As with the Jews, the Nazis needed to determine who was to be considered a "Gypsy." Dr. Ritter decided that someone could be considered a Gypsy if they had "one or two Gypsies among his grandparents" or if "two or more of his grandparents are part-Gypsies."3 Kenrick and Puxon personally blame Dr. Ritter for the additional 18,000 German Gypsies that were killed because of this more inclusive designation, rather than if the same rules had been followed as were applied to Jews.4
To study Gypsies, Dr. Ritter, his assistant Eva Justin, and his research team visited the Gypsy concentration camps (Zigeunerlagers) and examined thousands of Gypsies - documenting, registering, interviewing, photographing, and finally categorizing them.
It was from this research that Dr. Ritter formulated that 90% of Gypsies were of mixed blood, thus dangerous.
Having established a "scientific" reason to persecute 90% of the Gypsies, the Nazis needed to decide what to do with the other 10% - the ones that were nomadic and appeared to have the least number of "Aryan" qualities. At times Himmler discussed letting the "pure" Gypsies roam relatively freely and also suggested a special reservation for them. Assumably as part of one of these possibilities, nine Gypsy representatives were selected in October 1942 and told to create lists of Sinti and Lalleri to be saved.
There must have been confusion within the Nazi leadership, for it seems that many wanted all Gypsies killed, with no exceptions, even if they were categorized as Aryan. On December 3, 1942, Martin Bormann wrote in a letter to Himmler:
- . . . special treatment would mean a fundamental deviation from the simultaneous measures for fighting the Gypsy menace and would not be understood at all by the population and lower leaders of the party. Also the Führer would not agree to giving one section of the Gypsies their old freedom.5
Though the Nazis did not discover a "scientific" reason to kill the ten percent of Gypsies categorized as "pure," there were no distinctions made when Gypsies were ordered to Auschwitz or deported to the other death camps.
By the end of the war, it is estimated that 250,000 to 500,000 Gypsies were murdered in the Porajmos - killing approximately three-fourths of the German Gypsies and half of the Austrian Gypsies.
So much happened to the Gypsies during the Third Reich, I created a timeline to help outline the process from "Aryan" to annihilation.
Notes
1. Donald Kenrick and Grattan Puxon, The Destiny of Europe's Gypsies (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1972) 46.
2. Hans F. K. Günther as quoted in Philip Friedman, "The Extermination of the Gypsies: Nazi Genocide of an Aryan People." Roads to Extinction: Essays on the Holocaust, Ed. Ada June Friedman (New York: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1980) 382-383.
3. Robert Ritter as quoted in Kenrick, Destiny 67.
4. Kenrick, Destiny 68.
5. Kenrick, Destiny 89.
