(Alternative link.)

In a landmark compensation case brought in January 1956, the Federal Court of Justice (Bundesgerichtshof, BGH) ruled that “the resettlement of [insert racial slur here] from the border zone and neighbouring areas to the ‘Generalgouvernement’ (‘General Government of Poland’) carried out in April 1940 does not constitute a Nazi act of violence on racial grounds pursuant to § 1 of the Bundesentschädigungsgetz (Federal Compensation Act)”.

The measure carried out in May 1940, euphemistically referred to as a ‘resettlement’ by the [Fascists] (a term re-employed in the 1956 ruling), was the first such family deportation of Sinti and Roma, and it affected a total of some 2,500 women, men, adolescents, and children. Included in the number were as many as 1,000 affected persons from northern Germany, approximately 930 from western Germany, and approximately 490 from south-western Germany.

They were arrested without prior notification, not as early as April 1940 as cited in the quotation, but on 16 May 1940, and then taken to three central assembly centres in Hamburg, Cologne and Hohenasperg (north of Stuttgart). From there they were subsequently deported to three different destinations in ‘Generalgouvernement’ between May 20 and 22.

A striking aspect of the grounds given for the 1956 ruling issued by West Germany’s supreme court — apart from the fact that it is riddled with antiziganist stereotypes — is that it denied the Sinti and Roma any recognition as a victim group and judged the persecution and deportation to be legitimate in that it was a strategy aimed at ‘crime prevention’.

Indeed, “experience has shown” that the persons concerned “had exhibited a tendency to criminality, particularly theft and fraud; they frequently lacked the moral urges of respect for the property of others since, like primitive beings, they had inherent within them an uninhibited instinct for occupation”. The judgement meant that a female plaintiff and a male plaintiff were denied compensation payments for their deportation from the Rhineland in May 1940.

The judgement was revised in 1963, but it was not until 2015 — i.e. 59 years after the 1956 landmark ruling of the BGH — that BGH President Bettina Limperg issued an official apology to the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma, finding strong words at a symposium jointly organized by the BGH and the Central Council in 2016: “It is a ruling to be ashamed of, and an indefensible dispensation of justice”.

(Emphasis added.)