The Nazi Genocide of the Roma: Reassessment and Commemoration

Using the framework of genocide, this volume analyzes the patterns of persecution of the Roma in Nazi-dominated Europe. Detailed case studies of France, Austria, Romania, Croatia, Ukraine, and Russia generate a critical mass of evidence that indicates criminal intent on the part of the Nazi regime to destroy the Roma as a distinct group. Other chapters examine the failure of the West German State to deliver justice, the Romani collective memory of the genocide, and the current political and historical debates. As this revealing volume shows, however inconsistent or geographically limited, over time, the mass murder acquired a systematic character and came to include ever larger segments of the Romani population regardless of the social status of individual members of the community.

Anton Weiss-Wendt is Senior Lecturer in the research department at the Center for the Study of the Holocaust and Religious Minorities in Oslo, Norway. He is the author of Murder Without Hatred: Estonians and the Holocaust (2009) and Small-Town Russia: Childhood Memories of the Final Soviet Decade (2010), and the editor of Eradicating Differences: The Treatment of Minorities in Nazi-Dominated Europe (2010) and Racial Science in Hitler’s New Europe, 1939-1945 (with Rory Yeomans, 2013).