The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies [Paperback]

Lewy restricts himself to Germany and countries occupied by the Germans, though with some significant omissions. So, he does not attempt to deal with the murder of Gypsies in Croatia or Transdniestria by Germany’s fascist allies. That said, he has consulted an impressive amount of documentation, much of it available for the first time. It comprises material from some 30 archives including the individual records in three towns.

The reader will find previously unpublished material in the account of the attempt to set up a Gypsy camp in Frankfurt am Main in 1929, stories of returners from the 1940 deportations to western Poland and details of the Sinti Sprecher whom Himmler charged with making lists of pure Gypsies to be saved

In his introduction Lewy already stands out from the majority of previous writers on the subject of the genocide in discussing to what extent Gypsies are responsible for the prejudice against them. He cites their lying, having more than one name, stealing, tricking persons while fortune telling and creating rubbish. He does however accept that they do not steal children or commit burglary - the latter because “they have a superstitious fear of closed doors.” There is no reference given for this last assertion. The Nazis could, thefrefore, build upon this justified popular dislike of Gypsies in evolving their policies,

I have no quarrel with the story that Lewy has woven from these archives. But when he turns to an analysis of the material, he becomes more controversial. For Lewy the genocide of the Jews is unique. He will not accept that the Nazi policy towards the Gypsies was also one of genocide, albeit evolving in a different way. This argument is partly based on statistics, partly on his failure to find any interest on the part of Hitler in the fate of the Gypsies.

He accepts at face value the statement of Ohlendorf - a leader of the Einsatzgruppen, responsible for thousands of deaths - who claimed at his trial that the Gypsies were included in those to be destroyed in the occupied Soviet Union because of their tendency to spy. Lewy considers the racial element in the killings to be “unimportant”

We look in vain for any reference to the massive shootings of Gypsies outside the camps in Poland, carried out on the spot by a range of German military units wherever they came across their victims. Even if Lewy cannot read Polish. and has not come across the papers delivered at the Conference on War Crimes in Warsaw in 1983, there is no reason for him to omit these murders, which counteract his general thesis.

Another gap in Lewy’s coverage is the fate of the Gypsies in Hungary and North Italy after the Germans took power in those countries towards the end of the Second World War. Immediately, Hungarian Gypsies were marched to the northern frontier in large numbers and no trace of their fate remains. The same happened to those Italian Gypsies unfortunate enough to find themselves in the zone occupied by the Germans. Men, women and children were held in the camp at Gries from which transports began to concentration camps in Poland. There was no logical reason why the Germans should have wanted to clear Hungary or Italy of Gypsies at that stage in the war. The deportations had one aim - to murder as many Gypsies as possible before the coming defeat - in the same way as, until the last moment, the German army were deporting Jews from Greece as the Allied armies advanced.

The strongest argument Lewy puts forward to back his eventual conclusion that the Gypsies were not subject to genocide is that large numbers of Roma and Sinti were not deported from Germany. He considers that the figure could be as high as 15,000 .His mathematics are doubtful.

In his conclusion Lewy looks at whether the mass killings in Auschwitz and the Soviet Union represent genocide and the much-debated difference between the fate of the Jews and that of the Gypsies. He says genocide must be the intent to destroy a group and argues that the Nazis did not intend to destroy the Gypsies. The mass gassings at Chelmno and Auschwitz were - he says - to stop the spread of typhus (itself the result of the poor conditions imposed by the German guards) and to make room for Hungarian Jews, respectively. We seek in vain in the index for the extermination centres of Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. As Lewy does not mention the killings there, he does not have to explain them away. But these were centres to which Gypsies were taken from ghettos and roadside camps and killed on arrival. None of Lewy’s excuses can be put forward here. Belzec appears only in this volume only during its early life as a work camp.

He accepts that the sterilisation programme was in fact an act of genocide (as if every adult is sterilised there will be no more births and the race will die out) but it was carried out - he asserts - not to wipe out the group but to stop Gypsies having children by Germans and producing more mixed race children.

Lewy concludes by reiterating the viewpoint of so-called uniquists - only in the case of the Jews did the Nazis seek to annihilate physically every man, woman and child. But a study of his own text - even with the omissions I have pointed out - will lead most readers to the opposite conclusion; only the defeat of Germany saved the Roma and Sinti from genocide.