Everything about the Porajmos totally explained
The
Porajmos (also
Porrajmos), literally
Devouring, is a term coined by the
Romani people to describe attempts by the regime in
Nazi Germany to exterminate most of the Romani peoples of
Europe as part of
the Holocaust.
The phenomenon has been little studied and largely overshadowed by the
Shoah (the Hebrew term for the Nazi campaign to exterminate Jews). Other aspects of the Holocaust included the Nazi campaign against people with disabilities (see
Action T4), and the slavery of Christian Polish people in concentration camps.
Because the Romani communities of
Eastern Europe were less organized than the Jewish communities, it's more difficult to assess the actual number of victims, though it's believed to range from 220,000 to 500,000. Only in recent years has the Romani community begun to demand acceptance among the victims of the Nazi regime. The response so far has been mixed.
Using the term
Some Russian and
Balkan Romani activists protest against using the word Porajmos. In
Balkan dialects this word is a synonym of a word Poravipe which have meanings "Violation" and "Rape", so the activists consider the word to be abusive. The Balkan Romani activists offer the term "Samudaripen"
(External Link
), and some
Russian Romani activists offer the term "Kali Traš"
(External Link).
The term
porajmos was introduced into the literature by the Romani scholar and activist
Ian Hancock, in the early 1990s, though he didn't coin the term. There is also another term,
Samudaripen (
Mass killing), coined by Marcel Courthiade, but dismissed as not conforming to the
Romani language.; they were
stigmatized as habitual criminals, social misfits, and
vagabonds. Given the Nazi predilection for “
racial purity,” it would seem inevitable that the Roma would be among their first victims. Nevertheless, in the earliest days of the
Third Reich, the Roma posed a problem for
Hitler’s racial ideologues. The Gypsy language (
Romani) is one of the
Indo-Aryan languages, originating in northern
India. Nazi
anthropologists realized that Roma migrated into Europe from India and were thus descendants of the
Aryan occupants of the subcontinent, thought at the time to have invaded India from Europe. In other words, the Roma are native speakers of an Aryan language; the Roma were as Aryan, or perhaps even more Aryan, than the Germans themselves.
Nazi racialist
Hans F. K. Günther added a socioeconomic component to the theory of racial purity. While he conceded that the Roma were, in fact, descended from Aryans, they were of poorer classes that had mingled with the various “inferior” races they encountered during their wanderings. This, he explained, accounted for their extreme poverty and nomadic lifestyle. While he conceded that there were some groups that were “purely Aryan,” most Gypsies posed a threat to Aryan homogeneity because of their racial mingling.
To study the problem further, the Nazis established the Racial Hygiene and Demographic Biology Research Unit (
Rassenhygienische und Bevölkerungsbiologische Forschungsstelle, Department L3 of the Reich Department of Health) in 1936. Headed by Dr.
Robert Ritter and his assistant Eva Justin, the body was mandated to conduct an in-depth study of the “Gypsy question (
Zigeunerfrage)” and to provide data required for formulating a new Reich Gypsy law. After extensive fieldwork in the spring of 1936, consisting of interviews and medical examinations to investigate
genealogical and
genetic data, it was determined that most Roma posed a danger to German racial purity and should be eliminated. No decision was made regarding the remainder (about 10 percent of the total Romani population of Europe), primarily
Sinti and Lalleri tribes living in Germany, though several suggestions were made. At one point
Heinrich Himmler even suggested the establishment of a remote reservation, where “pure Gypsies” could continue their nomadic lifestyle unhindered. According to him:
...The aim of measures taken by the State to defend the homogeneity of the German nation must be the physical separation of Gypsydom from the German nation, the prevention of miscegenation, and finally, the regulation of the way of life of pure and part-Gypsies.
