Thirty years have passed since debates on the “forgotten victims” of the Nazi regime first placed the murder of Roma and Sinti on the agenda of Holocaust research. The persecution of this heterogeneous group has since entered into textbook accounts of the Holocaust and gained a more prominent position within the commemorative landscape of various European states. While this process of inclusion has been slow and often frustrating to the descendants of Romani survivors who feel deprived of proper recognition of their families' suffering, a new volume bringing together old and new essays on the subject shows how far scholarship has come over the past decades.
The programmatic title of the volume under review, The Nazi Genocide of the Roma, highlights the key concept used to bind together most of the contributions: genocide. A term originally coined by Raphael Lemkin in 1943, it has come to define the comparative study of different victims of the Nazis, as well as other perpetrators of mass murder. Remaining squarely in this comparative mode, several prominent scholars (including, most recently, Guenter Lewy, The Nazi Persecution of Gypsies [2000]) have challenged the notion that the Nazi persecution of Roma and Sinti amounted to genocide. According to this school of thought, the lack of a clearly articulated and systematically executed policy to kill every last Roma makes the term inapplicable to their case. Other scholars, as well as Romani activists, have, by contrast, insisted that the term is not merely accurate, but also one that illuminates the similarities between the extermination of Jews and Roma during the war and suggests that both groups merit equal treatment in memorial culture and scholarship. This volume weighs in on these debates on the side of those who claim that the term is appropriate and productive.
Choosing to organize a collection of essays on the Romani Holocaust with the question of genocidal intention as its main question certainly has its drawbacks. The term invites polemical interventions since it has clear political stakes—stakes that have only been further raised over the past years because of recent debates over contemporary discrimination against Roma across Europe. By emphasizing the perpetrators' intentions and methods, debates on the applicability of this legal category also have the potential to eclipse the study of victims' experiences. It is to the great credit of Weiss-Wendt and his contributors that the volume avoids both pitfalls. Without descending into polemics, the essays offer new evidence organized within a conceptual framework that makes these contributions meaningful to a broad range of scholars in European history, as well as in Holocaust and genocide studies. At the same time, they show how new scholarship has given greater consideration to sources that highlight Romani experiences during and since World War II.
The volume features six contributions on the Nazi era and three on postwar memory politics. All nine essays touch directly or indirectly on the challenges of dealing with a genocide that is commonly analyzed with concepts and questions derived from the study of the Jewish Holocaust. The implicit comparison to the latter case reveals that policies against Roma across Europe were even more diverse than those against Jewish victims, in part because the Nazis had a less homogeneous foreign policy when it came to those categorized as “Gypsies.” There was, then, a more homegrown quality to anti-“Gypsy” policies, particularly among Germany's allies.
The first chapter, by Shannon Fogg, illustrates this diversity of policies and the importance of local political traditions. Fogg argues that Vichy France's measures against the populations designated as nomades were not racialized to the same degree as German policies against Zigeuner. Indeed, in France the definition of nomades derived from a 1912 law, which forced a particular class of mobile populations without regular domicile to carry an identification card with biometric information, known as the carnet anthropométrique. As a result, the major question of scholars of French and Western European Romani history has been to what degree the ethnicized term Roma overlaps with terms such as nomades or the German Zigeuner. One major school of thought has emphasized that the Western European equivalents of Gypsy are police terms that do not correspond to racial definitions, but apply to all nomadic populations irrespective of their ethnicity. Fogg seeks a middle path: she claims that all those defined as nomades were Roma, but not all Roma were defined as nomades. Whereas the first point cannot be proved with empirical certainty, she manages to offer strong evidence for the second: French authorities at different points released individuals from their camps if they were judged to be “Gypsies,” but not carriers of the carnet. Ultimately, Vichy inherited not just the terms defining populations, but also the policies of the Third Republic. Throughout the Vichy regime's existence, the emphasis was on assimilation—not extermination—of nomades. As a consequence, Roma and Sinti were not deported to German camps from the areas remaining within the control of the French authorities.
