Romani Holocaust

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]

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Romani Holocaust
Part of World War II
European Roma and Sinti civilians in Asperg, Nazi Germany are rounded up for deportation by Nazi German authorities on 22 May 1940. Colourised.
Location	Nazi Germany and its occupied territories
Date	1935–1945
Target	European Roma and Sinti peoples
Attack type	Genocide, ethnic cleansing, mass murder
Deaths	At least 150,000. Other estimates give figures such as 500,000[1] 800,000[2] or even as high as 1.5 million.[3]: 383–396
Perpetrators	Nazi Germany and its allies
Motive	Antiziganism, Germanisation, Pan-Germanism

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Under Adolf Hitler, a supplementary decree to the Nuremberg Laws was issued on 26 November 1935, classifying the Romani people (or Roma) as "enemies of the race-based state", thereby placing them in the same category as the Jews. Thus, the fate of the Roma in Europe paralleled that of the Jews in the Holocaust.[1]

Historians estimate that between 250,000 and 500,000 Romani and Sinti were killed by Nazi Germans and their collaborators—25% to over 50% of the estimate of slightly fewer than 1 million Roma in Europe at the time.[1] Later research cited by Ian Hancock estimated the death toll to be at about 1.5 million out of an estimated 2 million European Roma.[3]

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]

Within the Nazi German state, first persecution, then extermination, was aimed primarily at sedentary "Gypsy mongrels". In December 1942, Heinrich Himmler ordered the deportation of all Roma from the Greater Germanic Reich, and most were sent to the specially established Gypsy concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Other Roma were deported there from the Nazi-occupied Western European territories. Approximately 21,000 of the 23,000 European Roma and Sinti sent there did not survive. In areas outside the reach of systematic registration, e.g., in the German-occupied areas of Eastern and Southeastern Europe, the Roma who were most threatened were those who, in the German judgment, were "vagabonds", though some were actually refugees or displaced persons. Here, they were killed mainly in massacres perpetrated by the German military and police formations as well as by the Schutzstaffel (SS) task forces, and in armed resistance against the Nazi German occupation of Europe.[1]