This is an extract that I meant to share on December 16, the 82nd anniversary of the Schutzstaffel’s order to deport Roma and Sinti to Auschwitz. However, because my last computer broke down and I had to wait a few weeks before receiving a new one, it was too late for me to time this with the anniversary.
As I lack a good idea for today’s topic, I have decided to share this one now as a substitute. Besides, the white supremacist rhetoric may look familiar, reminding you of a certain apartheid régime that is not yet officially defunct.
Judging by the place assigned to them in the newspapers, the conclusion can be drawn that the Roma articles were not viewed as the most important information. However, in Lemberger Zeitung the pieces on Roma appeared on a page dedicated to inquiring into important issues concerning the war effort and connected topics.³⁴
This placed them in the focus of the readership. In Gazeta Lwowska, all pieces on Roma appeared on pages dedicated to local developments and history. This was likely to illuminate “the [insert slur here] problem” as a direct concern and a challenge to the readership.
[…]
The first mention of Roma in the [Axis] occupation press in Lviv aimed at showing the readership that Roma were put under firmer control than during the Soviet occupation. Among the news on local developments, one finds that Roma have “again appeared on the streets, market squares, and in tramways of Lviv”. Their “screams and clamor” filled the streets, as they “obtrusively clung to passers‐by in order to tell them their fortune”. Still, Roma were far fewer than “during the Bolshevik times”, when “whole camps” of them lived on Lviv’s streets and squares.⁵³
Thus, the reader learns that Roma brought trouble while constituting an alien body of visitors, and being a nuisance to the town’s permanent inhabitants. Therefore, the reference to their supposedly lower numbers is supposed to bring about a sense of relief and improvement. The last‐mentioned was one among many supposed improvements, be it the tidying up of the town (after the [Fascist] offensive) or barring Jews from public parks.
[…]
In September 1942, Stanislavske Slovo informs readers that “Yugoslavia begins a campaign of struggle against [insert slur here]‐wanderers”, who are not only thieves, but also “carriers of infectious diseases, particularly typhoid fever”.⁵⁷
The name of (by the time) a defunct state shows that propagandists would not go into the technical niceties and realities of the [Axis] occupation and the Ustaša régime, but rather mention a place that the readership could put on a map. [Axis] propaganda programmatically accused Jews of spreading diseases, particularly typhoid fever.⁵⁸ However, it is unlikely that the readers knew what measures were being undertaken: mass murder of segments of the Roma population in the so‐called Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, the NDH).
[…]
The Lemberger Zeitung article “Die Zigeunerfrage im europäischen Südosten” (The [insert slur here] question in South‐Eastern Europe) published in June 1943 drew parallels between “solving” the Jewish and “the [Romani] question”. The readers were informed that Roma had been undermining the societies “they have haunted”, and constituted “a plague”.
It was not a coincidence, the author continues, that the peoples of the Balkans required a solution to “the [Romani] question” at the same time as the Jewish question was being solved on “the basis of race”. After all, Roma were “an equally important issue for a healthier population policy in South‐Eastern Europe [as Jews]”. They once poured into Europe, and had “haunted” Germany, “seldom ready to work, but always inclined to earn a living by theft, robbery and deceit”. Only after [Fascism’s] accession to power, the author finds, were convincing measures taken against them.
Roma were declared an inferior race. Since they were idlers, they were expelled from the body of [Fascist] German people, “and officially treated accordingly”. Today, as the peoples of the South‐Eastern Europe were striving towards the victory, it was an obligation, “to enforce the settlement and solution of the [Romani] problem with all means, just as with the Jewish question, so the creative European people would be liberated from those parasites”.
According to the author, no further proof was needed that Roma were a “parasitic people” (Schmarotzervolk). Unlike Jews, Roma engaged in deceit and criminal activities only to scrape a living, and did not strive after prosperity and riches. However, they refused “any scheduled work”, unlike “the native cultural peoples”. By doing so while the peoples were working hard for the new order and the victory, Roma “as a race and as humans” put themselves outside “the European community”.
No nation could allow itself the luxury of nurturing such subversive elements at the time when strengthened discipline was needed, the author summarized.⁶¹ Thus, one learns that Roma constituted a natural disaster of sorts and a contagion, as they “poured” into the continent, “haunting” its societies, constituting a “plague”, and being “parasites”. As they were rootless, one could not expect loyal and productive behavior from them, but merely “theft, robbery and deceit”.
In addition, Roma had deliberately put themselves outside the community of peoples in order to carry on with their life. While the [Fascist] measures against Roma in the Reich were positive steps, they did not suffice in the era of the life and death struggle against Bolshevism. With wording recalling medical science, the indirect suggestion is made that the infected part of the body be removed, and not merely by means of legal discrimination.
“The national body” should be cleansed, given the decay Roma brought into the society. Recurring references to Jews make the necessary measures clear. Roma must disappear physically.
[…]
When presenting anti‐Roma measures in [the Kingdom of] Hungary, Ridna Zemlia wrote that separating Roma from the rest of the population and putting them in labor camps was “due to the high number of criminals among [them]”, among several other reasons.⁶⁴ In 1944, in a piece entitled “The biggest free‐loaders”, Ridna Zemlia claimed that Hungarian statistics mirrored “the criminal behavior” of Roma, who also regularly came into conflict with the law.⁶⁵
(Emphasis added. Click here for more.)
