[Q] Gypsies in the Holocaust

[lemit]

This is the time of year when we all are reminded of the Holocaust, which we should never forget the rest of the year.

 

I have a question about the Holocaust. We all know the number 6,000,000. (I didn't write "million" because I wanted each zero and each comma to be a reminder in itself.)

 

In 1973, the BBC aired the series "The World At War." I haven't recently looked at it, but there's something I remember from then, which I haven't seen confirmed anywhere else but believe to be true.

 

"The World At War" says the total number of human beings killed in the Holocaust was 13,000,000, including 5,000,000 Gypsies, and that the Holocaust pretty much wiped out all the Gypsies in Europe.

 

Gypsies I got acquainted with in 1974 were surprised but not shocked to hear that number. By nature they are not a record-keeping people (one of the qualities I love about them), but when given that information, they remembered stories passed down from relatives after WWII and thought the number might be right.

 

This is a question that has nagged at me, as I have suggested, for over 30 years. I'd appreciate documentation one way or the other.

 

Thanks.

 

--lemit

[Thunderbird]

"Gypsies," or the "Roma" as they prefer to be called, are an ethnic group which originated in India (their language-Romany-is directly descended from Sanskrit) which for unknown reasons took to a wandering life*style in the late middle ages. Eventually they reached Europe and became part of the ethnic mix of many countries, contributing not a little in areas such a music and the arts.

 

Gypsies in the Holocaust

[CraigD]

"The World At War" says the total number of human beings killed in the Holocaust was 13,000,000, including 5,000,000 Gypsies, and that the Holocaust pretty much wiped out all the Gypsies in Europe.

There is no credible doubt, I believe, that a terrible fraction of all Romani people were killed in the Holocaust.

 

I believe 5,000,000 is several times overstated. Sources such as those given in the Wikipedia article “The Holocaust” put the number of Romani killed between 220,000 and 1,500,000, noting that this number is especially difficult to estimate, because Romani were and continue to be secretive and difficult to count. A 200,000 to 1,500,000 estimate seems more reasonable to me, as the best modern estimates of the present-day Romani population give a high range of about 10,000,000, which, assuming a reasonable 2% annual growth, would put their 1938 population at about 2,500,000. Some scholars have estimated the 1938 Romani population in Europe to be as low as 700,000. By nearly any estimate, it seems unlikely that there were 5,000,000 Romani in Europe ca. 1938, so that many couldn’t possibly have been killed.

 

Many scholars conclude, and I agree, that, regardless of the absolute number of Romani killed, the fraction of their total population killed was terrible “almost certainly exceed[ing] that of Jewish victims”.

 

Many people of many ethnic, religious, and other classifications were killed in the Holocaust. IMHO, it’s more important to concentrate of the wrongness of the systematic killing of any people than the classifications used to justify or conduct it.

 

I think it especially important to emphasize that, much as we would like to comfort ourselves that humankind has learned a lesson and will never permit such killing to happen again, mass killings on the scale of the Holocaust did not end in 1945, but continue to occur. (see the wikipedia article “Genocides in history”)

[enorbet2]

It may also be worthwhile to remember the attempt at Armenian genocide that not only predated The Holocaust but was and apparently still is used as a model in that getting away with it, with few countries even officially recognizing it occurred, including the USA, emboldened monsters like Hitler, who reportedly said "Who remembers the Armenians?" when asked if he thought the Nazis could get away with similar genocide.

 

FWIW and for those that deny the veracity of the Holocaust, my Father, an Irish Catholic, told me many times he saw the stacked bodies of thousands with his own eyes and that nearby villagers even when "reminded" of the stench said they didn't know it was a death camp.

[lemit]

In answer to a couple of people, the "World at War" series, after saying that five million "Gypsies" were killed, adds that that was the essentially the total population in Europe.

 

There are many other things about The Holocaust and other holocausts I want to discuss elsewhere.

 

--lemit