The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies (review)

The history of the Gypsies during the Third Reich was, and remains, a history of persecution, destruction, and horror. It is also a history that, until the 1990s and the scholarship of Michael Zimmermann, remained a corpus of superficial examinations marred by a lack of in-depth investigations into the primary source materials. Guenter Lewy’s recent study is a valuable piece of research that presents a detailed account of the Nazis’ bureaucratic and social policies towards the Gypsies, and a window into the lives of several Gypsies before, during, and after the Second World War. While focusing primarily on the Gypsies from Germany and Austria, Lewy examines a multitude of archival and documentary materials that show how extensive, and in some cases how varied, the Nazi position was on the Gypsy problem.

The origins of the oppression and maltreatment of Gypsies date back to the early fifteenth century when they first appeared in central Europe. The Gypsies were always seen as outsiders by the governing bodies of Europe, and with the establishment in 1899 of the Central Office for Gypsy Affairs in Bavaria the German government began a systematic cataloguing of the Gypsy population that culminated in 1925 with “more than 14,000 names from all over Germany” (p. 9). Lewy emphasizes throughout the book that the desire of the German government to track the Gypsies was, initially, a means of identifying so-called “work-shy” individuals, or people who were seen as vagabonds or petty criminals. Unlike the Jews, who were seen by the Nazis as an economic and political threat, the Gypsy problem was of a biological and social nature: Gypsies were viewed as a group of people whose blood was of an inferior quality and whose work habits were a detriment to a country in economic turmoil. The examination of the biological schema of Gypsies is one in which the Nazi government took a particular interest. The issues of eugenics and racial hygiene were key criteria by which Gypsies were identified and categorized, and Lewy provides a detailed examination into the work of Robert Ritter, the head of Germany’s Rassenhygienische und bevölkerungsbiologische Forschungsstelle (The Research Institute for Racial Hygiene and Population Biology). Since the degree of one’s racial purity was in many cases a matter of incarceration or extermination, Ritter and his colleagues devised a system that identified a person as one of five possible degrees of race status.

The narrowing of race should have simplified the Nazi questions of what to do with the Gypsies, but Lewy’s research has shown that it only led to confusion and contradiction in the German high ranks. Himmler was fascinated with “racially pure” Gypsies, for he viewed them as direct descendents of the Aryan race who, like the Gypsies, originated in the Indian subcontinent, and he desired to “keep alive just a few of these pure Gypsies as a kind of live museum or as ‘rare animals’” (p. 148). Hitler was opposed to this idea, and as Levy discovered in a multitude of diaries and notes from high and low-level meetings, there was much debate as to the fate of the Gypsies in the Nazi bureaucracy: no one could come to an agreement as to whether they were to be isolated in concentration camps, sterilized, sent to the periphery of the empire, placed in forced labor camps, or systematically exterminated. From viewing Lewy’s copious amounts of mandates and laws, on the local, state, and national level, the Nazi party from 1933 to March 1943 had no unified law regarding the Gypsies. From March 1943 on, the solution was to send all Gypsies of all racial backgrounds from Austria and Germany to Auschwitz or one of the other larger camps, such as Ravensbrük or Dachau.

How one should write a history, and in particular a history that has the Holocaust as its focal point, has become a issue of great debate among historians, philosophers, and theorists. How should one represent something that...