Minister urges action to tackle anti-Roma discrimination

Germany’s next interior minister must give “high political priority” to tackling discrimination against Roma and Sinti people, Interior Minister Horst Seehofer urged on Tuesday, warning that this would be “extremely important” for societal cohesion in Germany.

Receiving an 800-page expert study commissioned by parliament, Seehofer backed its twin calls for a federal treaty between the government and Germany’s Central Council of Sinti and Roma and for a special commissioner to tackle anti-Roma discrimination, assisted by Germany’s regional states.

Addressing journalists in Berlin, alongside council chairman Romani Rose, Seehofer warned that negotiating such a treaty would be “very difficult,” but even on retirement — after Germany’s September election — he would “make his contribution.”

Almost all of the panel’s recommendations had his “high sympathy,” Seehofer said, rejecting, however, the advisers’ call for a blanket halt to Roma deportations to other European nations.

Two states already have such treaties at the local level, Baden Württemberg and Bavaria. Seehofer, of the Bavarian CSU, said he had struggled to persuade conservative colleagues to adopt such a document in 2018.

“It was one of the toughest cases I had to resolve in my political career,” he asserted.

German government ‘exemplary,’ public less so

Rose said the intended federal treaty must highlight Germany’s responsibility for the Nazi era annihilation of an estimated half a million Sinti and Roma.

“We must denounce discrimination of Sinti and Roma just as we denounce anti-Semitism,” Rose told DW. “We denounce this, because we know that anti-Semitism was the foundation stone during the Nazi era for this campaign of extermination, committed against Jews but also against Sinti and Roma people.” 

• Remembering Nazi genocide of Sinti and Roma

  Serving the fatherland

  Many German Sinti fought for Germany not only in the First World War but also in the Wehrmacht from 1939 on. In 1941 the German high command ordered all “Gypsies and Gypsy half-breeds” to be dismissed from active military service for “racial-political reasons.” Alfons Lampert and his wife Elsa were then deported to Auschwitz, where they were killed.

• Remembering Nazi genocide of Sinti and Roma

  Measuring and registering race

  Eva Justin, a nurse and anthropologist, learned the Romani language to gain the trust of Sinti and Roma. As a specialist in so-called scientific racism, she traveled through Germany to measure people and create a complete registry of “Gypsies” and “Gypsy half-breeds” — the basis for the genocide. She and others researched family ties and and assessed churches’ baptismal records.

• Remembering Nazi genocide of Sinti and Roma

  Locked up and dispossessed

  In the 1930s, Sinti and Roma families were in many places forced into camps on the outskirts of town, surrounded by barbed wire and patrolled by guards with dogs, like here in Ravensburg in southwestern Germany. They were unable to leave. Their pets were killed. They had to work as slave laborers. Many were forcibly sterilized.

• Remembering Nazi genocide of Sinti and Roma

  Deportation in broad daylight

  In May 1940 Sinti and Roma families were sent through the streets of the town of Asperg in southwestern Germany to the train station and deported directly to Nazi-occupied Poland. “The dispatchment went smoothly,” a police report noted. Most of those deported traveled to their deaths in work camps and Jewish ghettos.

• Remembering Nazi genocide of Sinti and Roma

  From school to Auschwitz

  Karl Kling appears on this class picture from Karlsruhe in the late 1930s. He was collected from school in spring 1943 and sent to the “Gypsy Camp” at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where he became one of the victims of the genocide. Survivors reported that before being deported they had been marginalized in their schools and sometimes weren’t even able to take part in lessons.

• Remembering Nazi genocide of Sinti and Roma

  Greeted with an evil lie

  “I can work,” thought nine-year-old Hugo Höllenreiner when he arrived at Auschwitz in a cattle car with his family in 1943. He was greeted by the phrase “Arbeit macht frei” (“work will set you free”) above the entrance. It offered hope, Höllenreiner remembered later. He wanted to help his father work: “Then we could be free again.” Only one out of every ten people deported to Auschwitz survived.