Roma wedding parties went on for three days, with an abundance of food and alcohol brought in by Roma women. The passers‐by enjoyed the music streaming out of the windows. . Turn away from the main Nowozniesieńska Street, the author instructed, and walk to Kardynał Trąba (Cardinal Trąba) Street. There, “impoverished and dirty” girls sit on the ground and play — “light‐haired indigenous ones and black‐haired [insert slur here]”; “they grow together, they play together, they know how to communicate with each other”.
The author concludes that “righteous and brave” people, citizens of Lviv, inhabited Zniesienie with its orderly flower and vegetable gardens.⁶⁷ One reads that Roma are loud in a way similar to Tartars (the symbol of pillage and destruction in Polish historical imagination) in the past.
[…]
The reference to wedding parties with plentiful food and drink going on for days were intended to upset readers who were likely to be worn out by malnutrition due to high food prices; general public health was declining.⁶⁹ It likely alluded to goods supposedly brought to the parties as obtained in illicit ways.
The daily rather correctly described the ways the Roma women moved in the city center — in pairs, or in slightly bigger groups, as cases from the local courts from 1943 show.⁷⁰ The passage about the citizens of Lviv and orderly gardens of inhabitants of Zniesienie probably referred to the need to solve the mingling of peoples that could prove disastrous for the non‐Roma population, in terms of mutually exclusive polarities of order (the non‐Roma population) and disorder (Roma).
The latter were bringing noise, dishonesty, and potential insecurity to the otherwise calm and orderly suburb.⁷¹
[…]
While the articles in Gazeta Lwowska stand out as full of double meanings, and as somewhat more sophisticated when it comes to the message, the point was still that Roma could not be trusted. Under the neighborly façade, the criminal dwelled. By putting Roma in the local setting of Lviv and the vicinity, the articles in Gazeta Lwowska also brought “the [insert slur here] problem” into the direct environment of the readership, and provided it with a face, a location, and even an address.
[…]
Ridna Zemlia […] claim[ed] that “if all […] romanticism is put aside […], the [insert slur here] problem reveals a picture of deep social degeneration”. The common view of Roma culture as containing romantic elements was in fact a result of “sentimental films and operettas”, and “a consequence of Jewish profiteering”. The result of this process was “glorification of the [insert slur here] ideal”.⁷⁹
In those two articles, one finds a departure from the dichotomy of Roma as a potential criminal and an alien on the one hand, and as a “noble savage”/“operetta [insert slur here]” (stereotypical but with positive elements) on the other. It turns out that predilection for even most selective and stereotyped parts of Roma culture was mistaken, as those were a smoke screen for social and moral deviance. In the latter article, one also learns that the pre‐war popularity of Roma/Roma influenced music was due to Jewish interests in show business.
Here, two negative narratives interact. The profiteering Jews employ the deviant and morally corrupt Roma culture in order to facilitate the decay of society and to make a profit. The “operetta [Roma]” was no more.
Click here for events that happened today (January 12).
1893: Alfred Rosenberg and Hermann Göring, Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories and Minister President of Prussia, respectively, were unfortunately both born. (Yes, they shared the exact same birthday.)
1901: Karl Künstler, SS officer, rudely imposed his presence on the earth.
1935: Berlin named SS‐Oberführer Heinrich Deubel the Dachau Concentration Camp’s commandant, replacing Berthold Maack.
1940: Berlin relieved Hellmuth Felmy of command of Luftflotte 2 as the result of the Mechelen Incident, and Fascist submarine U‐23 torpedoed and sank Danish oil tanker Danmark in Inganess Bay, eliminating 14,000 tons of fuel for the Allies in the process.
1941: The Axis airbase at Catania, Sicily suffered an Allied assault, and the Fascists in Norway began recruiting for the Nordland Regiment of 5.SS‐Wiking Division.
1942: George von Küchler replaced Wilhelm von Leeb, who resigned after the Chancellor refused his request to withdraw behind the Lovat River to prevent II Corps being cut off. Meanwhile, Luftwaffe group I./KG 100, with 28 He 111 bombers, arrived at Focsani, and Axis troops continued to attack the Abucay‐Mauban line on Bataan Peninsula, Luzon. The Imperialists also executed various allied POWs, but on the bright side, Walther von Reichenau suffered a stroke in Poltava.
1943: The Wehrmacht withdrew from the Caucasus region in southern Russia to the Kuban bridgehead, and Irako transited the Bungo Strait between Shikoku and Kyushu around the same time that Zuikaku, Mutsu, and Suzuya arrived at Kure.
1944: One thousand Jews from Stutthof Concentration Camp arrived at Auschwitz Concentration Camp; Axis officials registered 120 men and 134 women into the camp but exterminated 746 upon arrival.
1945: The Imperial Japanese Army launched its final special attack mission in the Philippine Islands area, and Axis V‐2 rocket hit a row of cottages in Ilford, London, massacring seventeen folk and wounding sixty.