critica a lewy

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Downplaying the Porrajmos:

The Trend to Minimize the Romani Holocaust

A review of Guenther Lewy,

The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies, Oxford University Press, 2000

By Ian Hancock

When OUP [Oxford University Press] sent me the manuscript of The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies for evaluation, I returned it in some

dudgeon, barely critiqued, saying only that it represented to me another

example of the growing body of literature devoted to diminishing the

place of the Romani people (“Gypsies”) in the Holocaust, and whatever I

had to say in a review of the manuscript would probably go unheeded.

Lewy’s agenda was clearly already in place and the published work has

demonstrated that. This is a book which seeks not only to exclude the

Nazis’ Romani victims from the Holocaust-which is not anything new-

but goes a step further to say that they were not even the targets of

attempted genocide. Heavily reliant on Zimmermann (1996), it adds little

to that author’s existing documentation but differs considerably in

interpretation.

There are two aspects of this work that must come under scrutiny: firstly the claims it

makes in support of the author’s case against genocide, and secondly, the biased tone inwhich those claims are made. I shall summarize the first aspect first. In short, Lewy

states

1) That there was no racially-motivated general plan for a

Final Solution of the Gypsy Question;

2) That the Nazis made a distinction between sedentary

and migratory Romanies in the East and between mixed

and unmixed Romanies in Germany, and spared some

from death because of this;

3) That as a consequence the estimated number of half amillion Romanies murdered is a gross exaggeration, and

that “perhaps the majority” of them in Germany actually

survived, and weren’t even transported to the East; and

4) Because there was no intent to kill all Romanies, and

because policies against them were not motivated by Nazi

race theory, their treatment cannot be compared with that

of the Jews and therefore they do not qualify for inclusion

in the Holocaust-in sum because their treatment did not

constitute a genocide and it was not motivated by a policy

based on Nazi race theory.

I shall address each point in turn, though only briefly; my arguments can

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be found in more detail in Hancock (1996). Firstly, that there was no

“general plan” is hardly unique to the Romani case; the incarcerations,

deportations and gassings took place nevertheless. We lack numbers of

documented “general plans” for Nazi actions throughout the entire

period, for all categories of victims. In fact “[n]o direct or indirect

evidence . . . has been delivered which could prove the existence of aformal written order by Hitler to start the mass extermination of the

Jews” (Hornshøy-Møller, 1999:I:313); absence of evidence is not

evidence of absence.

The statement that Nazi policy towards Romanies was not race-based is

patently absurd. The belief that Romani “criminality” was a genetic

defect which caused “hereditarily diseased offspring” is racist in itself,

and was justification for terminating Romani “lives unworthy of life.”

That very term ( Lebensunwertesleben) was first used in print by Liebich

in 1863 to refer specifically to Romanies; it was used six years later in an

essay by Kulemann-once more solely to refer to Romanies-and again in

the title of Binding & Hoche’s influential 1920 treatise on euthanasia.And it was used yet again just one year after Hitler came to power as the

title of a law ordering sterilization which was directed inter alia at

Romanies. Romanies were classified as possessing “alien” (i.e. non-

Aryan) blood along with Jews and people of African descent following

the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, and in November that year marriage between

members of those three groups and Germans was made illegal.

Statements against Romanies referring to their being a “racial” problem

are numerous and well-documented. Criteria for determining who had

Romani ancestry were exactly twice as strict as those determining who

was of Jewish descent; the fact that even Gypsy-like people were

targeted demonstrates that the Nazis were taking no chances with the

possibility of undetected Romani ancestry infecting German citizens.

Romanies were never regarded as a political or economic or religious

danger to the Third Reich, as were the Jews: individuals of mixed

Romani and European ancestry posed the greatest threat, and it was

solely a racial one.

Secondly, the fact that some categories of Romanies were exempted

from deportation is true; but the same is also true for some categories of

Jews. The six thousand Karaim who successfully pleaded to be spared,

for example, or the Jews married to non-Jews in the Netherlands.

Eichmann himself was prepared to spare the lives of one million Jews inreturn for ten thousand trucks. This position on Eichmann’s part may be

compared with Himmler’s desire to save some “pure” Roma as

anthropological specimens; neither was acted upon.

Thirdly, of the estimated ca. 20,000 Romanies in Germany in 1939,

fully three quarters had been murdered by 1945. Of the 11,200 in

Austria, a half were murdered. Of the 50,000 in Poland, 35,000; In

Croatia, Estonia, the Netherlands, Lithuania and Luxembourg, almost the

entire Romani populations were eradicated.