The essays on the murder of Roma in the German-occupied areas of the Soviet Union show how paradigms of assimilation had no place farther east. Here the argument that Weiss-Wendt wants the whole volume to make—that new scholarship supports the idea of genocide—is most plausible. Two scholars, Martin Holler and Mikhail Tyaglyy, were tasked with writing separate chapters on the subject. Both focus on the rich records of the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission, which collected testimonies in the newly liberated areas starting in 1942. They also come to the same conclusion that distinctions between sedentary and nomadic Roma were irrelevant to the perpetrators. Both in areas under civil administration and under military command, a racialized definition of “Gypsies” became the basis of systematic killings.
Other essays in the volume illustrate the diverse origins and uneven implementation of murderous policies. In an essay that parallels similar claims made by other scholars about anti-Jewish measures, Florian Freund argues that Austrian politicians were crucial agents in the radicalization of the Third Reich's anti-Roma policies. The Roma population of the Burgenland proved to be the test case for genocidal policies that would later affect German Sinti and Roma. Essays on Croatia under the Ustaše and Romania under Prime Minister Ion Antonescu—the two allied regimes of the Third Reich that autonomously developed their own extermination programs against Roma—offer additional evidence for the diverse origins of these policies. Examining the Croatian case, Alexander Korb demonstrates how anti-Roma—and anti-Jewish—policies emerged in connection with anti-Serb measures that were more central to the regime's ideology. In the case of Romania, Vladimir Solonari shows how the mass deportation of Roma to Transnistria was more clearly based on “ethnic nationalism and racial anthropology”—and less opposed by the country's non-Romani population than previous scholarship has allowed. In all these cases, anti-Roma policies took shape less under German influence than in the context of the decisions of local fascist elites.
The final three essays, which cover the post-1945 period, help frame the stakes of the debates on genocide, while also tracing the question of Romani persecution through the present. A previously published essay by the late Gilad Margalit offers an overview of the compensation decisions of the German judiciary, as well as its failure to persecute some of the best-known perpetrators of the Romani genocide. Another excellent chapter, written by Nadine Blumer, explores the debates on Berlin's new Memorial to the Sinti and Roma Victims of National Socialism, which opened in October 2012. The monument was the outcome of controversies that emerged over earlier plans for a shared memorial to Jewish and Romani victims, which were ultimately rejected by Jewish and non-Jewish German activists who argued for the uniqueness of the Jewish Holocaust. Blumer effectively shows how the compromises reached by Romani, Jewish, and German state representatives since the 1990s have thus created a “memorial network” (222) that serves simultaneously to retain and undermine victim hierarchies in public commemorations. The concluding essay by the Polish sociologist Sławomir Kapralski compellingly critiques claims that Roma and Sinti have a culture that is inimical to historical memory. He points instead to the social structures that impeded or discouraged public Romani memory and shows how Romani and non-Romani activists have recently begun cooperating to invent traditions that offer new spaces for communal commemoration.
Whereas Wendt-Weiss's volume gives a much-needed and accessible overview of recent research on the Romani genocide, the second book under review offers more modest rewards. Tobias Schmidt-Degenhard's study of Robert Ritter's life and scholarly work retains the feel and structure of a German dissertation. Ritter was the youthful psychiatrist and eugenicist behind the definition and registration of those identified as “Zigeuner” and “Zigeunermischlinge” in Germany. A career physician whose expertise fueled top-down policy decisions from Berlin, Ritter has received a considerable amount of scrutiny from scholars and activists. Joachim Hohmann, Michael Zimmermann, Karola Fings, and the somewhat idiosyncratic Reimar Gilsenbach have written extensively on Ritter's biography and his work for the Reichsgesundheitsamt. Most popular accounts on the Romani genocide also offer extensive descriptions of Ritter's research.
