Throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, Nazi anti-Roma policies and violent actions escalated into the genocide of over 250,000 people. One of the sites of the Romani genocide was Auschwitz-Birkenau, the concentration and death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.[1] Though they were outmatched in numbers and resources, the Romani prisoners did not submit to the violence against them without resistance.
Roma in Auschwitz-Birkenau
Anti-Roma policies took a variety of forms in different territories during World War II. On the Eastern Front, tens of thousands of Roma were murdered by Einsatzgruppen, special killing units who followed behind front-line Wehrmacht troops executing Roma, Jews, and communists. In Western Europe, Roma were interned in camps and subjected to forced labor. In December 1942, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler ordered the removal of all Roma remaining in Germany—many had already been deported to camps in occupied Poland—to Auschwitz-Birkenau, a massive concentration camp near Kraków.
The first transport of Roma arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau on February 26, 1943. A special section of the camp, separate from other prisoners, was set up for Romani arrivals and surrounded with barbed wire. It was a barren, muddy rectangle with no buildings. The new arrivals, exhausted after a multiday train journey with no food or water, were then forced to construct barracks with the flimsy wood and meager tools that the SS forced into their hands.[2]
In this newly established section of the camp, later known as the “Gypsy Family Camp,” Romani prisoners remained with their families, though their barracks were segregated by gender. The latrines were not gender-segregated, causing extreme shame when family members saw one another naked. The latrines also did not have running water nor sanitary supplies. The food was rotten and so foul that people often vomited or had diarrhea, which ran down their legs and caked onto their clothing. Women who were still healthy enough to menstruate closely guarded rags to use as pads.
As more transports arrived in the spring, overcrowding became an issue. In March 1943, over 12,000 people arrived in the section of the camp. The population peaked in July 1943, when there were 23,000 people packed into a few small barracks. The overcrowding and lack of sanitation led to outbreaks of lice, typhus, and other diseases. In addition to the spread of diseases, many prisoners grew weak and died of malnutrition and exhaustion. Camp overseers beat anyone who collapsed on the job, disobeyed orders, or even looked at them askance. Because of these conditions, more than 16,000 died in the first year of the “Gypsy Family Camp.”[3] Hugo Höllenreiner recalls how horrible it was to see his own family die:
I think my hope had completely disappeared. We had no more hope. We—people prayed. I’m Roman Catholic. We were raised that way. But we saw that it was of no use. I had seen my grandfather die there, my uncles, my aunts, and I thought to myself, “Where is the Lord God? Where is He?”[4]
Many prisoners lost their faith not only in God, but in humanity. From the “Gypsy Family Camp,” prisoners could see the selection ramp, where new transports entered into the camp and were forced to march to the gas chambers. They witnessed the extreme cruelty of the guards: “Small children were beaten to death with the butt of a gun. Babies, everyone. This I saw with my own eyes.”[5] Having witnessed the genocide of the Jews, people in the Romani section began to fear that they were next.
The First Attempt to Dissolve the “Gypsy Family Camp”
In the spring of 1944, Auschwitz-Birkenau camp leadership was gearing up for the arrival of over 400,000 Hungarian Jews, most of whom would be sent to the gas chambers. As part of their preparations, camp commandant Rudolf Höss sought to clear out the “Gypsy Family Camp” to make room for the thousands of new prisoners.
The first sign that the camp was going to be “liquidated”—the Nazi euphemism for emptying the camp and murdering its inhabitants—came when Russian Roma were forcibly removed. As they were taken away, the SS guards told the remaining Romani prisoners that the Russian Roma
had smallpox and would have infected us. The evening it happened, a few trucks pulled up and the SS jumped out with dogs, rifles and machine guns. They set about herding the people onto the trucks. We heard screaming, barking and crashes, and peered out through the openings in the roof; there weren’t really any proper windows in the barracks. The vehicles drove off. Before long we saw flames shooting up from the crematorium chimneys and the air was full of the smell of burning human flesh.[6]
After that evening, the survivors realized that they were no longer safe from selections. On May 15, 1944, word came through SS Sergeant Georg Bonigut to the block leaders that all Roma were to be rounded up and killed in the gas chambers.[7] That night, the block leaders and prisoners assembled to discuss a plan of action: “Everyone thought, fine, if they want to take us out of here, then we’ll sell our lives as dearly as possible. We won’t just sit there for the taking.”[8] They assembled anything that could be used as a weapon—shovels, hammers, hoes, pickaxes, planks of wood—and resolved not to leave the barracks until they were forced.
The following day, 50 to 60 SS men and guards arrived in trucks, armed with machine guns and rifles, and accompanied by German Shepherds. As SS-Obersturmführer Johann Schwarzhuber led his men from barrack to barrack banging on the doors, everyone stayed still. Marching furiously from building to building, Schwarzhuber “noticed that the lights had gone on in all the barracks, even over in the Polish and Jewish camps. The whole of Birkenau was lit up. Everyone was on the alert.”[9] Unprepared for a rebellion, and certainly not one the scale of the entire camp, Schwarzhuber and his men returned to their trucks and drove off into the night.
