A People Destroyed features the most recent work on the Roma genocide in Europe during World War II. Despite the murder of a substantial part of the Romani population in various countries and occupied territories, it took historians more than half a century to collect enough evidence to establish the fact of genocide. Even today the public remains largely unaware of the extent of suffering that the Nazis and some of their allies inflicted on the Roma.
A People Destroyed shows that the Nazis most consistently murdered Roma in the German-speaking countries and the occupied Soviet territories, while Fascist Croatia attempted its own “Final Solution of the Gypsy Question.” The history of persecution that Roma people endured in Europe laid the foundation for the Nazi policy of extermination.
Anton Weiss-Wendt and the contributors to the volume, who come from nine different countries, build on existing Holocaust scholarship in their discussion of policy implementation, racial ideology, and the shared experiences of Jews and Roma. Meticulously analyzing diverse primary sources such as perpetrator documents and war crimes trial records, witness testimonies, population data, and contemporaneous newspaper reports and oral interviews, A People Destroyed provides a comprehensive overview of the destruction while focusing on the individual experiences of the victims.
List of Illustrations
List of Tables
Abbreviations
Introduction
Anton Weiss-Wendt
1. “He Knew Things about Us, Gypsies”: Documenting the May 1940 Deportation of Karlsruhe Sinti through the Records of the Racial Hygiene Research Center
ThÉophile Leroy
2. The Deportation of Sinti and Roma from Flensburg on May 16, 1940: Prehistory, the Ordeal, and the Struggle for Compensation and Prosecution
Sebastian Lotto-Kusche
3. The Internment Camp for Sinti and Roma at Berlin-Marzahn: Everyday Life, Persecution, and Deportation
Patricia Pientka
4. The Deportation of Roma from Belgium via the Dossin Transit Camp, 1942–44: Prehistory and Consequences
Laurence Schram
5. The Fate of a Man, the Destruction of a People: Zolo Karoli and the Persecution of the Norwegian Roma, 1921–45
Maria Schwaller-Rosvoll
6. Agency in the Destruction of the Roma in German-Occupied Serbia: Victims, Perpetrators, Rescuers
Milovan Pisarri
7. Means of Survival of the Romanian Roma Deported to Transnistria
Petre Matei
8. The Lemberg Paradox: The Nazi Persecution of Roma in the District of Galicia
Piotr Wawrzeniuk
9. Ethnography of Mass Murder: The Destruction of the Roma in Nazi-Occupied Estonia
Anton Weiss-Wendt
10. Mapping the Genocide of Roma in Ukraine, 1941–44
Mykhaylo Tyaglyy
11. Autobiographies of Romani Holocaust Survivors: Literary Expressions of Persecution and Survival
Katrin KÜhnert
12. The Number of Romani Deaths during the Nazi Era Revisited
Anton Weiss-Wendt
Contributors
Index
