The Nazis' Forgotten Victims

Angry gypsies are pressing to settle old scores

When they first appeared in Germany 500 years ago, one chronicle denounced them as an "uncouth, dirty and barbarous" people who "live like dogs and are expert at thieving and cheating." During the Middle Ages, aristocrats out on a hunt considered them fair game, along with birds and boar. More than 400,000 of them were murdered by the Nazis in the course of the Holocaust that also claimed 6 million Jewish lives. Even today West Germany's gypsies are openly persecuted. Says Grattan Puxon, general secretary of the Roma World Union, an international gypsy organization based in Bern, Switzerland: "We are the forgotten victims of Fascism."

A race of dark-eyed, olive-skinned traders who began migrating out of India a millennium ago and still speak their own language (a guttural tongue with Aryan roots called Romany), gypsies have been vilified wherever they have gone. Of the 10 million who now live outside India, roughly half have settled in Eastern Europe, while a million are in Western Europe and 500,000 are in the U.S. But only 50,000 gypsies are in West Germany. It is the home, they believe, of the worst prejudice against them.

Though studies have shown that the rate of violent and sexual crimes is lower among gypsies than among the German population as a whole, they remain marked as dangerous people, as well as chronic pickpockets and con men. Tellingly, the German name for gypsy, Zigeuner, literally means "wandering swindler." Complains Romani Rose, a German gypsy activist: "If a sandwich is missing in the schoolroom, a gypsy child gets blamed."

Attempts by gypsies to move into decent neighborhoods invariably touch off protests. Most gypsies are confined to ghettos; in Bad Hersfeld, a town of 30,000 near the East German border, 200 gypsies live in old refugee housing that lacks hot water and indoor toilets and is so overrun by rats from a nearby garbage dump that children are not allowed out at night. In summer, when gypsies take to the highways in camper trucks as wandering salesmen and secondhand dealers, the treatment that they encounter is especially rough. Owners of almost 90% of West Germany's campsites, claiming that the gypsies would pester vacationers by peddling their wares, have tacked up signs reading GYPSIES FORBIDDEN. Police periodically descend on camping gypsies with guard dogs and submachine guns and force them to move on. "We are the original campers," Rose complains. "Yet now everyone can live like a gypsy in West Germany except gypsies."

As part of Hitler's drive to exterminate "inferior races," the Nazis in 1938 established a Central Office for Combatting the Gypsy Menace, which arbitrarily classified thousands of gypsies as common criminals and sent them to concentration camps. Later, gypsies became targets of the Nazi crusade for racial purity.

The downfall of the Third Reich, however, did not halt the devaluation of gypsy lives. Though West Germany paid nearly $715 million in reparations to Israel and various Jewish organizations, gypsies as a group received nothing. In 1952, when the new West German government offered to pay survivors five deutsche marks (worth roughly $1.20) for each day they had spent in the camps, many illiterate gypsies simply signed away their claims for compensation in exchange for trifling sums. Gypsy activists have uncovered a case of a woman who received $10 for the death of her baby in Auschwitz.

West German officials have rejected the efforts of several thousand gypsy survivors of the war to establish citizenship in the Federal Republic, even though their families have lived in Germany for generations. What particularly galls gypsy leaders is that these rejections seem to be based on Nazi records of alleged misconduct. Says Rose: "No postwar German government has acknowledged our suffering. They agonize over the Jews, and rightly. But they have ignored us."

Joined by Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, gypsies have begun to press for rights and recognition. Last month 2,000 gypsies marched to the stone marker at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where thousands of Jews and gypsies were killed.

In a brief but moving talk, Simone Veil, a French Jew who survived Bergen-Belsen and is now President of the European Parliament, recalled how the music of gypsy fiddlers had bolstered the morale of the camp's prisoners, until one day the music stopped. She pledged her support for a ten-point list of demands that gypsy leaders presented to Chancellor Helmut Schmidt last week. It asks, among other things, for an official acknowledgment of the Germans' responsibility for the gypsies' wartime persecution and an end to discrimination in jobs and housing, free access to campsites and a "reeducation program" for prejudiced police. Gypsy activists are also negotiating with the government for a reparations payment of $365 million that could be used to pay for educational and cultural programs benefiting all of Western Europe's gypsies.

Schmidt's government has expressed sympathy for the gypsies' cause; one official has urged it to settle the compensation issue "promptly and generously." If that does not happen soon, some gypsies are prepared to take further steps to underscore their grievances. One tactic under consideration: inviting arrest by tearing down signs barring gypsies from campsites in the hope that it might lead to a court ruling affirming the full equality of a people still searching for a place to call home.

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