A Period of Quiet
A week after the failed attempt, the SS men returned to the “Gypsy Family Camp,” this time to select prisoners for transfer to other sites. In this selection, they were looking for young, fit people who were capable of forced labor. Many of those selected were also former Wehrmacht soldiers who had been ousted because of their race. More than 1,500 Roma were transferred to the Auschwitz main camp and later onto other camps.[10]
After that selection, the summer was relatively quiet. Prisoners continued to go to their forced labor assignments, and children were quietly whisked away for Nazi doctor Josef Mengele’s experiments. Diseases continued to claim the lives of prisoners, and men and women suffered the brutality of the guards, but no selections took place, and no one came to claim their lives.
This quiet was disrupted on August 1, 1944, when another selection took place. Again, the SS sought young, fit prisoners capable of forced labor. Over 1,400 prisoners were selected and transferred out of the “Gypsy Family Camp.” There were then only 2,900 prisoners remaining, mainly older people and children.
The Final Dissolution of the “Gypsy Family Camp”
Late in the day on August 2, 1944, the SS once again stormed up to the “Gypsy Family Camp” armed with machine guns, rifles, and vicious German Shepherds. Though lesser in number and without trained soldiers among them, the Roma once again resisted, kicking, screaming, and attempting to hide from the SS. They refused to go to the gas chambers, and the SS struggled to contain them. Eventually, after a night of fighting back, the Roma were forced into the gas chambers, where they were all killed.[11]
After most people had been forced into the gas chambers, the SS searched the camp one final time, looking for anyone who had evaded their grasp. In the kindergarten, among the paintings of fairies and toys scattered around, they found Helena Hannemann, a German woman married to a Romani man. She had been imprisoned with her husband and five children in the Romani section of the camp, where she had worked as a nurse and caretaker for the children there, sometimes getting into heated arguments with Mengele about their mistreatment. When the guards found her there, desperately trying to protect her children, they presented her with a choice: hand over her children so that she may live, or go to the gas chambers with them. She chose to die with her children, comforting them in their last moments of life.[12]
Of the almost 23,000 Roma imprisoned in Auschwitz-Birkenau, over 19,300 were killed there. Though most succumbed to starvation and disease, the Roma did not go quietly to their deaths, whether in the camp “hospital” or the gas chambers.[13]
The genocide of the Roma is now remembered and mourned on August 2, the day of the destruction of the Romani section of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Roma Resistance Day is commemorated on May 16, the day that the Romani prisoners rebelled against their Nazi oppressors.
References and Footnotes:
Bársony, János, and Ágnes Daróczi, eds., Pharrajimos: The Fate of the Roma During the Holocaust, trans. by Gábor Komáromy (Budapest: Romedia Foundation, 2008).
Kay, Alex J., Empire of Destruction: A History of Nazi Mass Killing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021).
Lewy, Guenter, The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
Rosenberg, Otto, and Ulrich Enzensberger, A Gypsy in Auschwitz, trans. by Maisie Musgrave (London: Monoray, 2022).
Sonneman, Toby, Shared Sorrows: A Gypsy Family Remembers the Holocaust (Hertfordshire: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2002).
Footnotes:
- [1] This article uses the term ‘Roma’ as an umbrella term for the diverse groups encompassed in Europe’s largest minority. Following EU precedent, this article uses ‘Roma’ to refer to Roma, Sinti, Kale, Romanichels, Boyash/Rudari, Ashkali, Egyptians, Yenish, Dom, Lom, Rom and Abdal, as well as Traveller populations. The adjectival form, ‘Romani,’ will also be used. Except when referring to Nazi policy or speech, this article refrains from using the term ‘Gypsy,’ a term now widely considered to be derogatory and offensive.
- [2] Alex J. Kay, Empire of Destruction: A History of Nazi Mass Killing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021), pg. 239.
- [3] Ibid., pg. 250.
- [4] Translation mine. Hugo Hoellenreiner, Interview 50119, USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive (July 26, 1999), Tape 2, 7:17.
- [5] Translation mine. Rudolf Morgenstern, Interview 10235, USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive (February 24, 1996), Tape 1, 8:51.
- [6] Otto Rosenberg and Ulrich Enzensberger, A Gypsy in Auschwitz, trans. by Maisie Musgrave (London: Monoray, 2022), pg. 116.
- [7] Kay, Empire of Destruction, pg. 239.
- [8] Rosenberg and Enzensberger, A Gypsy in Auschwitz, pg. 118.
- [9] Ibid., pg. 119.
- [10] Kay, Empire of Destruction, pg. 251.
- [11] Henryk Świebocki, “The Behavior of the Prisoners and Instances of Spontaneous Resistance,” in Auschwitz, 1940–1945, ed. by Wacław Długoborski and Franciszek Piper (Oświęcim: Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, 2000), Vol. IV, pgs. 40–42.
- [12] Helena Kubica, “Children and Adolescents in Auschwitz,” in Auschwitz 1940–1945, ed. by Długoborski and Piper, trans. by Brand, Vol. II, pg. 254.
- [13] Michael Zimmermann, “Jews, Gypsies and Soviet Prisoners of War: Comparing Nazi Persecutions,” in The Roma: A Minority in Europe, ed. by Roni Stauber and Raphael Vago (Budapest: CEU Press, 2007), pgs. 31–53.
Jennifer Putnam, PhD
Jennifer Putnam is a former Research Historian at the Jenny Craig Institute for the Study of War and Democracy at the National World War II Museum.