NO ROMA IN THE
UN OFFICIAL CEREMONY FOR THE HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE
Jan 25 2014 Jan 25 2014 Srebrenica Roma Holocaust
January 22nd 2014
STATEMENT TO MS. MANN
For too long, proper recognition of the fate of the
Romani victims of the Holocaust has been avoided, both at the national and the
international level. At best, we are grouped separately as “other victims”—
meaning other than the Jewish victims—thus putting us together with, e.g.,
Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, communists and a number of other populations
(not “peoples”) defined by their behavior, politics or religion and not by
genetics.
The Holocaust (Shoah, Khurbn, Porrajmos) was a massive
program of genocide. Just two peoples, Jews and Romanies, were singled out for
obliteration. Just two peoples, Jews and Romanies, were singled out for what
they were born. Just two peoples, Jews and Romanies, were singled out as
targets of a Final Solution, and by 1945 both had lost approximately the same
percentage of their total number in Nazi-occupied Europe.
On March 4th 1936 a Nazi document drafted under the
direction of State Secretary Hans Pfundtner of the Reichs Ministry of the
Interior addressed the creation of a “Gypsy law” (Reich- zigeunergesetz) and
referred to “the introduction of the total solution of the Gypsy problem on
either a national or an international level.”
In his 1938 address to The German Association for
Racial Research, Dr. Adolph Würth of the Racial Hygiene Research Unit said “the
Gypsy question is a racial question for us today. In the same way that the
National Socialist state has solved the Jewish question, it will also have to
settle the Gypsy question once and for all. The race biological research on
Gypsies is an unconditional prerequisite for the Final Solution of the Gypsy
Question.”
In March the same year a letter to the “Imperial Leader
of the SS” from Dr. Werner Best, Head of the Nazi Security Police, addressed
the “initiat[ion of the] Final Solution to the Gypsy problem from a racial
point of view.” The first official publicly-posted Party statement to refer to
the Final Solution of the Gypsy Question (the endgültige Lösung der
Zigeunerfrage) was issued at that time signed by Himmler, who also ordered the
Bureau of Romani Affairs to be moved from Munich to Berlin.
In his post-war memoirs, SS Officer Perry Broad of the
political division at Auschwitz wrote that “it was the will of the all-powerful
Führer to have the Gypsies disappear from the face of the earth” (“es war der
Wille des allmächtigen Reichsführers, alle Zigeuner von der Erde verschwinden
zu lassen”), and that “the Central Office knew it was Hitler’s aim to wipe out
all the Gypsies without exception” (“das Zentralbüro wusste, dass es Hitlers
Ziel war, alle Zigeuner ohne Ausnahme auszulöschen”).
“The final resolution, as formulated by Himmler, in his
‘Decree for Basic Regulations to Resolve the Gypsy Question as Required by the
Nature of Race,’ of December 8th, 1938, meant that preparations were to begin
for the complete extermination of the Sinti and Roma” (emphasis added). In 1939
Johannes Behrendt of the Office of Racial Hygiene issued a brief stating that
“[a]ll Romanies should be treated as hereditarily sick; the only solution is
elimination. The aim should therefore be the elimination without hesitation of
this defective element in the population.”
A conference on racial policy and to decide, inter
alia, upon the Final Solution of the Gypsy Question, was held in Berlin on 21st
September 1939 and organized by Reinhard Heydrich, who was Head of the Reich
Main Security Office and the leading organizational architect of the Nazis’ Final
Solution of the Jewish Question. Four issues were decided: the concentration of
Jews in towns, their relocation to Poland, the removal of 30,000 Romanies to
Poland, and the systematic deportation of Jews to German-incorporated
territories using goods trains. An express letter sent by the Reich Main
Security Office on 17th October 1939 to its local agents mentioned that the
‘Gypsy Question will shortly be regulated throughout the territory of the
Reich.’ At about this time, Adolf Eichmann made the recommendation that the
‘Gypsy Question’ be solved simultaneously with the ‘Jewish Question.’
On January 24th 1940 a memorandum from Leonardo Conti,
Secretary of State for Health in the Ministry of the Interior, which was sent
simultaneously to the Main Office of the Security Police, to the Kripo
headquarters, and to the Reich Health Department in Berlin, read “It is known
that the lives of Romanies and part Romanies are to be regulated by a Gypsy law
(Zigeunergesetz) . . . I firmly believe, now as before, that the final solution
of the Gypsy problem can only be achieved through the sterilization of full and
part Romanies.”
On July 31st 1941 Heydrich also included the Romanies
in his ‘final solution’ shortly after the German invasion of the USSR, ordering
the Einsatzkommandos “to kill all Jews, Romanies and mental patients.”
Complying with this, the senior SS officer and Chief of Police for the East,
Dr. Alfred Landgraf, informed the Reich Commissioner for the East, Hinrich
Lohse, of this inclusion of the Romanies in the ‘final solution,’ and on
December 24th 1941 issued the order that the Romanies “should be given the same
treatment as the Jews.”
Himmler signed the order dispatching Germany’s Sinti
and Roma to Auschwitz on December 16th 1942. The ‘Final Solution’ of the ‘Gypsy
Question’ had begun.
Since the world seems not to have learnt the terrible
lesson of the Holocaust, focus is increasingly on genocide, its early warning
signs, and its prevention. I am a state commissioner with the Texas Holocaust
and Genocide Commission, and we have an active program of bringing genocide
education to the schools. Indeed, in the late 1970s, the advisory board
responsible for detailing the mission of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
here in our own country stated that “This museum belongs at the center of
American life because America, as a democratic civilization, is the enemy of
racism and its ultimate expression, genocide.” UN statements addressing
genocide are legion.
My own people were the victims of attempted genocide in
the Holocaust, as were Jews, “for the same reasons using the same methods,” as
Miriam Novitch of the Ghetto Fighters’ House in Israel wrote in 1968. Despite
these facts, we remain woefully under-represented, and continue to be sidelined
in Holocaust commemoration. We still wait for an explanation for this
imbalance.
Sincerely,
signature
Ian Hancock
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