ROMA IN HOLOCAUST SINTO AND ROMA

Sinti & Roma: Victims of the Nazi Era

For centuries Europeans regarded Gypsies as social outcasts a people of foreign appearance, language, and customs. In modern Germany, persecution of the Sinti and Roma preceded the Nazi regime. Even though Gypsies enjoyed full and equal rights of citizenship under Article 109 of the Weimar Constitution, they were subject to special, discriminatory laws. A Bavarian law of July 16, 1926, outlined measures for "Combatting Gypsies, Vagabonds, and the Work Shy" and required the systematic registration of all Sinti and Roma. The law prohibited Gypsies from "roam[ing] about or camp[ing] in bands," and those "[Gypsies] unable to prove regular employment" risked being sent to forced labor for up to two years. This law became the national norm in 1929. When Hitler took power in 1933, anti-Gypsy laws remained in effect. Soon the regime introduced other laws affecting Germany's Sinti and Roma, as the Nazis immediately began to implement their vision of a new Germany one that placed "Aryans" at the top of the hierarchy of races and ranked Jews, Gypsies, and blacks as racial inferiors. Under the July 1933 "Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Defects," physicians sterilized against their will an unknown number of Gypsies, part-Gypsies, and Gypsies in mixed marriages. Similarly, under the "Law against Dangerous Habitual Criminals" of November 1933, the police arrested many Gypsies along with others the Nazis viewed as "asocials" - prostitutes, beggars, chronic alcoholics, and homeless vagrants - and imprisoned them in concentration camps.
DOCUMENT: http://www.ushmm.org/education/resource/roma/RomaSBklt.pdf