was justification for terminating Romani “lives unworthy of life.”
That very term (Lebensunwertesleben) was first used in print by Liebich
in 1863 to refer specifically to Romanies; it was used six years later in an
essay by Kulemann-once more solely to refer to Romanies-and again in
the title of Binding & Hoche’s influential 1920 treatise on euthanasia.
And it was used yet again just one year after Hitler came to power as the
title of a law ordering sterilization which was directed inter alia at
Romanies. Romanies were classified as possessing “alien” (i.e. non-
Aryan) blood along with Jews and people of African descent following
the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, and in November that year marriage between
members of those three groups and Germans was made illegal.
Statements against Romanies referring to their being a “racial” problem
are numerous and well-documented. Criteria for determining who had
Romani ancestry were exactly twice as strict as those determining who
was of Jewish descent; the fact that even Gypsy-like people were
targeted demonstrates that the Nazis were taking no chances with the
possibility of undetected Romani ancestry infecting German citizens.
Romanies were never regarded as a political or economic or religious
danger to the Third Reich, as were the Jews: individuals of mixed
Romani and European ancestry posed the greatest threat, and it was
solely a racial one.
Secondly, the fact that some categories of Romanies were exempted
from deportation is true; but the same is also true for some categories of
Jews. The six thousand Karaim who successfully pleaded to be spared,
for example, or the Jews married to non-Jews in the Netherlands.
Eichmann himself was prepared to spare the lives of one million Jews in
return for ten thousand trucks. This position on Eichmann’s part may be
compared with Himmler’s desire to save some “pure” Roma as
anthropological specimens; neither was acted upon.
Thirdly, of the estimated ca. 20,000 Romanies in Germany in 1939,
fully three quarters had been murdered by 1945. Of the 11,200 in
Austria, a half were murdered. Of the 50,000 in Poland, 35,000; In
Croatia, Estonia, the Netherlands, Lithuania and Luxembourg, almost the
entire Romani populations were eradicated.
Lastly, the claim that the Nazis’ treatment of their Romani victims did not constitute
genocide is bizarre to say the least (“The various deportations of Gypsies to the East and
their deadly consequences do not constitute acts of genocide”- p. 223). This claim has
been made more than once already, most forcefully by Katz:

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 The only defensible conclusion, the only adequate
encompassing judgment . . . is that in comparison to the
ruthless, monolithic, meta-political, genocidal design of
Nazism vis-à-vis Jews, nothing similar . . . existed in the
case of the Gypsies . . . In the end, it was only Jews and
the Jews alone who were the victims of a total genocidal
onslaught in both intent and practice at the hands of the
Nazi murderers (Katz, 1988:213).

But there is no evidence that Jews or any other targeted group were
intended to be eradicated from the face of the earth, however passionate
a Nazi vision that might have been. We find instead numerous
statements such as that in a letter from Thierack to Martin Bormann
dated October 13th, 1939, in which he refers to “the intention of
liberating the German area from Poles, Russians, Jews and Gypsies”
(emphasis added). Hitler’s own statement, made publicly on January
30th earlier that same year, envisioned “the annihilation of the Jewish
race in Europe” (emphasis added). Documents such as that issued on
August 14th, 1942 by the Central Security Office’s Department VI-
D(7b) asking for information on Romanies living in Britain, and that
British POWs be routinely interrogated about the condition and status of
Romanies in that country suggest that, had the Nazis won, their anti-
Romani policies would have been extended overseas.
Similar fact-finding memos about Jews overseas also existed-but no
document has been identified specifically expressing the intent to
exterminate every Jew or Gypsy on the planet. That being the case, such
statements as Katz’ or the Anti-Defamation League’s or Lewy’s are
revisionist and subjective, and cannot be used to distinguish the fate of
Jews from the fate of Romanies. What we have as a result are various
interpretations based on circumstantial evidence (the “intentionalist”
approach, the “semiotic” approach and so on-see Breitman, 1991), and it
is his interpretation, not his objective evidence, upon which Lewy rests
his case. It is also interpretation which prompts the statement in the
Auschwitz Memorial Book that “[t]he final resolution, as formulated by
Himmler, in his ‘Decree for Basic Regulations to Resolve the Gypsy
Question as Required by the Nature of Race’ of December 8th, 1938,
meant that preparations were to begin for the complete extermination of
Sinti and Roma” (State Museum, 1993:xiv).
Disqualifying Romanies as victims of genocide is Lewy’s major criterion
for also excluding them from the Holocaust itself, for denying, in fact,
that there was a Romani Holocaust. The battle over ownership of that
word is a latter-day phenomenon, yet it has been a part of the English
language for centuries, according to the Oxford English Dictionary first
appearing in print around 1250 AD. Its use in a purely religious context
dates from 1833, in a book by Leitch Ritchie, in which is described the
fate of over a thousand people in 18th century France who were locked
inside a church and burned to death at the order of King Louis VII:
“Louis VII . . . once made a holocaust of thirteen hundred persons in a
church (p. 104).” It has led to a distinction being made between Upper-