Lastly, the claim that the Nazis’ treatment of their Romani victims did not constitute

genocide is bizarre to say the least (“The various deportations of Gypsies to the East and

their deadly consequences do not constitute acts of genocide”- p. 223). This claim has been made more than once already, most forcefully by Katz:

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The only defensible conclusion, the only adequate

encompassing judgment . . . is that in comparison to the

ruthless, monolithic, meta-political, genocidal design of

Nazism vis-à-vis Jews, nothing similar . . . existed in the

case of the Gypsies . . . In the end, it was only Jews andthe Jews alone who were the victims of a total genocidal

onslaught in both intent and practice at the hands of the

Nazi murderers (Katz, 1988:213).

But there is no evidence that Jews or any other targeted group were

intended to be eradicated from the face of the earth, however passionate

a Nazi vision that might have been. We find instead numerous

statements such as that in a letter from Thierack to Martin Bormann

dated October 13th, 1939, in which he refers to “the intention of

liberating the German area from Poles, Russians, Jews and Gypsies”

(emphasis added). Hitler’s own statement, made publicly on January30th earlier that same year, envisioned “the annihilation of the Jewish

race in Europe” (emphasis added). Documents such as that issued on

August 14th, 1942 by the Central Security Office’s Department VI-

D(7b) asking for information on Romanies living in Britain, and that

British POWs be routinely interrogated about the condition and status of

Romanies in that country suggest that, had the Nazis won, their anti-

Romani policies would have been extended overseas.

Similar fact-finding memos about Jews overseas also existed-but no

document has been identified specifically expressing the intent to

exterminate every Jew or Gypsy on the planet. That being the case, suchstatements as Katz’ or the Anti-Defamation League’s or Lewy’s are

revisionist and subjective, and cannot be used to distinguish the fate of

Jews from the fate of Romanies. What we have as a result are various

interpretations based on circumstantial evidence (the “intentionalist”

approach, the “semiotic” approach and so on-see Breitman, 1991), and it

is his interpretation, not his objective evidence, upon which Lewy rests

his case. It is also interpretation which prompts the statement in the

Auschwitz Memorial Book that “[t]he final resolution, as formulated by

Himmler, in his ‘Decree for Basic Regulations to Resolve the Gypsy

Question as Required by the Nature of Race’ of December 8th, 1938,

meant that preparations were to begin for the complete extermination of Sinti and Roma” (State Museum, 1993:xiv).

Disqualifying Romanies as victims of genocide is Lewy’s major criterion

for also excluding them from the Holocaust itself, for denying, in fact,

that there was a Romani Holocaust. The battle over ownership of that

word is a latter-day phenomenon, yet it has been a part of the English

language for centuries, according to the Oxford English Dictionary first

appearing in print around 1250 AD. Its use in a purely religious context

dates from 1833, in a book by Leitch Ritchie, in which is described the

fate of over a thousand people in 18th century France who were locked

inside a church and burned to death at the order of King Louis VII:

“Louis VII . . . once made a holocaust of thirteen hundred persons in achurch (p. 104).” It has led to a distinction being made between Upper-

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Case Holocaust and lower-case holocaust, or to the abandonment of the

term altogether for Shoah. This at least is specific to the fate of Jews, as

Porrajmos (“paw-rye-mawss”) is to the fate of the Romani people.

A widespread interpretation of its meaning is found at “Holocaust” on

the Anti-Defamation League’s website, where it states:

The Holocaust was the systematic persecution andannihilation of more than six million Jews as a central act

of state by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between

1933 and 1945. Although millions of others, such as

Romani, Sinti (sic), homosexuals, the disabled and

political opponents of the Nazi regime were also victims

of persecution and murder, only the Jews were singled out

for total extermination (ADL, 2000).

A more scholarly interpretation, and one which names Romanies

correctly, is found in the German government’s handbook on Holocaust

education:

Recent historical research in the United States and

Germany does not support the conventional argument that

the Jews were the only victims of Nazi genocide. True,

the murder of Jews by the Nazis differed from the Nazis’

killing of political prisoners and foreign opponents

because it was based on the genetic origin of the victims

and not on their behavior. The Nazi regime applied a

consistent and inclusive policy of extermination-based on

heredity-only against three groups of human beings: thehandicapped, Jews, and Sinti and Roma (“Gypsies”). The

Nazis killed multitudes, including political and religious

opponents, members of the resistance, elites of conquered

nations, and homosexuals, but always based these

murders on the belief, actions and status of those victims.

