A People Destroyed: New Research on the Roma Genocide, 1941–1945

A People Destroyed features the most recent work on the Roma genocide in Europe during World War II. Despite the murder of a substantial part of the Romani population in various countries and occupied territories, it took historians more than half a century to collect enough evidence to establish the fact of genocide. Even today the public remains largely unaware of the extent of suffering that the Nazis and some of their allies inflicted on the Roma.

A People Destroyed shows that the Nazis most consistently murdered Roma in the German-speaking countries and the occupied Soviet territories, while Fascist Croatia attempted its own “Final Solution of the Gypsy Question.” The history of persecution that Roma people endured in Europe laid the foundation for the Nazi policy of extermination.

Anton Weiss-Wendt and the contributors to the volume, who come from nine different countries, build on existing Holocaust scholarship in their discussion of policy implementation, racial ideology, and the shared experiences of Jews and Roma. Meticulously analyzing diverse primary sources such as perpetrator documents and war crimes trial records, witness testimonies, population data, and contemporaneous newspaper reports and oral interviews, A People Destroyed provides a comprehensive overview of the destruction while focusing on the individual experiences of the victims.
 

Anton Weiss-Wendt is a research professor at the Norwegian Center for Holocaust and Minority Studies in Oslo. He is the author of Murder without Hatred: Estonians and the Holocaust and The Soviet Union and the Gutting of the UN Genocide Convention, and the coeditor of Racial Science in Hitler’s New Europe, 1939–1945 (Nebraska, 2013).