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Case Holocaust and lower-case holocaust, or to the abandonment of the
term altogether for Shoah. This at least is specific to the fate of Jews, as
Porrajmos (“paw-rye-mawss”) is to the fate of the Romani people.
A widespread interpretation of its meaning is found at “Holocaust” on
the Anti-Defamation League’s website, where it states:
The Holocaust was the systematic persecution and
annihilation of more than six million Jews as a central act
of state by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between
1933 and 1945. Although millions of others, such as
Romani, Sinti (sic), homosexuals, the disabled and
political opponents of the Nazi regime were also victims
of persecution and murder, only the Jews were singled out
for total extermination (ADL, 2000).

A more scholarly interpretation, and one which names Romanies

correctly, is found in the German government’s handbook on Holocaust
education:

Recent historical research in the United States and

Germany does not support the conventional argument that
the Jews were the only victims of Nazi genocide. True,
the murder of Jews by the Nazis differed from the Nazis’
killing of political prisoners and foreign opponents
because it was based on the genetic origin of the victims
and not on their behavior. The Nazi regime applied a
consistent and inclusive policy of extermination-based on
heredity-only against three groups of human beings: the
handicapped, Jews, and Sinti and Roma (“Gypsies”). The
Nazis killed multitudes, including political and religious
opponents, members of the resistance, elites of conquered
nations, and homosexuals, but always based these
murders on the belief, actions and status of those victims.
Different criteria applied only to the murder of the
handicapped, Jews, and “Gypsies.” Members of these
groups could not escape their fate by changing their
behavior or belief. They were selected because they
existed (Milton, 2000:14)

The second aspect of the book-and the one which concerns me most-is
the tone in which it is written. This is a book about Romani people
written by someone who does not know any Romani people, and who
admits to deliberately not seeking their input in its compilation. No
Romanies are credited in the acknowledgments. Lewy has no expertise
in Romani Studies, and apart from a couple of recent articles excerpted
from the same book, he has never published anything on Romanies
before this. It reflects one facet of a disturbing trend which seems to be
emerging in Holocaust studies, most recently expressed on an Australian-
based Holocaust website which proclaims that “just mentioning Gypsies
in the same breath as the Jewish victims is an insult to their memory!
(David, 2000).” This statement differs hardly at all from that made by

