Germany and Its Gypsies: A Post-Auschwitz Ordeal

7. Public Debate on Nazi Persecution of Gypsies

7 Public Debate on Nazi Persecution of Gypsies T he debate among Germans about the Gypsy persecution has focused more on the motives of the Nazis than on the fate of the victims. Opinion has been divided sharply between those who share the Allies’ views and those whose views are more in line with the defeated Nazis. The Allies, who first received details about the Gypsy persecution as early as 1942, perceived it as a racist crime against an innocent victim. By contrast, from 1936 onward, the Nazi regime presented their actions against Gypsies as part of a legitimate and integral struggle against crime. These differences of opinion are reflected in three narratives found in the German discourse about the Gypsy persecution. Two are contradictory narratives, each expressing one of the two interpretations of the Gypsy persecution, and the third is syncretic and reconciliatory, combining elements of the other two narratives. The first of these I shall refer to as the Nazi Narrative, because of its shared viewpoints with Nazism. The second narrative (perceiving the Gypsy persecution as a crime against innocent victims) is borrowed from Western consciousness. It was generated in 1942 in England, just after the first news from German-occupied Europe about the persecution and murder of Gypsies, and it copied the narrative about the persecution of Jews that had preceded it.1 For this reason I term it the Jewish-like Narrative. The third narrative, which I term the Syncretic Narrative, adopted the element of blaming the victim for his fate from the Nazi Narrative, when it accused Gypsies of being at least in part responsible for their own persecution due to their behavior. At the same time, it also adopted 160 Public Debate on Nazi Persecution of Gypsies the moral attitude of the Allies, who denounced the Gypsy persecution as an evil crime. This narrative expressed the attitude of much of federal and local government and of many of the central streams in German society for most of the postwar period, until the 1980s. These narratives, passed from one generation to the next, were processed in the German consciousness to become collective memories. nazi narrative Als man dies in Dorf erfuhr War von Trauer keine spur. [In the village, when word went out There was no mourning, not even a pout.].2 The postwar Nazi Narrative has been widely expressed among the German public, bureaucracy, and political establishment. It was based on the interpretation that the Nazi regime provided for its Gypsy policy and on the common image, engraved on the German collective memory over many centuries, of Gypsies as thieves and asocials. Government officials also provided support for this interpretation by citing original Nazi documents , which stated that Gypsies were dealt with because most of them were found to be asocials and criminals who endangered public safety. This narrative linked the Gypsy persecution with that aspect of Nazi policy which many Germans, even after 1945, perceived as positive: the regime ’s struggle against crime. The Nazis had promised to provide law and order for respectable citizens and to deport to concentration camps the criminals and asocials who disturbed the peace.3 The most extreme adherents of this narrative presented death as the appropriate way to punish Gypsies for their evil deeds. However, its more moderate proponents ignored the criminal aims of the persecution—as if the mass murder of Gypsies was not an integral part of Nazi persecution—and ended the narrative with the supposedly “legitimate incarceration” of Gypsies in concentration camps. As this revealed a certain identification with one of the criminal aspects of Nazism, the political culture consolidated under the auspices of the Allies in post-1945 Germany imposed a taboo on the public voicing of the narrative, and its expressions in the media or in writing were rare. While only neo-Nazis dared to completely violate the taboo and express the narrative in its crudest and most direct form, in more moderate and seemingly decent circles it was expressed more subtly, using codes that could be easily understood by others. As far as is known, the only German politician who publicly aired this narrative in a political forum in the postwar period was Joseph 161 Germany and Its Gypsies Vogt, a Christian Democrat member of the local parliament of BadenWu ̈rttemberg. In 1956 Vogt requested that the Bavarian vagrancy law of 1953 also be adopted by...