Schmidt-Degenhard seeks to contribute to this literature by focusing on the part of Ritter's life least discussed by others: the years immediately before his move to Berlin in 1936. In this period Ritter worked as a psychiatrist at the Universitätsnervenklinik Tübingen and prepared his habilitation, Ein Menschenschlag. Erbärztliche und erbgeschichtliche Untersuchungen über die—durch zehn Geschlechterfolgen erforschten—Nachkommen von “Vagabunden, Jaunern und Räubern.” Schmidt-Degenhard convincingly shows how this massive volume, hailed by Ritter's contemporaries as an eminently readable, interdisciplinary tour de force, was nothing but a glorified genealogical project. Ritter collected references to minor transgressions in local courts and cross-referenced them with information from church books. He needed no sophisticated medical methodology due to his trust in hereditary determinism, which allowed him to argue that so-called asocial traits were inevitably passed on within particular groups.
Schmidt-Degenhard offers some new insights in his description of Ritter's early scientific efforts. He demonstrates, among other things, the banality of Ritter's procedure by analyzing a representative case from a collection of nineteenth-century police files that Ritter used for his research. Schmidt-Degenhard exposes Ritter's method of analyzing such sources by showing how the Nazi scholar construed his histories of familial deviance from isolated records about complaints filed against one person. Most of these complaints concerned petty offenses such as public drunkenness—or bringing out the manure at the wrong time. The reader gets a vivid sense of how Ritter willed into existence networks of intergenerational asocial behavior based on minor infractions listed in fragmentary collections. Unfortunately, such innovative moments are rare. Too often, Schmidt-Degenhard merely cites Ritter at length without much analysis.
In the more strictly biographic sections, Vermessen und Vernichten also offers some dubious interpretations of Ritter's behavior. In his efforts to reconstruct Ritter's early years, Schmidt-Degenhard relies too heavily on a long biographical letter bequeathed by Ritter to his daughters in 1945. In this and other respects, Schmidt-Degenhard proves too willing to accept Ritter's description of himself as a man who wanted nothing more than to be a good physician. Schmidt-Degenhard thus employs this description as the premise of his investigation into the ways ideologically uncommitted doctors could become cogs in the machine of destruction. Although he offers the occasional caveat suggesting that we should not take Ritter's personal professions at face value, Schmidt-Degenhard nevertheless uses them as the main source for his psychological portrait of the man. The principal problem here is one of a biased archive: the psychologically richest documents come either from Ritter himself or from people whom he asked to vouch for him in postwar proceedings against him. Ritter made sure that any documents that might cast doubt on his political ideology would not survive. As a result, we have no documents that explain his decision to drop out of his Gymnasium in 1919 to join the paramilitary Grenzschutz Ost in Silesia. Must we accept that the most relevant episodes of Ritter's life were those for which he left us the densest sources?
Whereas Schmidt-Degenhard's study will be of interest largely to specialists, Weiss-Wendt's volume should appeal broadly to researchers and students alike. Bringing together previously published and new essays in a coherent fashion, it will no doubt remain one of the foundational volumes on the Roma genocide for many years to come. The Nazi Genocide of the Roma also reflects the maturing of Romani Holocaust studies into a recognized field of historical inquiry. In the face of rising hostility against Romani populations across Europe, Holocaust research institutions and major funding agencies have become more welcoming to research on the Romani genocide. At the same time, scholars—if not students—today expect courses on the (Jewish) Holocaust to include information on victims who were not Jews. This volume, which draws on a range of scholarship produced under these new conditions, is an important resource for Holocaust educators who seek to respond to the growing interest in the experiences of Roma and Sinti during World War II.
This should not suggest that Romani history is now an established field. The vast majority of publications on the history of Europe's Roma and Sinti deal only with the nadir of their history. Their experiences during the Nazi era have become relevant to historians largely because they were killed by and alongside people who are regularly the subject of serious historical inquiry. With the substantial scholarship on the Romani Holocaust at our disposal, historians now face the challenge of creating interpretative frameworks that allow us to understand the experiences of Europe's largest ethnic minority as part of European history writ large. Weiss-Wendt's volume opens important comparative vistas to other genocides and mass murders. We need more volumes with such clear conceptual interventions to make the early modern and modern history of Romani life relevant to larger debates in the discipline.
