Happy to report the discovery of this Roma Archive blog that appears already archived as of 2019. Finally on my radar ;) Useful nevertheless. Many interesting articles and studies. Some excerpts pasted below. Read the full article after clicking on the link
https://blog.romarchive.eu/auschwitz-and-the-testimony-of-the-sinti-and-roma-de-en/
Auschwitz and the Testimony of Sinti and Roma
Karola Fings
The historian Karola Fings
recently wrote the book “Sinti and Roma. History of a minority” [Sinti
and Roma. History of a Minority] published by C.H. Beck in the series
“Knowledge”. She is the curator for Romarchive’s project “Voices of the Victims”, featuring early Sinti and Roma testimonials which document Nazi persecution in 20 European countries. In the following text, she describes the testimony of Sinti and Roma at the Auschwitz trial.
“There is nothing you
can compare Auschwitz to. If you say 'the Hell of Auschwitz', that's no
exaggeration. I think it's not enough for me to say that I’ve dreamt of
Auschwitz a thousand times since then, of that horrible time where
hunger and death ruled. I was a young girl when they brought me to
Auschwitz. When I left the camp I was sick, and I am still sick today.”[1]
Elisabeth Guttenberger,
excerpt from an authorised version of an interview for the TV
broadcaster Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR), 1962
Born in Stuttgart in 1926, Elisabeth Guttenberger, quoted above, was
deported to the concentration and death camp in Auschwitz in March 1943.
Like the survivor Max Friedrich, pictured together with his wife Grete
in the photo, Ms Guttenberger was one of six witnesses of the Sinti and
Roma minority whose testimony substantiated the Nazi crimes and the
Holocaust in the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt am Main, regarded by many
as a historic milestone.
Every year on 27 January, when we remember the victims of National
Socialism, the survivors of the concentration and death camp
Auschwitz-Birkenau are frequently the centre of public interest. On 27
January 1945, the Red Army liberated several parts of the Auschwitz camp
where more than one million people, most of them Jewish, were murdered.
In 1996, the German Federal President Roman Herzog declared 27 January
as the day of commemoration for all victims of the Nazi regime, and in
2005, the United Nations officially designed it as the “International
Holocaust Remembrance Day”. Today, there are only a few living survivors
who can still testify to the crimes that were committed there. But
their voices are heard, their stories are appreciated, and they
themselves now receive attention and empathy.
But this wasn’t the case for many decades – and particularly so for
the Sinti and Roma survivors of Nazi persecution. After 1945, the
Federal Republic of Germany did not recognise their suffering as
“racially motivated” persecution. Instead, the former perpetrators read
to convince the courts that members of this minority were “inferior” or
alleged “spies” who were deported for “crime-preventative” reasons. This
position was largely accepted by the general public which meant that
most of the crimes and their perpetrators went unpunished. The survivors
and their relatives continued to suffer discrimination, received no
acknowledgement of their anguish, and as a result, many of them were
denied compensation.
The civil rights movements of the Sinti und Roma, which have been
active in Germany and on the international stage since the 1970s,
finally compelled the German government to acknowledge the genocide
committed against the minority. The Memorial to the Sinti and Roma
Victims of National Socialism, which officially opened in Berlin in
2012, is the most visible result of this long struggle for recognition.
Throughout the debate, the testimony of survivors played a large role.
Even among many of the Sinti and Roma survivors, it wasn’t until the TV
series “Holocaust” aired in 1979 that they recalled their own suffering
from Nazi persecution, which they had suppressed in order to get on with
their lives. Against the background of this growing historical
awareness of the Holocaust in the majority society, and consequently,
the fate of the “forgotten victims”, a grosslong withfied activities of
the civil rights movements to document the history of persecution, a
slew of reports, documentaries, biographies and autobiographies were
published starting in the 1980s w have been very .[2]
All the more remarkable are the early testimonies by Sinti and Roma,
presented in a social atmosphere of rejection and denial of the crimes.
It is almost impossible to imagine what it meant for the victims to
raise their voices against this wall of silence. The Auschwitz trial was
one of the few legal proceedings in Germany, in which Nazi crimes
against the Sinti and Roma were litigated – albeit only marginally.[3]
The trial itself came about thanks to the commitment of the Hessian
Attorney General Fritz Bauer who – facing heavy resistance in Frankfurt
am Main and to an extent never seen before– initiated criminal .in
crimes committed in Auschwitz.[4]
On 7 October 1963, the Frankfurt District Court began proceedings
against 22 accused individuals which, following testimony from 360
witnesses, concluded with the announcement of the verdicts on 20 August
1965. Most of the accused were sentenced to life imprisonment or shorter
prison terms for having committed murder or abetting joint murder.
There were also three acquittals.Among the accused were six former SS
officers who were also implicated in murdering the Sinti and Roma.
Starting in March 1943, some 23,000 men, women and children were rounded
up in the German empire, Austria and the German-occupied Poland,
Czechoslovakia, Belgium and the Netherlands, and deported to a special
section of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. The conditions in the camp were
so horrendous that within a matter of months, most of them died of
hunger, illness or violent crimes.
“The worst thing,”
according to Elisabeth Guttenberger in her report, “what the hunger. The
hygienic conditions were undebatable. There was hardly any soap or
possibilities to wash up. (...) The children died first. Day and night,
they cried for bread; soon they all starved to death. (...) In our work
brigade we had to do everything in double time. To SS Block Leader rode a
bicycle alongside us. If a woman collapsed because she was too weak, he
would beat her with a baton. Many died as a result of this physical
abuse. (...) The SS Camp Doctor, who was in charge of the Gypsy camp,
was named Dr Mengele. He was one of the most dreaded camp doctors at
Auschwitz. In addition to everything the SS doctors were guilty of at
Auschwitz, he carried out experiments on the handicapped and twins. He
also used my cousins, who were twins, as “guinea pigs”. (...) I lost
about 30 relatives in Auschwitz. My siblings and my father literally
starved to death within the first few months. My youngest brother was 13
years old. He had to carry stones until he had been reduced to a mere
skeleton. So He starved to death. And finally, my mother starved to
death.”[5]
The only ones who had a chance of surviving were those who were
transferred to other camps to do forced labour. Among them was Elisabeth
Guttenberger, who was transported to the Ravensbrück concentration camp
on 1 August 1944, and then sent further to a subcamp of the Flossenbürg
concentration camp. The remaining 3,000 or so Sinti and Roma were
murdered in the gas chambers at Birkenau in the night of 2 to 3 August
1944.
