(This takes about one minute to read.)

Quoting Ari Joskowicz’s Rain of Ash: Roma, Jews, and the Holocaust, page 25:

Reading Jewish sources—and histories of the Holocaust that draw on these sources—one would not know that Roma lived through new forms of internment before Jews did. In fact, as early as 1935 municipal authorities in Cologne began moving Roma to camps. These efforts accelerated around the 1936 Berlin Olympics, when authorities decided that the removal of “Gypsies” from urban centers would help Germany manage its international reputation.¹¹

By the end of 1936, Berlin, Frankfurt am Main, Düsseldorf, Essen, Dortmund, Gelsenkirchen, and other municipalities operated policed camps for “Gypsies.”¹² This confinement of Sinti and Roma to particular living areas allowed the authorities to surveil, register, and more effectively categorize them, eventually facilitating authorities’ ability to deport them to concentration camps.¹³

If and when German Jews noticed these attempts to isolate German Romanies, they likely perceived them much as other Europeans did, as extensions of long-standing policies toward unwanted populations by welfare authorities, municipalities, and state security forces.

Given the long history of anti‐Romani policing in Europe, arresting “Gypsies” as asocials might have seemed like business as usual, whereas boycotting Jewish stores seemed like a radical departure. Being treated like [one of these people]—“behandelt wie a zigeiner,” as the historian Simon Dubnow put it to describe the abuse of Jews in nineteenth‐century Romania—was certainly an ominous sign.¹⁴

Yet there was little reason for German Jews to think they would end up in [one of these camps] on the outskirts of German cities.¹⁵ Most Jews viewed themselves as people who occupied a fundamentally different place in society than did the Sinti and Roma in their environment. Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that [these] camps did not show up in early Holocaust histories: the first generation of survivor historians did not understand them as part of their story.¹⁶