A Gypsy In Auschwitz: How I Survived the Horrors of the ‘Forgotten Holocaust’

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German doctors performed a variety of experiments on prisoners at Auschwitz. SS doctors tested the efficacy of X-rays as a sterilization device by administering large doses to female prisoners. Carl Clauberg injected chemicals into women's uteruses in an effort to glue them shut. Prisoners were infected with spotted fever for vaccination research and exposed to toxic substances to study the effects. [154] In one experiment, Bayer—then part of IG Farben—paid RM 150 each for 150 female inmates from Auschwitz (the camp had asked for RM 200 per woman), who were transferred to a Bayer facility to test an anesthetic. A Bayer employee wrote to Rudolf Höss: "The transport of 150 women arrived in good condition. However, we were unable to obtain conclusive results because they died during the experiments. We would kindly request that you send us another group of women to the same number and at the same price." The Bayer research was led at Auschwitz by Helmuth Vetter of Bayer/IG Farben, who was also an Auschwitz physician and SS captain, and by Auschwitz physicians Friedrich Entress and Eduard Wirths. [155] Defendants during the Doctors' trial, Nuremberg, 1946–1947 Initially, the Romani were herded into so-called ghettos, including the Warsaw Ghetto (April–June 1942), where they formed a distinct class in relation to the Jews. Ghetto diarist Emmanuel Ringelblum speculated that Romani were sent to the Warsaw Ghetto because the Germans wanted: They did not greet us, nor did they smile; they seemed oppressed not only by compassion but by a confused restraint, which sealed their lips and bound their eyes to the funereal scene. It was that shame we knew so well, the shame that drowned us after the selections, and every time we had to watch, or submit to, some outrage: the shame the Germans did not know, that the just man experiences at another man's crime; the feeling of guilt that such a crime should exist, that it should have been introduced irrevocably into the world of things that exist, and that his will for good should have proved too weak or null, and should not have availed in defence. [295] The term is mostly used by activists and as a result, its usage is unknown to most Roma, including relatives of victims and survivors. [10] Some Russian and Balkan Romani activists protest against the use of the word porajmos. [11] In various dialects, porajmos is synonymous with poravipe which means "violation" and "rape", a term which some Roma consider offensive. János Bársony and Ágnes Daróczi, pioneering organisers of the Romani civil rights movement in Hungary, prefer to use the term Pharrajimos, a Romani word which means "cutting up", "fragmentation", "destruction". They argue against the use of the term porrajmos, saying that it is marhime (unclean, untouchable): "[p]orrajmos is unpronounceable in the Roma community, and thus, it is incapable of conveying the sufferings of the Roma". [12] In 1970, Rosenberg founded the Berlin-Brandenburg State Association of German Sinti and Roma, and he remained chairman until his death. [7] Rosenberg frequently talked about his experiences in German schools. [4]

Fascist regimes that were allies or clients of Nazi Germany implemented their own measures. In the puppet Slovak Republic, “Gypsies” were subject to escalating persecution that left them isolated and impoverished, although no form of internment or deportation was introduced; some fell victim to German reprisals against suspected partisans late in the war. Croatia is notorious for the Jasenovac concentration camp in which some 20,000 Roma were detained and murdered alongside Serbian and Jewish prisoners. Herbet Heuss notes that "[t]his Bavarian law became the model for other German states and even for neighbouring countries." [23]

Forced labour and incarceration

The Polish government-in-exile in London first reported the gassing of prisoners in Auschwitz on 21 July 1942, [250] and reported the gassing of Soviet POWs and Jews on 4 September 1942. [251] In 1943, the Kampfgruppe Auschwitz (Combat Group Auschwitz) was organized within the camp with the aim of sending out information about what was happening. [252] The Sonderkommando buried notes in the ground, hoping they would be found by the camp's liberators. [253] The group also smuggled out photographs; the Sonderkommando photographs, of events around the gas chambers in Auschwitz II, were smuggled out of the camp in September 1944 in a toothpaste tube. [254] The Romani Holocaust or the Romani genocide [4] was the planned effort by Nazi Germany and its World War II allies and collaborators to commit ethnic cleansing and eventually genocide against European Roma and Sinti peoples during the Holocaust era. [5]

