The Roma Struggle for Compensation in Post-War Germany (review)

At the beginning of the discussion in his two-volume work on the Nürnberg IMT trial, Drexel A. Sprecher, a member of the U.S. legal team, stated that one of the failings of the prosecution was not to make “a separate submission to the Tribunal on the persecution and murder of the Gypsies.”¹ This omission is doubly tragic given that the Roma are often mentioned together with Jews as victims of Nazi persecution throughout the trial’s transcripts. This failure not only robbed persecuted Roma of their “day in court,” but also deprived us of the rich body of testimony that would have given us much earlier insight into the evolution of Nazi policies towards this group. And since little was made of the plight of the Roma under German occupation, their status in postwar Europe remained much as it was before 1933: deeply impoverished, marginalized, and little understood, a status that has plagued them to this day.

Julia von dem Knesebeck’s study opens a little wider the historical window on the Roma during the Holocaust by examining their efforts in postwar West Germany to be compensated for their persecution, sterilization, and imprisonment by the Nazis. In many ways, this is a dual study that blends not only German Roma efforts to gain compensation or restitution under West Germany’s complex, evolving laws, but also provides insight into the experiences of Roma during the Holocaust and into the personal toll their efforts took on those who chose to apply for compensation. Not surprisingly, given the prevalent indifference in West Germany, and for that matter, the rest of Europe, officials hid behind many of the prewar stereotypes and prejudices about the Roma to prevent them from getting a fair hearing. This, coupled with the fact that the West German government refused until the 1960s to regard the Roma as racial victims of the Nazis, discouraged many German Roma from filing claims.

Fortunately, a handful of individual German Länder did date the beginning of the racial persecution of the Roma to the Nürnberg Laws, though at first the general approach had been to date it back only to Heinrich Himmler’s December 16, 1942 order to deport Greater Reich Zigeunermischlinge (mixed-race Gypsies), and then later to his December 8, 1938 Bekämpfung der Zigeunerplague (Combating the Gypsy Plague) decree. Equally fortunately, a handful of visionary scholars such as Dr. Franz Calvelli-Adorno, president of the senate of the district court (Oberlandesgericht) in Frankfurt, have argued forcefully that the Roma were racial victims of the Nazis well before these dates. Knesebeck also argues that Calvelli-Adorno’s 1961 article, “Die rassische Verfolgung der Zigeuner vor dem 1. März 1943,” which he drew partially from the works of other scholars, played a key role in getting the Bundesgerichtshof (Federal Supreme Court) to decide in 1963 that the Roma had been victims of racial persecution.

The other major player in the Roma compensation-restitution question was the Zentralrat Deutscher Sinti und Roma (Central Council of German Sinti and Roma), created in 1982. Though Knesebeck’s study covers only the period from 1945 to 1982, she does discuss the Zentralrat, crediting it with bringing the West German Roma and Sinti something they had long missed—a strong, collective national (or international) voice to underscore not only Roma mistreatment at the hands of the Nazis, and also a strong organizational means to guide applicants, many of whom were confused about the process.

To say that the “Wiedergutmachungs-apparatus” (restoration apparatus) as Knesebeck calls it, was complex and confusing would be an understatement. It had two dimensions: a program of compensation for individual Holocaust victims, and a second for the restitution of property stolen by the Nazis. Between 1953 and 1965 the West German government adopted three compensation laws. While a handful of Roma were successful in filing claims under the first two, most were...