Paraimos - the genocide that was forgotten
Card of the gypsy Karl Stojko, arrested by the Gestapo in 1943
Settela and Karl
The genocide of Jews during the years of Nazi rule in Europe, if disputed, is by complete outcasts and admirers of the Third Reich. However, using the example of the Holocaust, one can see how hypocritical world politics and public opinion can look.
But first story one photo.
The tragically famous photograph of Settella Steinbach. 1944
It shows a ten-year-old girl, Settella Steinbach, looking out of a train car heading to Auschwitz from the Westerbork camp. The fate of the unfortunate woman was sealed, and she died in the camp in early August 1944. The whole family died along with the girl - her mother, two sisters, two brothers, her aunt, her two nephews and her niece. Only the father of the family survived.
Settela was filmed by the Jewish prisoner Rudolf Breslauer - he acted on the orders of the chief of Westerbork. This tragedy would have remained one of millions, but the piercing and doomed look of Settella became one of the symbols of the Holocaust.
An equally tragic truth was revealed only in 1992 through the efforts of the Dutch journalist Ad Wagenaar. The "girl in the headscarf" was not actually Jewish, but a gypsy originally from Buchten, in the Dutch province of Limburg. Settela's family apparently fled Germany after 1933, when the Nazis passed a law requiring the sterilization of Jews, Gypsies, Sinti and Roma.
Since the mid-30s, German Sinti and Roma were kept in special camps. Thus began the most little-known genocide in Europe, for which the Germans did not want to repent for many decades.
Gypsies in the Hellerwiese camp in Vienna. 1940 Most of the Roma and Sinti in Austria will be exterminated in death camps.
It is significant that the tragedy of the Roma is still not fully understood. There is very little documentary evidence of the genocide, and there was no one particularly involved in collecting data.
Europe has not remembered the massacres of Roma and Sinti for decades. For example, in Austria, 90 percent of the Roma were exterminated during the war, but the first memorial plaque appeared in the Mauthausen concentration camp only in 1994. In addition to the story of Settela Steinbach, eight other personal tragedies have been well studied.
For example, the fate of Karl Stoica. His family belongs to the Lovar people, an ethnic group of gypsies formed in the territory of modern Hungary. Karl was born in 1931 in Wampersdorf, a small village in Lower Saxony.
Karl Stojko's brothers and himself on Gestapo registration cards in 1944.
In 1940, his father was arrested and sent to Dachau, and then to Mauthausen, where he died. A year later, my grandparents were sent to the camp. Karl himself was arrested on March 3, 1943, when the Reich decided to finally get rid of the gypsies. The boy miraculously managed to survive, and years later he recalled the day of his arrest this way:
“The door opened and the school superintendent, the director and several people in heavy leather coats – Gestapo men – came in. We all had to jump up and shout “Heil Hitler!” I joined in, of course, but then they started whispering to our teacher, who suddenly turned to me and sadly said, “Come on, Carly Stance, you’ll have to go with them now!” I took my things, and a police car and a truck already full of gypsies were waiting for us below.”
At the end of March, together with 2,5 thousand Austrian gypsies, Sinti and Roma, Karl ended up in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp.
Carl's grandparents and parents. Only the mother survived.
He was incredibly lucky - the boy was able to get a job as a waiter in the SS canteen, where he earned food for himself. And for his family - his sister and mother lived in one of the barracks. While waiting for the Soviet Army, the Germans decided to evacuate part of Auschwitz to Buchenwald. For this, the strongest and youngest were selected.
Auschwitz-Birkenau. Barracks have been designated for Gypsies and Sinti.
Gypsy camp Hodonin in Czechoslovakia.
Karl's mother managed to place her son in a group of evacuees, although the boy was not suitable in age. He later recalled his uncle Lulo, who remained forever in Auschwitz:
“My uncle named Lulo died voluntarily, although he could have saved himself. He passed the selection, but his wife and three children remained. As we started to leave, she stood on the other side of the fence, looked at him and said, “Lulo, are you going to leave us here alone?” He managed to get back to camp, stayed with his family, took their hands and watched us leave. He was a hero, but one of those heroes that no one ever talks about."
