Samudaripen
The Roma and Sinti Holocaust
The persecution and murder of Roma and Sinti people in Europe, 1933–1945 — the Samudaripen. How it was built in police registries, how it was carried out, and how long recognition took.
- Period covered
- 1899–2015
- Dated entries
- 23
- Sourcing
- Every entry carries a citation. Where scholarship disagrees on a figure, the range is given.
Language
What to call it
Roma and Sinti communities use several names for the Holocaust. Samudaripen — 'mass killing' — is the term used most widely by Romani organisations, and the one this Centre uses.
Porrajmos, 'the devouring', is also encountered in English-language scholarship. Many Romani speakers avoid it, because in some dialects the word carries an obscene second meaning. It appears here only where a source uses it.
Kali Traš, 'the black fear', is used in some communities. Where survivors or their families use a particular word, we keep theirs.
Scholarship and resolutions cited on this site are quoted as they were published, including where their titles or their wording use words the Centre does not use in its own writing.
How many were killed
220,000to 500,000
The range within which published scholarly estimates of the Roma and Sinti dead generally fall.
There is no agreed figure, and there never will be a precise one. Roma and Sinti were often killed without registration, shot at the roadside or in mass graves, and many of the records that did exist were destroyed.
Published scholarly estimates for the number of Roma and Sinti murdered across Europe generally fall between 220,000 and 500,000. Some historians argue for a substantially higher total. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum describes the toll as 'hundreds of thousands'.
In several countries the proportional loss was near-total. Roma communities in occupied Croatia and in parts of the occupied Soviet Union were effectively destroyed.
Timeline
Registration, then confinement, then killing
Dates and figures below are drawn from published scholarship and museum collections. Sources are listed with each entry.
Registration
1899–1932
Before any Nazi decree, German police forces had spent three decades building card indexes of Roma and Sinti families. The Holocaust began with paperwork.
1899
Munich
A police index of Roma families
Bavarian police establish an information service on Roma and Sinti under Alfred Dillmann, collecting names, photographs, fingerprints and family relationships. In 1905 Dillmann publishes the Zigeuner-Buch, a printed register of more than three thousand people. Nothing in it is secret and nothing in it is illegal. It is simply a list, and it is still in use forty years later.
16 July 1926
Bavaria
The Law for the Combating of Gypsies, Travellers and the Work-Shy
Bavaria passes a law (Gesetz zur Bekämpfung von Zigeunern, Landfahrern und Arbeitsscheuen) requiring Roma and Sinti to register with the police and to carry identity papers. Those who cannot show regular employment may be sent to a workhouse for up to two years. Other German states adopt comparable measures.
The Nazi state
1933–1938
Sterilisation law, racial research, municipal camps and a national registration order. Roma and Sinti were classified, photographed and confined years before the first deportation.
14 July 1933
Germany
Compulsory sterilisation becomes law
The Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases (Gesetz zur Verhütung erbkranken Nachwuchses) permits the forced sterilisation of people diagnosed with a range of supposed hereditary conditions. Roma and Sinti are sterilised under it in large numbers, frequently on a diagnosis of “feeble-mindedness” recorded by a doctor who has met them once.
15 September 1935
Nuremberg
The Nuremberg Laws are extended to Roma
The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour is written against Jews, but supplementary decrees and official commentary during 1935 and 1936 place Roma in the same category of “alien blood” (artfremdes Blut). Marriage between Roma and non-Roma Germans becomes a criminal offence, and Roma lose the vote.
July 1936
Berlin
The Olympic clearance
Weeks before the Olympic Games open, Berlin police clear Roma and Sinti from the city and confine around six hundred people to a site at Marzahn, between a sewage works and a cemetery. It is called a Rastplatz — a resting place. There is one water tap and two toilets. Municipal camps follow in Cologne, Frankfurt, Düsseldorf and elsewhere, and become the collection points for later deportations.
1936
Berlin
The Racial Hygiene Research Unit
Dr Robert Ritter is appointed to head the Racial Hygiene and Demographic Biology Research Unit at the Reich Health Office. Ritter and his assistant Eva Justin travel to camps, settlements and prisons, take blood samples and skull measurements, and compile genealogies. They produce “racial diagnoses” on roughly 24,000 Roma and Sinti. These files are later used to decide who is deported. After the war Ritter is investigated and never tried; Justin returns to work as a psychologist.
8 December 1938
Germany
“Combating the Gypsy Plague”
Heinrich Himmler issues a decree (Bekämpfung der Zigeunerplage) ordering that all Roma and Sinti in the Reich be registered and classified by racial criteria, and that the question be settled “on the basis of race”. Registration is compulsory from the age of six.
War and mass murder
1939–1942
With the invasion of Poland and then the Soviet Union, registration became deportation and deportation became shooting. Allied and occupied states carried out killings of their own.
May 1940
Germany to occupied Poland
The first mass deportation
Around 2,500 Roma and Sinti are taken from western and north-western Germany and deported to occupied Poland. Families are given very little notice. Most are put to forced labour; many are later murdered.
From June 1941
Occupied Soviet territory
Shot alongside Jewish neighbours
After the invasion of the Soviet Union, Einsatzgruppen, police battalions and Wehrmacht units shoot Roma in the places where they are found — at the edge of villages, in ravines, in anti-tank ditches. Roma were among those murdered at Babyn Yar. Because these killings were frequently not recorded by name, or not recorded at all, the number of Romani dead in the occupied Soviet Union cannot be established.
Autumn 1941
Occupied Serbia
Hostage shootings
German occupation forces shoot Romani men in mass reprisal killings under a hostage policy that counts Roma, with Jews, as the first to be taken. Women and children are held at the Sajmište camp outside Belgrade.