Loss of citizenship
On
November 14,
1935, The Law for the "Protection of Blood and Honor" colloquially knowns as the
Nuremberg laws. Where Marriage between non-Aryans and Aryans is forbidden. Criteria defining who is Gypsy are exactly twice as strict as those defining any other group. The second Nuremberg law, The Reich Citizenship Law, stripped citizenship from non-Aryans
Blacks. and Gypsies, like Jews, lost their right to vote on
March 7,
1936.
Extermination
The sterilization of Gypsies was started as early as 1933, also in 1933, camps were being established by the Nazis to contain Gypsies at Dachau, Dieselstrasse, Mahrzan and Vennhausen.
The vast majority of
Jews were to suffer the same indignities as the Roma. Scholarly estimates of deaths in the Sinti and Roma genocide range from 220,000 to 500,000 although Ian Hancock challenges this figure and puts the estimates as 500,000 to 1,500,000. They were herded into
ghettos, including the
Warsaw Ghetto (April–June, 1942), where they formed a distinct subclass. Ghetto diarist
Emmanuel Ringelblum speculated that Roma were sent to the Warsaw Ghetto because the Germans wanted:
...to toss into the Ghetto everything that's characteristically dirty, shabby, bizarre, of which one ought to be frightened, and which anyway has to be destroyed.
Further east, teams of
Einsatzgruppen tracked down Romani encampments and murdered the inhabitants on the spot, leaving no records of the victims.
Roma were also victims of the puppet regimes that cooperated with the Third Reich during the war, especially the notorious
Ustaše regime in Croatia. In
Jasenovac concentration camp, along with
Serbs and Jews, tens of thousands of Roma were killed. Serbian Roma are parties to the pending
Class action suit against the Vatican Bank and others currently pending in US Federal Court seeking return of wartime loot.
On
December 16,
1942, Himmler ordered that the Romani candidates for extermination should be deported to
Auschwitz-Birkenau. To the Romani people of Europe, this order was equivalent to the
January 20 decision of that same year, made at the
Wannsee Conference, at which Nazi bureaucrats decided on the “
Final Solution” to the “Jewish problem.” Himmler then ordered, on
November 15,
1943, that Gypsies and “part-Gypsies” were to be put “on the same level as Jews and placed in concentration camps.”
The governments of some Nazi German allies, namely
Slovakia,
Hungary, and
Romania, also contributed to the Nazi plan of Romani extermination, but this was implemented on a smaller scale and most Romani in these countries survived, unlike those in Ustashe
Croatia or in areas directly ruled by Nazi Germany (such as
Poland). The demographic effect is still noticeable today, with the populations of those countries who didn't try to exterminate their Roma now between 7-10% Roma (see
Romani people). The Hungarian
Arrow Cross government deported between 28,000 and 33,000 Roma out of a population estimated between 70,000 and 100,000.
The Croatian government sent 26,000; of the Roma killed, about half were murdered at the
Jasenovac concentration camp. Similarly, the Romanian government of
Ion Antonescu had its own concentration camps in
Transnistria to which 25,000 Romani people were deported, of whom 11,000 died. At least one notable Jewish Holocaust victim appears to have seen Gypsies at Auschwitz - Anne Frank .
In the
Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, Romani internees were sent to the
Lety and Hodonín concentration camps before being transferred to
Auschwitz-Birkenau for gassing. What makes the Lety camp unique is that it was staffed by Czech guards, who could be even more brutal than the Germans, as testified in
Paul Polansky’s book
Black Silence. The genocide was so thorough that the vast majority of Romani in the
Czech Republic today are actually descended from migrants from
Slovakia who moved there during the post-war years in
Czechoslovakia.
Recognition
On October 23, 2007, Romanian President
Traian Băsescu publicly apologized for his nation's role in the Porajmos, the first time a Romanian leader has done so. He called for the Porajmos to be taught in schools, stating that, "We must tell our children that six decades ago children like them were sent by the Romanian state to die of hunger and cold". Part of his apology was in the
Romani language. Băsescu also awarded three Porajmos survivors with an Order for Faithful Services.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Porajmos'.
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