Different criteria applied only to the murder of the

handicapped, Jews, and “Gypsies.” Members of these

groups could not escape their fate by changing their

behavior or belief. They were selected because they

existed (Milton, 2000:14)

The second aspect of the book-and the one which concerns me most-is

the tone in which it is written. This is a book about Romani people

written by someone who does not know any Romani people, and who

admits to deliberately not seeking their input in its compilation. No

Romanies are credited in the acknowledgments. Lewy has no expertise

in Romani Studies, and apart from a couple of recent articles excerpted

from the same book, he has never published anything on Romanies

before this. It reflects one facet of a disturbing trend which seems to be

emerging in Holocaust studies, most recently expressed on an Australian-

based Holocaust website which proclaims that “just mentioning Gypsies

in the same breath as the Jewish victims is an insult to their memory!(David, 2000).” This statement differs hardly at all from that made by

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the Darmstadt city mayor who, in an address to the municipal Sinti and

Roma Council, said that their request for recognition “insults the honor

of the memory of the Holocaust victims” by aspiring to be associated

with them (Anon., 1986), evidence that this kind of antigypsyism extends

well beyond the confines of Holocaust scholarship. The motive for

writing this book, therefore, was evidently not to add to our knowledgeof Roma, but to support the Jewish “uniquist” position, Lewy’s swan-

song upon his retirement from The University of Massachusetts.

His section on history is flawed and anemic; most of it relies heavily on

Fonseca’s journalistic, non-academic book Bury Me Standing . He

accepts negative stereotypes without comment, quoting e.g. Martin

Block, whose 1936 book was commissioned by the Nazi Party and

served as one of their fundamental guides to the “Zigeuner”, and who

says Romanies “are masters in the art of lying.” Having made the point

once, Lewy then reinforces Block’s statement in a footnote by repeating

Fonseca’s similar racist observation that “Gypsies lie. They lie a lot.

More often and more inventively than other people.” He unnecessarilyquotes the editor of a Roman Catholic magazine who recently wrote that

Romanies are “with exceptions, a lazy, lying, thieving and

extraordinarily filthy people . . . exceedingly disagreeable people to be

around.”

Accepting uncritically the opinions of prejudiced non-Romani authors

and presenting their statements as fact, and repeating undefended racist

venom while calling it merely “intemperate,” suggests that to Lewy such

statements are not questionable, and that we are not real people at all, but

simply subjects in books written by other non-Romanies. We are not

real people with real sensitivities and real aspirations in the real world,

and we were not real people in the Holocaust. All in all, in his opening

chapter Lewy seems to take delight in documenting the “nasty” aspects

of Romanies; he doesn’t seem to like us very much at all. In a blame-the-

victim statement (p. ll) he says “prejudice alone, I submit, is not

sufficient explanation for the hostility directed at the Gypsies . . . certain

characteristics of Gypsy life tend to reinforce or even create hostility.”.

He even puts himself in charge of what we should be called, maintaining

that “in fact there is nothing pejorative, per se, about the word

‘Zigeuner’” (p. ix). One suggestion I did make before returning the

original manuscript to OUP was that the author remove the word

“mysterious” in his description of us from his text.There are dozens of examples of this kind of insensitivity here and in

Lewy’s other writings. He repeats for example Yehuda Bauer’s

viciously insulting statement that my people were nothing more than a

“minor irritant” as far as the Nazis were concerned. Minor irritants are

not called Zigeunerplage or Zigeunerbedrohung or Zigeunergeschmeiss

as the Nazis referred to us (“Gypsy plague,” “Gypsy menace,” “Gypsy

scum”). The Bureau of Gypsy Affairs was not moved from Munich to

Hitler’s capital in Berlin in 1936 simply so that the Nazis could keep a

close eye on a “minor irritant.” In a paper presented at the U.S.

Holocaust Memorial Museum’s symposium on the Romani Holocaust in

September, 2000, he stated that “Gypsies were fortunate in not being thechosen victims of the Holocaust,” heedless of the gross insensitivity

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evident in using a word such as “fortunate” in the context of the

Holocaust.

In the same paper Lewy maintains that Romanies weren’t sent to

Auschwitz-Birkenau to be killed, that other inmates “envied” them there,

and that in some camps, they were merely murdered for carrying disease

or for taking up space. Throughout his writing, Lewy tempers his prejudices with the requisite sympathetic lip-service presumably lest he

be accused of bias, yet he includes no discussion of the ongoing

persecution of Romanies since 1945, of how there was no representation

at the Nuremberg Trials, or no war crimes reparations forthcoming, of

how neo-Nazi violence is directed-today-mainly at the Romani people, of

how The New York Times and CNN have both called Romanies “the

most persecuted in Europe today.”

As I write, the Greek government is already systematically removing

Romanies by force and demolishing their homes at the site of the next

Olympic Games, just as Hitler did in Berlin in 1936 and the Spanish

government did in 1992 in Barcelona. Romani women were beinginvoluntarily sterilized in Slovakia into the 1980s. These issues, in the

context of what the Holocaust must teach us, mean nothing to Mr. Lewy,

and it is because he can feel no empathy for a people who remain

complete strangers to him.

