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Reviewed by:
  • The Gypsies During the Second World War
  • David Crowe
The Gypsies during the Second World War. Volume 3 .The Final Chapter. Donald Kenrick , ed. ( Hatfield : The University of Hertfordshire Press , 2006 ), xviii + 264 pp., pbk., $29.95 .

This work is the third and final volume of Donald Kenrick’s history of the fate of the Roma during the Holocaust. The first two volumes, From “Race Science” to the Camps (1997) and In the Shadow of the Swastika (1999) dealt with topics such as the evolution of German policy toward the Roma between 1870 and 1945, the Roma in concentration camps in the Reich and the General Government, and the treatment of the Roma in Austria, Bulgaria, France, Italy, the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, Romania, and the Soviet Union. The first part of the volume under review continues this geographic approach in a section called “The Killing Fields” and concludes with a broad examination of the Roma struggle for recognition as racial victims of the Holocaust. Unfortunately, the diverse and often unrelated nature of the articles in the three volumes, combined with a lack of any sort of thematic continuity, leads to disappointment—particularly in light of the fact that editor Donald Kenrick, author of the classic The Destiny of Europe’s Gypsies (1972), could in some ways be considered the dean of Roma Holocaust studies.

One of the strengths of The Final Chapter is that its authors are specialists from the countries under discussion. Some of the articles in the first section are based on a variety of primary and secondary resources not available to most Western scholars. On the other hand, what is often missing in other articles in this section is the archival research so important to opening this new area of Holocaust research. In her excellent article on the Roma in Slovakia during World War II, Milena Hübschmannová relies heavily on Ctibor Nečas’s excellent but outdated work Nad osudem českých a slovenskýh Cikánů v letech 1939–1945 (1981) and his more recent edition of the same work, retitled Českoslovenští Romové v letech [End Page 123] 1938–1945 (1994). While this failure to open new doors of research using recently opened Slovak archives does not detract from her study, it does deny future scholars a hint of what is available in Slovak archives regarding this important period in Roma history.

This is definitely not the case with Katalin Katz’s article, “The Roma in Hungary in the Second World War.” During the course of her research, Katz interviewed sixty Roma in Hungary about their wartime experiences. Though her article begins with a broad overview of Hungarian polices towards the Roma going back to the early twentieth century, it concentrates primarily on the period from March 1944 to April 1945, when Germany occupied Hungary and began to impose its deadly policies on Roma and Jews. What is particularly important about this article is the attention the author pays to the roundup of Hungarian Roma and their deportation to camps in Poland and Germany. Katz concludes that about 50,000 of Hungary’s 133,000 Roma died during the Holocaust—a figure that is considerably higher than other scholars’ estimates.

The second part of Kenrick’s study, “The Aftermath,” deals primarily with Roma efforts after the war to gain recognition of and receive reparations for their suffering during the Holocaust. Michael Zimmermann, the author of the classic Rassenutopie und Genozid: Die nationalsozialistische “Lösung der Zigeunerfrage, (1996) begins this section of the book by asking whether it is wise to compare the Nazi persecution of the Roma with that of the Jews. While he skillfully lays out the considerable differences between Nazi perceptions of Jews and Roma as threatening racial groups, he also points out the danger of comparing Roma and Jewish victimization during the Holocaust. He fears that such comparisons could lead to the delegitimization of the “necessary memory of the murdered Roma and Sinti” (p. 147).

The Roma quest for justice and reparations is also covered in Peter Sandner’s “Criminal Justice Following the Genocide of the Sinti and Roma” and Wolfgang Wippermann’s “Compensation Withheld: The...

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