In the immediate postwar period, war crimes against Roma were not prosecuted. Survivors struggled to get recognition and compensation for the persecution they experienced. Although there is now a greater awareness of the atrocities committed against the Roma, the struggle for recognition continues. It includes materials collected by academic researcher Donald Kenrick and activist and researcher Grattan Puxon in the late s as part of the first attempt to systematically document the genocide against the Roma.
One story featured in the exhibition is that of Hans Braun , a German Sinti man. Braun survived forced labour service and incarceration in Auschwitz. In the s, he gave a testimony of his experiences, a copy of which is held by the Library. In the early years following the war, compensation was often denied to Roma and Sinti victims on this basis, despite extensive evidence that they were in fact persecuted as part of a campaign of targeted and ultimately genocidal racism.
As part of the development of these ideas, Roma were subject to a massive programme of pseudo-scientific investigation. Margarete Kraus, in the photograph to the left , a Czech Roma survivor of Auschwitz, was a victim of forced medical experiments. In two years, from to , more than 50, persons were killed in this program.
In , the Bishop of Muenster protested these gassings, and they were stopped. However, the victims had served their purpose as guinea pigs in the refinement of the use of gas for the mass killing of Jews and Gypsies.
The lessons learned in these earlier executions were used in the death camps. In Mein Kampf, Hitler had made known his antipathy toward Christianity. Reverence would be shown to Hitler and not to the traditional symbols of Christianity. Statues of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary would be banished and, in their place, the Fuehrer's photographs would be displayed.
In place of the banished cross would stand the swastika. Both the priests and ministers who spoke out against the Nazis were labeled "political opponents," and "enemies of the state. This isolation was to keep the clergy from giving solace or rites to the rest of the prisoners.
In the camps, the clergy, like other inmates, were used as slave laborers and in medical experiments. The handful of Catholic priests in Germany who protested the actions of the Nazis was also punished.
For example, Provost Bernard Lichtenberg of St. Hedwig's Cathedral in Berlin was arrested, imprisoned for two years, rearrested at the end of his sentence, and shipped to Dachau.
He died en route. In , when Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber of Munich, a leader of the Catholic hierarchy, protested the persecution of Jews, the Nazis attempted to burn down his house.
Most clergymen either did not read Mein Kampf or ignored its foreshadowing of things to come, and thus the majority of Germany's religious leaders supported Hitler's nationalistic ambitions. Yet there were those among the religious community who did challenge the Nazis.
Out of 17, Protestant clergy, three thousand were Evangelical Lutherans who opposed the Nazis. Some of the members of the group were arrested and sent to concentration camps-never to return. Others worked quietly in their opposition. Some spoke out because of Hitler's attacks on the church, and a few because of his actions against the Jews.
Jehovah's Witnesses, though few in number, also were seen as a threat to the Nazis. Not only did they oppose war and refuse to fight, but they also urged others not to serve. In addition, Witnesses refused to salute the flag or to say "Heil Hitler. Not only the parents, but also their eleven children, were punished for being Jehovah's Witnesses.
In , when the father, Franz Kusserow, refused to renounce his religion, he was put in jail until the end of the war. Two sons were executed because they refused induction into the army. Another son was incarcerated in Dachau, where he contracted tuberculosis and died shortly after the war.
The three youngest children were sent to reform school for "re-education. Kusserow and the older girls were taken either to prison or to concentration camps. The Gypsies, like the Jews, were condemned by the Nazis to complete annihilation for being racially impure, socially undesirable, and "mentally defective. In , a plan to put thirty thousand Gypsies aboard ships and sink the ships in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean was abandoned, but many Gypsies were sterilized under a law that permitted the sterilization of "mental defectives.
At least half a million Gypsies were murdered by the Germans in the gas chambers, in experiments, or in general round-ups. Although the Nazis declared Polish people Untermenschen, or subhumans, thousands of Polish children who were blond haired and blue eyed were separated from their families and sent to Germany to be raised in German homes as Aryans. The dark-haired, dark-eyed sisters and brothers remaining in Poland were to be taught only simple arithmetic, to sign their names, and to offer obedience to their German masters.
Their purpose in life was to serve as slaves for the German empire. Anyone caught trying to give further instruction to Polish children was to be punished. Despite the ban on education, secret schools flourished in attics and basements. Because of the ideological and racial antipathy toward Russian Communism, between two and three million Russian prisoners of war were purposely starved to death by the Nazis.
Part of the bathhouse sauna barracks in block 32 was set aside as a laboratory for him, where he carried out anthropometric studies of the twins at his disposal. A disease known as water cancer noma faciei—gangrenous stomatitis , appeared in the Zigeunerlager in the summer of Previously unknown among prisoners, it attacked children and young people especially.
Mengele began research on its causes and treatment. At first, the children there received better food. However, this was purely a propaganda move. High-ranking SS officers and civilians on inspection trips to Auschwitz were taken to see the Kindergarten and photographed playing with the children. Another area of research interest for Dr.
Mengele was the biological anomaly known as heterochromia iridis, the appearance of differently colored eyes in the same person. Many Sinti and Roma prisoners who suffered from heterochromia were killed in the camp by order of Dr.
A number of examples of this phenomenon were collected in the camp sauna barracks, and later shipped to the Reich as prepared samples. Mengele held the post of head physician of the Zigeunerlager until its liquidation. Later, he became camp physician Lagerarzt for the entire Birkenau camp. During the time that the Zigeunerlager was in operation, some of the people imprisoned there were transferred over time to camps in the depths of the Reich where they labored in factories.
Some of the people transferred were used in pseudomedical experiments. A few Gypsies were released on the condition that they undergo sterilization. There were other cases of the sporadic release from Auschwitz or transfer to camps in the Reich of Sinti and Roma who had served in the German army or received military decorations, and who came from mixed marriages.
The most frequent reason for release was intervention by non-Gypsy relatives. The Sinti and Roma tried as best they could to cope with the misery of the camp; the fact that they remained with their loved ones surely helped. Many of them had musical instruments, and they set up an informal orchestra, which often played during visits by high-ranking officers. Zigeunerlager in Birkenau existed until August 2, That evening, the approximately 4,,3 thousand men, women, and children left in the camp were loaded onto trucks and driven to the gas chambers.
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