Pictured: Roma and Sinti rounded up for deportation by the Fascist authorities in Asperg on May 22nd, 1940. Click here for more photographs.

In September 1942, Goebbels decided that “the asocial life of Jews and [Roma] should simply be destroyed”. Up to that moment, it seems that the idea about total annihilation of Roma had not appeared. On December the 16th 1942, [Schutzstaffel chief Heinrich] Himmler issued orders that all Roma be deported to Auschwitz. It was a definite turnaround in the policy of persecution against the Roma and commencement of mass deportations, with the aim of their total annihilation.

In Auschwitz, the Roma and the Sinti were interned in a separate section of the camp, in the […] “Family camp” (Familienlager), separated from other prisoners. It was exactly where Doctor Mengele’s laboratories were located, and he performed most of his experiments on imprisoned Roma. Deported Roma were mostly from Germany, Austria, Bohemia, Moravia, Holland, Belgium and northern France, totaling around 23,000. Somewhat over 3,000 survived.²⁶

In addition to Auschwitz, the Roma suffered in many other death camps, such as Majdanek, Bergen‐Belsen, Treblinka, Sobibor and Ravensbrück.

Hence,

In Serbia, […] the Day of Remembrance of the Roma killed in World War II is marked on the 16th of December, in memory of that date in 1942, when Himmler ordered the systematic deportation of Roma to concentration camps and their extermination.

Similarly with Palestinians today, it is actually surprisingly easy to find moderners who recommend lethal force against Roma and Sinti; many white Europeans continue to stereotype these Indo‐Europeans as congenitally lumpenproletarian. For example:

In one of the first substantial studies devoted to genocide against the Roma,¹ journalist and writer Christian Bernadac presents testimonies of two female concentration camp survivors, because, as he says,

Collecting certain stories and papers on deportation, I reached the conclusion that the Roma were avoided by all representatives of deported peoples, of which there were around thirty‐two or thirty‐five. As an illustration, it is sufficient to refer to some of the rare sentences mentioning the Roma in the survivors’ testimonies. “[Roma] women, dirty thieves, utter cowards, crybabies full of vermin […]”, “A herd of bohemians, disgustingly dirty, obtuse, thieves […]”, “One tall [Roma], thief and liar: just like others of his race, all he needed was one cue by an SS member to become a killer […]”.²

The author, in the paragraphs that follow, admits to having felt very disappointed when he noticed that even writers, university professors and priests from different countries share the same thoughts, quoting several of their statements from the post‐war period. Also, it was frightening to discover that the massacre of Roma was being ignored. “How is it possible to forget all those victims, to delete them from memory?”, he asks himself and others.³

(Emphasis added.)

See also: Remembering the Roma victims of the Holocaust