Speech by Romani Rose on 10 April 2005 at the Deutsches Nationaltheater Weimar on the Occasion of the National Commemoration of the

Chancellor Schröder,
Minister President Althaus,
Mr Spiegel,
Your Excellencies,
Ladies and Gentlemen,

“Holocaust” – this word also stands for the National Socialist state’s systematic murder of half a million Sinti and Roma. In Germany and in the European nations once under Nazi occupation, there is hardly a family to be found among the Sinti and Roma populations that did not lose at least one member during this period.

The fact that the great majority of victims were children and youth is perhaps the most convincing demonstration of the Nazi’s will to totally annihilate our people. Even Sinti and Roma children living in orphanages or with adoptive families did not escape bureaucratic registration and deportation to the death camps.

The first major event marking the systematic disenfranchisement of our people was the enactment of the “Nuremberg Laws”. Reich Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick decreed on 2 January 1936 (quote): “Regularly encountered among the alien races in Europe are, apart from the Jews, only the Gypsies.” (end quote) And Heinrich Himmler already spoke in his seminal decree of 8 December 1938 of the necessity of a (quote) “final solution to the Gypsy question”.

This determination to segregate and ultimately deport the Sinti and Roma peoples was then pursued according to plan, with the support of the entire state apparatus. In Berlin, the so-called “Institute for Race Hygiene and Population Biology” was founded in 1936 with the aim of registering and cataloguing all members of this minority.

Up until the collapse of the Nazi regime, the race researchers at the institute worked together with the Reich Department of Homeland Security, the party officials and other state authorities to do their best to seek out every last member of the Sinti and Roma populations.

Just how far-reaching their genocidal ambitions were is shown by the fact that even a so-called “one-eighth gypsy” – to use the inhuman language of the National Socialists – was classified as “racially inferior” and destined to be handed over to the state-organised murder programme.

Names like Auschwitz, Majdanek and Kulmhof, like Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau, Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen have been indelibly burned into the collective memory of our people.

These central scenes of the Holocaust stand for the National Socialist genocide against our minority, just as do countless other sites in occupied Europe where our people were hastily buried in unmarked mass graves. These Sinti and Roma fell victim to the systematic mass extermination perpetrated by the SS forces behind the Eastern Front.

One component of this genocidal plan was first to completely exploit the captives’ capacity for hard labour. Reich Justice Minister Otto Thierack’s remark on this point was recorded in the minutes of a conversation with Goebbels on 14 September 1942 (quote):
“Jews and Gypsies must be unconditionally ... exterminated. The idea of extermination through work would be the best.” (end quote)

Therefore, before being killed, Sinti and Roma prisoners were deployed as slave labour for the German arms industry, where they were literally forced to work themselves to death.

Our thoughts today are with all victims of the Nazi crimes. At the same time, we bow before the survivors and those who put up valiant resistance during those dark days. We give our thanks to the former Allied soldiers, who risked their lives to liberate Europe from the National Socialist dictatorship.

Ladies and Gentlemen, in our efforts today, after the Holocaust, to once again attain a state of normality in which the majority population and members of our Sinti and Roma minority can live together in peace, politics and the government carry particular historical responsibility.

Our people have seen themselves singled out and disenfranchised before the eyes of all others. Their neighbours, friends and colleagues looked away when the Nazis came to power and proceeded to defame, exclude, deport and finally murder members of our minority, a people that has made its home in Germany for centuries.

This dramatic experience has left a deep mark on subsequent generations, one that can still be felt today. This is why the policies of our democratic constitutional state must emphasize again and again that the Sinti and Roma people have equal rights in our society.

An important step on this road is the planned Holocaust monument to murdered Sinti and Roma in Berlin. Our survivors and the members of the international Roma organisations have voted overwhelmingly in favour of including a quote by former German President Roman Herzog as an inscription on the monument. In a speech of special historical significance on 16 March 1997, Herzog said:

(I quote.) “The genocide of the Sinti and Roma was carried out based on the same motive of racial hatred, with the same intent and the same will to systematic and final extermination as that of the Jews. Throughout the entire National Socialist sphere of influence, they were systematically murdered, family by family, from infant to grandfather.” (end quote)

We must not call this statement into question or qualify it in any way.

Thank you.