With its permanent exhibition, the Documentation and Cultural Center of German Sinti and Roma in Heidelberg remembers the genocide of some 500,000 Sinti and Roma in Europe. It begins with photos from before 1933, when Hitler came to power in Germany. Here, for example, are the Bambergers, a middle-class family.
Sinti and Roma: Genocide in Europe
Allegiance
During World War II, Sinti and Roma men served what they viewed as their fatherland by joining the Wehrmacht - the Nazi military. Emil Christ (right) is pictured here with his cousin. He was dismissed from duty and sent from the front directly to Auschwitz. Christ survived the concentration camp, but his wife and one of his children did not.
Sinti and Roma: Genocide in Europe
An absurd science
Jews and "gypsies," as Sinti and Roma were derogatorily known, were considered by the Nazis to be racially inferior. So-called eugenicists even attempted to back this pseudo-scientific theory with evidence. In December 1938, Heinrich Himmler, head of the feared Nazi paramilitary organization Schutzstaffel (SS), gave the order for all Sinti and Roma to be taken into custody.
Sinti and Roma: Genocide in Europe
Invasive testing
Throughout Nazi Germany, authorities photographed and collected statistics on members of the Sinti and Roma minority. In this photograph, a plaster model of this man's head is being made. Nearly 24,000 people were examined in this way. The results of the tests were used for dubious "race research" by pseudo-anthropologists.
Sinti and Roma: Genocide in Europe
Betrayal
Most of the Sinti and Roma were practicing Catholics and their names were recorded in the church registries. The Catholic Churches handed these registries over to the authorities so that members of the minority group could be identified. In May 1940, families from this town in southern Germany were deported to ghettos in Nazi-occupied Poland.
Sinti and Roma: Genocide in Europe
No advocate
In the southern German town of Mulfingen, around 40 Sinti children lived in the St. Joseph's Catholic children's home. A researcher misused them for her doctoral thesis on eugenics. After that, 39 of the children were sent to Auschwitz, where all but four were murdered. The directors of the children's home stood by and did nothing.
Sinti and Roma: Genocide in Europe
To Auschwitz
This picture shows Settela Steinbach, a young Sinti girl, as she was being deported from the Westerbork camp in Holland to Auschwitz on May 19, 1944. Settela was murdered in the gas chambers along with her mother and siblings, like nearly all of the 21,000 Roma and Sinti who were deported to Auschwitz.
Sinti and Roma: Genocide in Europe
Victims of eugenics
In Auschwitz, the infamous Dr. Mendele conducted brutal experiments, even on children. Johanna Schmidt, pictured, and her brother died a painful death in June 1943. After the Holocaust, Mengele fled to Argentina, and later to Paraguay and Brazil, where he is said to have died in a bathing accident in 1978.
Sinti and Roma: Genocide in Europe
Behind the front
The majority of the 500,000 Sinti and Roma who were murdered during the Holocaust did not die in concentration camps, but in the occupied regions of eastern Europe. The Nazi paramilitary SS would comb through the areas behind the front, searching for Jews, Sinti and Roma. Often they were killed on the spot and thrown into mass graves, like here in Libau, Latvia, in December 1941.
Sinti and Roma: Genocide in Europe
Freed, but not free
When British soldiers liberated the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp on April 15, 1945, they found more than 50,000 emaciated survivors. Many Sinti and Roma were among them. While a number of the survivors died soon after as a result of the harsh treatment in the camp, others suffered from the physical and emotional trauma their whole lives.
Author: Birgit Görtz / kjb
| Editor : Helen Whittle
