The Holocaust: The Denied Crimes Against Sinti and Roma. Review – Policy

“The Forgotten Holocaust” – that’s what it’s called Zooni Wise, who was the first cento to address the Bundestag on January 27, 2011, addressed the genocide of the Sinti and Roma in Europe. His speech and the opening of the memorial to the dead in 2012 mark a belated acknowledgment of this story by the Federal Republic. But German society did not simply forget the Nazi genocide. I deliberately refused to recognize the minority that had lived in Germany for centuries.

In the subtitle of his study, historian Sebastian Lotto Koch talks about “the long road to recognition.” It is at its heart the difficult process in which, against all odds, these four sentences can be said and finally become a matter of course This was announced by Helmut Schmidt in a press statement after the first meeting of the Federal Chancellor with representatives of the Sinti and Rome on March 17, 1982. He said, “The Nazi dictatorship inflicted grave injustice on the Sinti and Roma. They were persecuted on racial grounds, many of them were killed, and these crimes are considered genocide.” At last the head of government of the legal successor to the German Reich publicly acknowledged his crimes against the Sinti and Roma.

Genocide? Absolutely not, it was said in early Germany

Nazi genocide of Sinti and Roma? And this is exactly what all the experts (including scientists and social workers) who were heard by the criminal police, authorities, churches, and the federal government on the subject of “Gypsies” after 1945 denied. The knowledge of these experts often came from the “Racial Health Research Center,” whose expert opinions formed the basis The policy of persecution and extermination. Nazi measures were “criminal precaution”, there was no racial persecution or even genocide – and not only could that be said for a long time, it was the dominant “way of thinking”, as Lotto Koch calls it with reference to philosopher Ludwik Fleck’s science, until the 1970s. The low point was the unrestrained racist argument of the Federal Court of Justice, which in 1956 blamed Sinti and Roma for their persecution.

Features of this story are well known. Lotto Kush did not rewrite this, but managed to place accents that characterize the well-established narrative about “The Long Road to Recognition”. The exact context leads to new actors out Well-known circles in the civil rights movement Sinti, Roma and their civil society allies.

There is little fanfare in the evidence that long before Helmut Schmidt’s public admission in 1982 — that is, since the final enactment of the Federal Compensation Act of 1965 — legal opinion existed within federal ministries that racially motivated genocide had been committed against Sinti and Roma. But the victims mostly didn’t benefit because “arbitrary application deadlines” and “official harassment” got in their way – as long as the already permanent exclusion didn’t rob the few survivors of the courage to do battle with state authorities and “gypsy experts”. Lotto-Kush devotes enlightening and chilling chapters to the powerful network about Hermann Arnold, who continued the work and theses of Nazi racial research and became the most important advisor to the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, which is responsible for minorities.

The author enters new territory elsewhere. He contrasts leading figures in the civil rights movement, some of whom shaped the image for decades, with people within the power structures who created the opportunities in politics and administration that the Sinti and Roma appropriated. In the 1950s this included the now-forgotten CDU politician Franz Bohm, who belonged to the resistance against National Socialism, doing great things for German-Israeli understanding and the right to reparation, and in 1958 against the CDU. The “crime prevention” discourse of ministries, politicians and experts was influenced by NS He vehemently declared that the Sinti and Roma “are the only ones besides the Jews who are included in the so-called Final Solution, that is, in the program of total annihilation and extermination.” Fritz Bauer and other names should be mentioned here, and in the field of history in particular Michael Zimmermann.

Ministry official as a secret hero

Perhaps the book’s secret hero is Ministry official Gerhard Kono. Without this head of the department in the chancellery, and later head of the chancellery and senator in Berlin, the symbolic political turning point of the meeting between Helmut Schmidt and the Central Council of the German Sinti and Roma in 1982 would never have taken place. Only a few weeks ago, the Central Council had formed – somewhat exaggeratedly on the basis of the results presented: especially for this meeting – as an umbrella organization with internal structures constrained so that it could speak to politicians with one voice. But neither this step nor the growing knowledge of the genocide of the 1970s was enough to start a confrontation.

Open the detailed view

As early as 1979, political officer Kono took personal knowledge of the list of demands, the famous “Memorandum” of the German Sinti Association. It sounds like an irony of history: a Nazi-leaning specialist in the Ministry of Family Affairs prevented the Sinti representatives from delivering the memorandum to the Federal Chancellor. That’s how it ended with Kono. From then on, he made the Sinti-Roma issue his own, breaking the dominance of experts from the Ministry of Family Affairs, who had been influenced by the anti-Roma style of thinking, in government and putting the issue on the agenda of the Federal Chancellor. . The rest of the story is known.

This example shows that Lotto-Kush, without essentially rewriting history, with clever additions and despite its sometimes anachronistic moral overtones, has achieved something important: it pulls the minority out of marginalized areas of minority history, and puts the Sinti and Roma into Historical history. The main stream of the old Federal Republic, where The struggle for power and knowledge after 1945. Thus the long road to genocide recognition has reached its goal.