When people think of Nazi atrocities, the Holocaust against Jewish people is rightly at the center of that history. But another community suffered alongside them — the Roma and Sinti people, widely called “Gypsies” at the time. Their persecution was not incidental. It was deliberate, organized, and rooted in the same racial ideology that drove every other Nazi campaign of extermination.
Anti-Roma prejudice in Germany did not begin with the Nazis. For centuries, Roma and Sinti communities were treated as outsiders. Their nomadic traditions and distinct culture made them targets of suspicion and discrimination. But when the Nazi Party took power in 1933, that existing prejudice was absorbed into state policy and transformed into something far more deadly.
Nazi racial ideology placed the so-called “Aryan” race above all others and identified groups deemed racially inferior for removal from German society. Roma and Sinti fell squarely into that category. Beginning in 1938, a wave of repressive laws targeted them directly. These laws restricted their freedom of movement, forced them to register their racial status with authorities, and authorized compulsory sterilization.
Central to this persecution was the Racial Hygiene and Demographic Biology Research Center, a Nazi-run unit tasked with producing “scientific” justification for discrimination. Its director, Dr. Robert Ritter, led field investigations across Germany, cataloguing Roma and Sinti individuals by supposed racial category. His findings were used directly to determine who would be sterilized, interned, or killed.
Ritter’s team conducted interviews and physical examinations across Roma and Sinti communities in 1938, treating human beings as research subjects to be classified and catalogued. The work was framed as science but functioned as targeting.
A 1938 decree on crime prevention gave the Nazis a legal tool to arrest Roma and Sinti en masse without charge. Thousands were rounded up and sent to concentration camps under the pretense of fighting criminality. The following year, the “Decree for the Struggle against the Gypsy Plague” formalized what had already been happening — but now made extermination an explicit policy goal.
By May 1940, deportations to camps in Poland were well underway. In the town of Asperg, Sinti men, women, and children were marched under police guard through the streets to Hohenasperg prison, where they were held before being loaded onto trains heading east.
The camps those trains led to were places of starvation, disease, forced labor, and execution. Auschwitz-Birkenau held one of the largest populations of Roma and Sinti prisoners. Belzec, a dedicated labor and death camp, was another destination. Conditions were brutal by design. The Nazis made no effort to hide the intent behind these camps — they were instruments of elimination.
The Roma and Sinti refer to this genocide as the Porajmos — “the devouring.” Between 220,000 and 500,000 Roma and Sinti were killed during the Holocaust, representing roughly 25% of their entire European population. Entire family lines were wiped out in the space of a few years.
When Allied forces liberated the Nazi camps in 1945, the scale of the horror became visible to the outside world. Buchenwald, Dachau, and Bergen-Belsen were among the camps uncovered in the final months of the war. What soldiers found there — mass graves, starving survivors, execution equipment — was the physical evidence of years of systematic murder.