On August 2, 1944, the Germans exterminated 2 prisoners of the special “Gypsy” barracks at Auschwitz in gas chambers. Karl and his brother Mongo survived, and in 900 they learned that, miraculously, their mother and three sisters had survived.
Paraimos
Gypsies were a big problem for the Nazis. On the one hand, they were direct descendants of those same Aryans from India. On the other hand, they led, as it seemed to the Germans, a shameful lifestyle, wandering, begging and stealing.
As a result, the “scientists” of the Third Reich decided that the Gypsies and Sinti were the product of mixing pure Aryans with lower races. The Scientific Research Institute of Racial Hygiene, opened in Germany back in 1927, was tasked with proving this. The office flourished in 1936, when it plunged into pseudoscientific evidence of the racial superiority of the Aryans. Suffice it to say that Joseph Mengele worked part-time at the institute, supplying the locals with abundant material from Auschwitz.
Eva Justin, the closest assistant to the director of the institute, Eugen Fischer, also worked on gypsy topics. The German woman can rightfully be considered one of the accomplices of the genocide of Roma and Sinti in the Third Reich. The Nazi built her scientific career on proving the inferiority and danger of, in her opinion, inferior races.
The topic of her doctoral dissertation, “Biographical destinies of Roma children and their descendants who were raised in a manner inappropriate for their species,” is indicative. According to the conditions of the experiment, 41 Sinti children were raised in isolation from their parents and the traditions of the people. The Nazi tried to prove that the characteristics of behavior and intelligence of Sinti and Roma are innate and do not depend on the environment.
Amalia Shaikh, one of the few survivors of Eva Justin's research
Sinti children in a Catholic orphanage at a monastery in Mulfingen.
She took a lot of photographs, filmed with a movie camera and conducted psychological tests. Of course, she proved what was necessary, defended her doctoral dissertation, and on May 9, 1944, the children were taken from the orphanage to Auschwitz.
Interestingly, the German Catholic Church was aware of the fate of the Sinti children from Justin's sample, but did nothing to save them. Churchmen in Europe still dispute this shameful accusation.
Almost all of the children in the camp died; among the miraculous survivors was Amalia Shaikh. She remained silent for decades, without disclosing details, because she saw that yesterday’s killers lived quietly in European society. Eva Justin, for example, after the war worked as a psychologist for the Frankfurt police and even helped in the work of the commission on compensation for victims of the Holocaust. She died in 1966 from cancer. Amalia Shaikh spoke about her experiences in old age in 1994.
The forced sterilization law of 1933, the “Nuremberg Laws” and the Magirus-Deutz gas chamber near one of the camps with Gypsies and Sinti.
Robert Ritter, head of the biological research station for genetics of the Imperial Health Administration, as well as the Institute of Criminal Biology under the Gestapo, also escaped retribution.
Ritter coined the term “hidden mental retardation,” which affected Roma and Sinti people. In the 30s, German fears that the disease might spread forced the sterilization of several hundred Roma.
Like his comrade-in-arms Eva Justin, Ritter was fluent in the gypsy language, which endeared him to future victims. The Nazi compiled his own card index, took anthropometric measurements, took blood for racist research and determined who was a gypsy and who was not.
The Gestapo was guided by Ritter's manuals for selecting unfortunates for concentration camps. After the war he lived a full life, worked as a pediatrician and died in 1951. The charges against him were dropped because they were brought by “some gypsies.”
A Sinti prisoner photographed at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1938.
Sinti or Roma children photographed by a German soldier in the Warsaw Ghetto.
In total, the Nazis and their collaborators killed up to half a million Roma and Sinti people in Europe. This is at least half the pre-war number of nationalities. We will never know the exact number of deaths - there was too much hatred and indifference towards the Gypsies in Europe on the part of everyone.
In culture, the terrible period received the name “Paraimos” or “devouring, destroying.” There is a second interpretation, meaning: “desecration, rape.”
Anti-Gypsy sentiment in Europe continued after the war, which is not surprising - no one could stand up for the unfortunate. The Roma did not receive their own statehood, like the Israeli one, and will never receive it again.
The Germans only recognized the genocide in 1982, but never paid decent reparations to anyone. Meanwhile, the tragic phenomena of the Holocaust and paraimos should be considered exclusively on one plane.
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