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the Darmstadt city mayor who, in an address to the municipal Sinti and
Roma Council, said that their request for recognition “insults the honor
of the memory of the Holocaust victims” by aspiring to be associated
with them (Anon., 1986), evidence that this kind of antigypsyism extends
well beyond the confines of Holocaust scholarship. The motive for
writing this book, therefore, was evidently not to add to our knowledge
of Roma, but to support the Jewish “uniquist” position, Lewy’s swan-
song upon his retirement from The University of Massachusetts.
His section on history is flawed and anemic; most of it relies heavily on
Fonseca’s journalistic, non-academic book Bury Me Standing. He
accepts negative stereotypes without comment, quoting e.g. Martin
Block, whose 1936 book was commissioned by the Nazi Party and
served as one of their fundamental guides to the “Zigeuner”, and who
says Romanies “are masters in the art of lying.” Having made the point
once, Lewy then reinforces Block’s statement in a footnote by repeating
Fonseca’s similar racist observation that “Gypsies lie. They lie a lot.
More often and more inventively than other people.” He unnecessarily
quotes the editor of a Roman Catholic magazine who recently wrote that
Romanies are “with exceptions, a lazy, lying, thieving and
extraordinarily filthy people . . . exceedingly disagreeable people to be
around.”
Accepting uncritically the opinions of prejudiced non-Romani authors
and presenting their statements as fact, and repeating undefended racist
venom while calling it merely “intemperate,” suggests that to Lewy such
statements are not questionable, and that we are not real people at all, but
simply subjects in books written by other non-Romanies. We are not
real people with real sensitivities and real aspirations in the real world,
and we were not real people in the Holocaust. All in all, in his opening
chapter Lewy seems to take delight in documenting the “nasty” aspects
of Romanies; he doesn’t seem to like us very much at all. In a blame-the-
victim statement (p. ll) he says “prejudice alone, I submit, is not
sufficient explanation for the hostility directed at the Gypsies . . . certain
characteristics of Gypsy life tend to reinforce or even create hostility.”.
He even puts himself in charge of what we should be called, maintaining
that “in fact there is nothing pejorative, per se, about the word
‘Zigeuner’” (p. ix). One suggestion I did make before returning the
original manuscript to OUP was that the author remove the word
“mysterious” in his description of us from his text.
There are dozens of examples of this kind of insensitivity here and in
Lewy’s other writings. He repeats for example Yehuda Bauer’s
viciously insulting statement that my people were nothing more than a
“minor irritant” as far as the Nazis were concerned. Minor irritants are
not called Zigeunerplage or Zigeunerbedrohung or Zigeunergeschmeiss
as the Nazis referred to us (“Gypsy plague,” “Gypsy menace,” “Gypsy
scum”). The Bureau of Gypsy Affairs was not moved from Munich to
Hitler’s capital in Berlin in 1936 simply so that the Nazis could keep a
close eye on a “minor irritant.” In a paper presented at the U.S.
Holocaust Memorial Museum’s symposium on the Romani Holocaust in
September, 2000, he stated that “Gypsies were fortunate in not being the
chosen victims of the Holocaust,” heedless of the gross insensitivity

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evident in using a word such as “fortunate” in the context of the
Holocaust.
In the same paper Lewy maintains that Romanies weren’t sent to
Auschwitz-Birkenau to be killed, that other inmates “envied” them there,
and that in some camps, they were merely murdered for carrying disease
or for taking up space. Throughout his writing, Lewy tempers his
prejudices with the requisite sympathetic lip-service presumably lest he
be accused of bias, yet he includes no discussion of the ongoing
persecution of Romanies since 1945, of how there was no representation
at the Nuremberg Trials, or no war crimes reparations forthcoming, of
how neo-Nazi violence is directed-today-mainly at the Romani people, of
how The New York Times and CNN have both called Romanies “the
most persecuted in Europe today.”
As I write, the Greek government is already systematically removing
Romanies by force and demolishing their homes at the site of the next
Olympic Games, just as Hitler did in Berlin in 1936 and the Spanish
government did in 1992 in Barcelona. Romani women were being
involuntarily sterilized in Slovakia into the 1980s. These issues, in the
context of what the Holocaust must teach us, mean nothing to Mr. Lewy,
and it is because he can feel no empathy for a people who remain
complete strangers to him.
Having to deal with the same lack of concern is something that confronts
Romanies constantly. Representatives in the USA wanting to be included
in the disbursement of the Swiss assets looted by the Nazis have certainly
been made to feel like “a minor irritant;” while Ward Churchill devoted a
lengthy chapter to the unfair treatment of Romanies by Holocaust
scholars in his book A Little Matter of Genocide, neither of its two
reviewers in the last issue of this journal even mention it. In January,
2000, the Swedish government hosted an international conference on the
Holocaust in response to the sharp increase in neo-Nazi activity in
eastern Europe. Sinti and Roma were not only Holocaust victims, but
they are also the main targets of skinhead violence today-yet not even
one session on Romanies was included in the entire Stockholm forum.
The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies is a dangerous book. It is another
title in the antiquated tradition of an expert treatise on a people whom the
author has never met nor has made any effort to meet. How can you feel
compassion for a people you don’t know? We are an abstraction, to be
discussed in our absence and, worse, even in our presence, as though we
don’t really exist, with no thought for our feelings or our dignity. It will,
I am sorry to say, be widely read, and is already being quoted as
“evidence” to argue for the exclusion of the Romani people from their
rightful place in Holocaust history. Lewy unfairly dismisses Kenrick &
Puxon’s groundbreaking 1972 Destiny of Europe’s Gypsies, the first full-
length book of the subject in English, as “short of [being] a satisfactory
treatment.” But his own agenda-driven effort comes nowhere near
replacing it, and my recommendation is that those wanting scholarly,
contemporary sources on the Porrajmos rely on the Interface multi-
volume series Gypsies During the Second World War from the
University of Hertfordshire Press.