November 1941 – January 1942
Burgenland to Łódź and Chełmno
Five thousand from Burgenland
Around 5,000 Roma and Sinti, most of them from Burgenland in Austria, are deported to a sealed-off section of the Łódź ghetto. Typhus breaks out almost immediately and hundreds die within weeks. In January 1942 those still alive are taken to Chełmno (Kulmhof) and murdered in gas vans.
1941–1945
Independent State of Croatia
Near-total destruction
The Ustaša regime interns and murders the Romani population of the state, most of them at the Jasenovac camp complex. Estimates of the dead vary widely and the records are poor, but historians agree that the Romani community of Croatia and Bosnia was almost entirely destroyed.
June 1942 – 1944
Romania to Transnistria
The Transnistria deportations
The Antonescu regime deports around 25,000 Roma from Romania across the Dniester into Transnistria. They are left in villages and open ground without shelter, food or medicine through two winters. At least 11,000 die of starvation, exposure and typhus, or are shot. Romania acknowledged the deportations in the report of its own international commission in 2004.
Auschwitz-Birkenau
1942–1944
Roma and Sinti from across Europe were held as families in section BIIe. Around 23,000 people were registered there. Around 21,000 did not survive it.
16 December 1942
Berlin
The Auschwitz decree
Himmler signs the order (Auschwitz-Erlass) for Roma and Sinti in the Reich to be deported to Auschwitz. The implementing instructions issued in January 1943 specify which categories of people are to be seized, and how.
26 February 1943
Auschwitz-Birkenau
Section BIIe
The first transports reach Birkenau. Roma and Sinti are not separated on arrival but held together as families in section BIIe, the Zigeunerfamilienlager. Around 23,000 men, women and children from across occupied Europe are registered there. There is no sanitation to speak of; noma, typhus and starvation kill continuously. Around 21,000 of those registered die.
From May 1943
Auschwitz-Birkenau
Experiments on children
Josef Mengele takes up duties as a camp doctor with responsibility for the family camp. He selects Romani children, particularly twins, for experiments. Survivors' testimony describes injections, surgery without anaesthetic, and the killing of children afterwards for dissection.
16 May 1944
Auschwitz-Birkenau
The family camp refuses
The SS surround section BIIe intending to liquidate it. The prisoners have been warned. They do not come out of the barracks; they hold tools, stones and lengths of pipe. The SS withdraw and the liquidation is postponed. 16 May is now marked as Romani Resistance Day.
2 August 1944
Auschwitz-Birkenau
The liquidation of the family camp
In the weeks before, several thousand Roma and Sinti judged fit for labour are transferred to other camps. On the night of 2 August the SS surround what is left of section BIIe. Around 4,300 people — most of them children, the elderly and the sick — are taken to the gas chambers and murdered. 2 August is Roma Holocaust Memorial Day.
Silence, then recognition
1945–today
For nearly forty years West Germany refused compensation on the grounds that Roma had been persecuted as criminals, not as a race. Recognition came slowly, and is still incomplete.
1945–1982
Federal Republic of Germany
Compensation refused
West German authorities reject compensation claims from Roma and Sinti survivors on the grounds that they were detained as criminals and “asocials” rather than for reasons of race, and that measures taken before 1943 were ordinary policing. A 1956 Federal Court of Justice ruling entrenches this position. Some of the officials assessing the claims had worked on the racial files that produced the deportations.
April 1980
Dachau
Hunger strike at the camp
Twelve Sinti and Roma civil rights activists begin a hunger strike on the site of the former Dachau concentration camp, demanding that the murder of Sinti and Roma be recognised as racial persecution and that surviving racial files held by the police be released. The action draws international attention to a history that has had almost none.
March 1982
Bonn
Recognition, thirty-seven years late
Chancellor Helmut Schmidt states publicly that the Sinti and Roma were persecuted on racial grounds. The statement opens the way to compensation for survivors — most of whom are by then elderly, and many of whom have already died.
24 October 2012
Berlin
A memorial beside the Reichstag
The Memorial to the Sinti and Roma of Europe Murdered under National Socialism opens in the Tiergarten. Dani Karavan's design is a dark circular pool; a single fresh flower is placed on a stone at its centre each day.
15 April 2015
Strasbourg
2 August recognised across Europe
The European Parliament adopts a resolution recognising what was done to Roma and Sinti as historical fact, and designating 2 August as European Roma Holocaust Memorial Day. The same resolution records that anti-Gypsyism remains widespread in Europe.
Why the record is thin
The paperwork stops where the killing was quickest
Holocaust scholarship rests heavily on the archive the perpetrators kept. For Roma and Sinti that archive is uneven. In Germany the registration files are exhaustive — the racial-hygiene unit measured skulls and drew family trees. In the occupied Soviet Union there is often nothing at all: people were shot at the edge of a village by men who filed a number, if that.
A second silence followed. For nearly forty years, West German compensation offices treated the persecution as policing rather than as racial persecution, which meant survivors had little reason to make statements and no institution gathering them. The generation who could have testified in the 1950s testified in the 1990s, or not at all.
This is why the Centre collects from families. What is missing from the public archive is, in a good number of cases, in somebody’s house.
In 2015, the European Parliament formally recognised the Holocaust of Roma and Sinti and established 2 August as European Roma Holocaust Memorial Day.
European Parliament · Resolution of 15 April 2015
Where to read further
- USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia — Roma (Gypsies) series (opens in a new tab)
- Documentation and Cultural Centre of German Sinti and Roma (opens in a new tab)
- Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum (opens in a new tab)
- Holocaust Memorial Day Trust (United Kingdom) (opens in a new tab)
- Roma Support Group (opens in a new tab)
The history is one half of it. The archive is where the people are.