Having to deal with the same lack of concern is something that confronts

Romanies constantly. Representatives in the USA wanting to be included

in the disbursement of the Swiss assets looted by the Nazis have certainly

been made to feel like “a minor irritant;” while Ward Churchill devoted a

lengthy chapter to the unfair treatment of Romanies by Holocaust

scholars in his book A Little Matter of Genocide, neither of its two

reviewers in the last issue of this journal even mention it. In January,

2000, the Swedish government hosted an international conference on the

Holocaust in response to the sharp increase in neo-Nazi activity in

eastern Europe. Sinti and Roma were not only Holocaust victims, but

they are also the main targets of skinhead violence today-yet not even

one session on Romanies was included in the entire Stockholm forum.

The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies is a dangerous book. It is another

title in the antiquated tradition of an expert treatise on a people whom the

author has never met nor has made any effort to meet. How can you feel

compassion for a people you don’t know? We are an abstraction, to be

discussed in our absence and, worse, even in our presence, as though wedon’t really exist, with no thought for our feelings or our dignity. It will,

I am sorry to say, be widely read, and is already being quoted as

“evidence” to argue for the exclusion of the Romani people from their

rightful place in Holocaust history. Lewy unfairly dismisses Kenrick &

Puxon’s groundbreaking 1972 Destiny of Europe’s Gypsies, the first full-

length book of the subject in English, as “short of [being] a satisfactory

treatment.” But his own agenda-driven effort comes nowhere near

replacing it, and my recommendation is that those wanting scholarly,

contemporary sources on the Porrajmos rely on the Interface multi-

volume series Gypsies During the Second World War from the

University of Hertfordshire Press.

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Works cited

ADL, 2000. http://www.adl.org/frames/front_holocaust.html

Anon., 1986. “Tragedy of the Gypsies,” Information Bulletin No. 26.

Vienna: Dokumentationszentrum des Bundes Jüdische Verfolgte des

Naziregimes.

Binding, Karl, & Alfred Hoche, 1920. Die Freigabe der Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens. Leipzig: Felix Meiner.

Block, Martin, 1936. Die Zigeuner: Ihr Leben und ihr Seele. Leipzig:

Bibliographisches Institut.

Breitman, Richard, 1991. The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution. New York: Knopf.

Charney, Israel, ed., 1999. Encyclopedia of Genocide, Santa Barbara:

ABC-CLIO. In two vols.

Churchill, Ward, 1997. A Little Matter of Genocide. Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present. San Francisco: City Lights

Books.

David, L., 2000.

http://member.telpacific.com.au/david1/The_Holocaust.htm - June 14th.

Fonseca, Isabel, 1995. Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and their

Journey. New York: Knopf.

Hancock, Ian, 1996. “Responses to the Porrajmos: The Romani

Holocaust,” in Rosenbaum, 1996, 39-64.

Heye, Uwe-Karsten, Joachim Sartorius & Ulrich Bopp, eds., 2000.

Learning from History: The Nazi Era and the Holocaust in German Education. Berlin: Press and Information Office of the Federal

Government.

Hornshøy-Møller, Stig, 1999. “Hitler and the Nazi decision-making

process to commit the Holocaust,” in Charney, 1999, vol. I, 313-315.

Katz, Steven, 1988. “Quantity and interpretation: Issues in thecomparative historical analysis of the Holocaust,” Remembering for the

Future: Papers to be Presented at the Scholars’ Conference,

Supplementary Volume, Oxford: Pergamon Press, 200-218.

Kenrick, Donald, & Grattan Puxon, 1972. The Destiny of Europe’sGypsies. New York: Basic Books.

Liebich, Richard, 1863. Die Zigeuner in ihrem Wesen und ihre Sprache.

Leipzig: Brockhaus.

Milton, Sybil, 2000. “Holocaust education in The United States and

Germany,” in Heye, 14-20.

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http://www.adl.org/frames/front_holocaust.html

http://member.telpacific.com.au/david1/

http://member.telpacific.com.au/david1/

http://www.adl.org/frames/front_holocaust.html



Ritchie, Leitch, 1833. Wanderings by the Loire. London: Longman &

Co.

Rosenbaum, Alan S., ed., 1996. Is the Holocaust Unique? Boulder &

Oxford: The Westview Press.

State Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau, 1993. Memorial Book: The

Gypsies at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Munich: Saur Verlag.

Zimmermann, Michael, 1996. Rassenutopie und Genozid: Die

nationalsozialistische ‘Lösung der Zigeunerfrage’ Hamburg: Christians

Verlag.

Ian Hancock

The Romani Archives and Documentation Center

Calhoun Hall 501

The University of TexasAustin, TX 78712 USA

E-mail: [email protected]

September, 2000

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