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Works cited
ADL, 2000. http://www.adl.org/frames/front_holocaust.html
Anon., 1986. “Tragedy of the Gypsies,” Information Bulletin No. 26.
Vienna: Dokumentationszentrum des Bundes Jüdische Verfolgte des
Naziregimes.
Binding, Karl, & Alfred Hoche, 1920. Die Freigabe der Vernichtung
lebensunwerten Lebens. Leipzig: Felix Meiner.
Block, Martin, 1936. Die Zigeuner: Ihr Leben und ihr Seele. Leipzig:
Bibliographisches Institut.
Breitman, Richard, 1991. The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the
Final Solution. New York: Knopf.
Charney, Israel, ed., 1999. Encyclopedia of Genocide, Santa Barbara:
ABC-CLIO. In two vols.
Churchill, Ward, 1997. A Little Matter of Genocide. Holocaust and
Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present. San Francisco: City Lights
Books.
David, L., 2000.
http://member.telpacific.com.au/david1/The_Holocaust.htm - June 14th.
Fonseca, Isabel, 1995. Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and their
Journey. New York: Knopf.
Hancock, Ian, 1996. “Responses to the Porrajmos: The Romani
Holocaust,” in Rosenbaum, 1996, 39-64.
Heye, Uwe-Karsten, Joachim Sartorius & Ulrich Bopp, eds., 2000.
Learning from History: The Nazi Era and the Holocaust in German
Education. Berlin: Press and Information Office of the Federal
Government.
Hornshøy-Møller, Stig, 1999. “Hitler and the Nazi decision-making
process to commit the Holocaust,” in Charney, 1999, vol. I, 313-315.
Katz, Steven, 1988. “Quantity and interpretation: Issues in the
comparative historical analysis of the Holocaust,” Remembering for the
Future: Papers to be Presented at the Scholars’ Conference,
Supplementary Volume, Oxford: Pergamon Press, 200-218.
Kenrick, Donald, & Grattan Puxon, 1972. The Destiny of Europe’s
Gypsies. New York: Basic Books.
Liebich, Richard, 1863. Die Zigeuner in ihrem Wesen und ihre Sprache.
Leipzig: Brockhaus.
Milton, Sybil, 2000. “Holocaust education in The United States and
Germany,” in Heye, 14-20.

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Ritchie, Leitch, 1833. Wanderings by the Loire. London: Longman &
Co.
Rosenbaum, Alan S., ed., 1996. Is the Holocaust Unique? Boulder &
Oxford: The Westview Press.
State Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau, 1993. Memorial Book: The
Gypsies at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Munich: Saur Verlag.
Zimmermann, Michael, 1996. Rassenutopie und Genozid: Die
nationalsozialistische ‘Lösung der Zigeunerfrage’ Hamburg: Christians
Verlag.

Ian Hancock
The Romani Archives and Documentation Center
Calhoun Hall 501
The University of Texas
Austin, TX 78712 USA
E-mail: xulaj@mail.utexas.edu
September, 2000