Auschwitz I, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, Auschwitz III-Monowitz". Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. Archived from the original on 22 January 2019. Construction of Auschwitz II began the following month, and from 1942 until late 1944 freight trains delivered Jews from all over German-occupied Europe to its gas chambers. Of the 1.3 million people sent to Auschwitz, 1.1million were murdered. The number of victims includes 960,000 Jews (865,000 of whom were gassed on arrival), 74,000 non-Jewish Poles, 21,000 Romani, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war, and up to 15,000 others. [7] Those not gassed were murdered via starvation, exhaustion, disease, individual executions, or beatings. Others were killed during medical experiments. a b "Stigmatized as a "Gypsy" from an Early Age". Arolsen Archives. 2018-08-01 . Retrieved 2020-01-25.

Creative Play

While the genocide of the Jews could not be denied, Romani victims of mass killings in Ukraine were simply “peaceful Soviet civilians” in official parlance. Socialist states were generally more ready to grant rights to Roma, and the drive for reconstruction provided work and upward mobility; many Slovak Roma migrated to the more industrial west of Czechoslovakia, replacing the decimated Czech Roma population. But this “integration” nearly always came at the price of the expectation that they settle down, often in segregated communities, and abandon their traditional ways of life. Kubica, Helena (2009). "Budy". In Megargee, Geoffrey P. (ed.). Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945. Volume 1. Indiana University Press, in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. pp.233–234. ISBN 978-0-253-35328-3. } Astor, Maggie (12 April 2018). "Holocaust Is Fading From Memory, Survey Finds". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 18 April 2018. Stangneth, Bettina (2014). Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 978-0-307-95967-6. The Nazis established the Racial Hygiene and Demographic Biology Research Unit ( Rassenhygienische und Bevölkerungsbiologische Forschungsstelle, Department L3 of the Reich Department of Health) in 1936. Headed by Robert Ritter and his assistant Eva Justin, this unit was mandated to conduct an in-depth study of the "Gypsy question ( Zigeunerfrage)" and to provide data required for formulating a new Reich "Gypsy law". After extensive fieldwork in the spring of 1936, consisting of interviews and medical examinations to determine the racial classification of the Roma, the unit decided that most Romani, whom they had concluded were not of "pure Gypsy blood", posed a danger to German racial purity and should be deported or eliminated. No decision was made regarding the remainder (about 10 percent of the total Romani population of Europe), primarily Sinti and Lalleri tribes living in Germany. Several suggestions were made. Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler suggested deporting the Romani to a remote reservation, as the United States had done to Native Americans, where "pure Gypsies" could continue their nomadic lifestyle unhindered. According to him:

Harassment and economic pressure encouraged Jews to leave Germany; their businesses were denied access to markets, forbidden from advertising in newspapers, and deprived of government contracts. [13] On 15 September 1935, the Reichstag passed the Nuremberg Laws. One, the Reich Citizenship Law, defined as citizens those of "German or related blood who demonstrate by their behaviour that they are willing and suitable to serve the German People and Reich faithfully", and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor prohibited marriage and extramarital relations between those with "German or related blood" and Jews. [14] Piper 2000b, p.132, for more on the corpses, p.140; for 400 prisoners and over 107,000 corpses, see Czech 2000, p.165. The corpses were burned in the nearby incinerators, and the ashes were buried, thrown in the Vistula river, or used as fertilizer. Any bits of bone that had not burned properly were ground down in wooden mortars. [226] Death toll New arrivals, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, May/June 1944 In 1982, West Germany formally recognized that Nazi Germany had committed genocide against the Romani people. [6] [7] In 2011, Poland officially adopted 2 August as a day of commemoration of the Romani genocide. [8]Margarete Kraus, (in the photograph to the left), a Czech Roma survivor of Auschwitz, was a victim of forced medical experiments.