• Remembering Nazi genocide of Sinti and Roma

  Brutal experiments by the ‘Angel of Death’

  Notorious SS doctor Josef Mengele worked at Auschwitz. He and his colleagues tortured countless prisoners. They mutilated children, infected them with diseases and carried out brutal experiments on twins. Mengele sent eyes, organs and entire body parts back to Berlin. In June 1944, he sent the head of a 12-year-old child. He escaped Europe after the war and never faced trial.

• Remembering Nazi genocide of Sinti and Roma

  Liberation comes too late

  When Russia’s Red Army arrived at Auschwitz on January 27, 1945, children were among the prisoners. But for the Sinti and Roma, the liberation came too late. On the night of August 2-3, 1944, the officers in charge of Auschwitz ordered those remaining in the “Gypsy Camp” sent to the gas chambers. Two children came crying out of the barracks the next morning and were subsequently murdered.

• Remembering Nazi genocide of Sinti and Roma

  Racially persecuted

  After the concentration camps were liberated, allied and German authorities issued survivors certificates of racial persecution and imprisonment. Later, many people were told they had only been persecuted for criminal reasons, and their requests for compensation were denied. Hildegard Reinhardt (above) lost her three young daughters in Auschwitz.

• Remembering Nazi genocide of Sinti and Roma

  Calling for recognition

  In the early 1980s, representatives of the Sinti and Roma communities staged a hunger strike at the entrance of the former Dachau concentration camp. They were protesting the criminalization of their minority and calling for the recognition of Nazi persecution. In 1982, then-Chancellor Helmut Schmidt officially recognized the Sinti and Roma as victims of Nazi genocide.

• Remembering Nazi genocide of Sinti and Roma

  A memorial in Berlin

  In 2012, a memorial for the Sinti and Roma victims of Nazi persecution was erected near the Bundestag in Berlin. The site is a reminder of the fight against discrimination for the world’s Sinti and Roma, particularly on International Romani Day. To this day, members of the minority still experience discrimination in Germany and around Europe.

  Author: Andrea Grunau

The origins for the prejudice in Germany go back at least six centuries, said Rose, who added that sentiment against “Gypsies,” as Sinti and Roma are often called, was still an everyday experience for people at schools or dealing with the authorities or with police.

Rose called the German government’s attitude over the past 30 or 40 years “exemplary,” albeit adding: “The people we are yet to reach [in Germany] are society at large.” 

In April, Chancellor Angela Merkel was awarded the Roma Civic Prize for the “special way” she had advanced the minority’s recognition across Europe.

“First and foremost, we are Germans,” Rose said. He added that a future treaty must acknowledge “Sinti and Roma as an integral part of German society.” The group was first officially recognized as a minority in 1995.

A treaty assuring Roma equal rights would resemble Germany’s long-existing federal treaties with Catholic and Protestant churches, and, postwar, with its Jewish community, said Rose.

Seehofer said he could foresee a government commissioner dedicated to tackling discrimination against Roma, similar to the role of the commissioner to combat antisemitism.

Lack of educational material

The experts in their study recommended special status recognition for Roma seeking asylum in Germany as particularly vulnerable persons. 

The panel also complained of a lack of materials in German classrooms and political education courses to help end discrimination against Roma.

June 2021: A Berlin protest after a Roma death in police hands in the Czech Republic

“Awareness of the massive discrimination against Sinti and Roma in all areas of life is almost completely missing,” Rosesaid, citing one example of a real estate company which he said “did not rent” apartments to Sinti and Roma.

The EU’s Fundamental Rights Agency estimates that between 10 to 12 million Roma currently live in Europe, with some 6 million within EU member states.

Known historical records on Sinti and Roma in Germany date back to 1407 in Hildesheim in Lower Saxony state.

ipj/msh (epd, AFP, dpa)

Article source: https://www.dw.com/en/minister-urges-action-to-tackle-anti-roma-discrimination/a-58255754?maca=en-rss-en-all-1573-rdf