The record
Sources & historical references
Every historical claim on this site is referenced to published scholarship or to a museum collection. This page gathers those references in one place.
- Works cited
- 9
- Citations
- 52
- Covering
- 23 dated entries on the history of the Samudaripen, and 25 named individuals on the Wall of Remembrance.
How we source
What has to be true before it goes up
A memorial site is worth only the confidence a reader can place in it. These are the rules the historical content is written to, set down where you can hold us to them.
01
Every claim carries its source
If a statement cannot be referenced to published scholarship or to a museum collection, it does not go on the site. Each timeline entry prints its citation beneath it; each name on the Wall of Remembrance prints the collection that documents the person.
02
Ranges, not the most striking number
Where scholarship disagrees on a figure, the site gives the range and says that it is a range. The number of Roma and Sinti murdered is the clearest case: published estimates generally fall between 220,000 and 500,000, and we do not pick a point inside that for effect.
03
The language of the record
Institutions, decrees and camps are named as the documents name them, with the German or Romanian in brackets — Zigeunerfamilienlager, Auschwitz-Erlass — so that a reader can follow a claim back into an archive catalogue and find it. Quotations and the titles of cited works are reproduced as published, even where their vocabulary is not the Centre's own.
04
Silence is described, not filled
For much of occupied Eastern Europe there is no record, because people were shot at the roadside and no register was kept. Where the documentation stops, the site says so rather than estimating across the gap.
Works cited
Every reference, and what it supports
This list is generated from the citations on the site itself, so it cannot fall out of step with them. Each entry links to the scholarship or the collection, and then to the statements here that rest on it.
01
02
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Roma (Gypsies)” series, Holocaust Encyclopedia (opens in a new tab)
Cited 16 times
- 1899 — A police index of Roma families
- 16 July 1926 — The Law for the Combating of Gypsies, Travellers and the Work-Shy
- 14 July 1933 — Compulsory sterilisation becomes law
- 15 September 1935 — The Nuremberg Laws are extended to Roma
- July 1936 — The Olympic clearance
- 1936 — The Racial Hygiene Research Unit
- 8 December 1938 — “Combating the Gypsy Plague”
- May 1940 — The first mass deportation
- From June 1941 — Shot alongside Jewish neighbours
- Autumn 1941 — Hostage shootings
- November 1941 – January 1942 — Five thousand from Burgenland
- 1941–1945 — Near-total destruction
- June 1942 – 1944 — The Transnistria deportations
- 16 December 1942 — The Auschwitz decree
- 26 February 1943 — Section BIIe
- 1945–1982 — Compensation refused
03
04
05
06
Erich Hackl, Abschied von Sidonie (1989)
Cited once
07
08
09
Collections
Where this history is held
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (opens in a new tab)
Its Holocaust Encyclopedia series on Roma and Sinti is an accessible scholarly overview in English, and the starting point we send teachers to.
Documentation and Cultural Centre of German Sinti and Roma (opens in a new tab)
Heidelberg. Founded by the German Sinti and Roma civil rights movement, and the principal collection on the persecution in Germany and on the forty-year fight for recognition that followed it.
Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum (opens in a new tab)
Holds the surviving registers of the Zigeunerfamilienlager in section BIIe, including the camp books that record names, numbers and dates of death.
Herinneringscentrum Kamp Westerbork (opens in a new tab)
The Netherlands. Holds the transport records from Westerbork, and the research that identified the girl in the cattle-wagon doorway as Anna Maria “Settela” Steinbach.
Holocaust Memorial Day Trust (opens in a new tab)
The United Kingdom's national body for 27 January. The Centre's commemorations appear on their programme.
Roma Support Group (opens in a new tab)
A Roma-led organisation in the United Kingdom working on the present-day conditions this history runs into.
On the figures
220,000to 500,000
The range within which published scholarly estimates of the Roma and Sinti dead generally fall.
No figure on this site is presented as settled when it is not. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum describes the number of Roma and Sinti murdered as “hundreds of thousands”; other published estimates run higher. We give the range, name the disagreement, and link to the scholarship that produced it.
The imprecision has a cause, and the cause is part of the history. Roma and Sinti people were frequently killed without registration — shot at the edge of a village, buried where they fell — and much of the documentation that did exist was destroyed. Where the record stops, we say that it stops.
Found something wrong?
If a citation is incomplete, a date is out, or you know of a source we should be reading, we would rather hear it than not.