European Roma Holocaust Memorial Day: Remembering a tragedy

FRANCE 24 English

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00:00Well, it's one of the under-discussed and perhaps lesser-known chapters of the Second World War.

00:05That is, the Nazis' racially-based massacre of anywhere between a quarter and half a million Roma,

00:12on top of the more than six million Jews that were killed in the Holocaust.

00:16Roma victims were also subjected to internment, forced labor, sterilization, deportation, and mass execution,

00:23though the journey to having the genocide against the community recognized as such has been more complicated.

00:30August 2nd marks European Roma Holocaust Memorial Day.

00:33So to talk more about it, historian Joey Rauschenberger joins us on the program today from Heidelberg.

00:39Thank you so much for joining us today, Joey.

00:41So to start, I mean, what do you think as a historian are some of the lesser-known aspects

00:46or maybe even misconceptions about the genocide committed against the Roma community?

00:51Well, in European societies after World War II, it took many decades to accept that this genocide of the European Roma

01:04was basically, in terms of the quality, the same like the Holocaust of the European Jews.

01:14This past April, you said it took a lot of time to get it kind of, the scale of it recognized.

01:22In April, a collective of members of the Roma community here in France launched a campaign lobbying the French government

01:29to officially recognize the genocide of Roma and Shinti people during the Second World War

01:34and also for August 2nd to be the national day of commemoration.

01:38Is France alone in this kind of refusal to officially recognize this genocide as such?

01:45And why is there such reticence?

01:49Well, in Germany, the official recognition of the genocide of the Sinti and Roma was already happening in 1982

02:00by the German Federal Chancellor Schmidt.

02:04But this was already 40 years ago by now, yes, but this was only after the Sinti and Roma themselves organized themselves

02:16and gathered in associations and put a lot of pressure on the German society by public campaigns

02:26like the hunger strike in Dachau in 1980, for example, which then started to raise public awareness on this topic.

02:38And so, sorry to interrupt you, go ahead.

02:44No, no, it's fine, just go ahead.

02:45I meant to just kind of add, so what do you think was behind, I mean, why did it take things like a hunger strike

02:51and for the community to organize in order for the German government to recognize the genocide?

02:58Yeah, that's an important question.

03:00I think this is due to the Sinti and Roma have kind of always lived at the margins of the societies in Europe

03:11since their first arrival in the late Middle Ages.

03:14They faced marginalization, discrimination, and a lot of hurdles to integrate and be part of the society.

03:24So these people were kind of unseen by the majority societies of Europe,

03:31and this didn't change after 1945.

03:34So to piggyback off of what you just said there, I mean, the Roma community obviously still to this day

03:41faces widespread discrimination, social exclusion, and stigma across Europe, really.

03:47Can you expand upon some of the modern-day challenges and whether or not you think that this is linked,

03:52perhaps in part, to some of the failures of European governments

03:55to recognize the crimes committed against the community in the past?

03:58If I understand you correctly, you're referring to today's trouble

04:11and the European government's policies towards the Roma.

04:13Of course, as a historian, this is not my major field of expertise,

04:19but I think you can surely say that there is a widespread mistrust in the Sinti and Roma communities

04:29towards the government, and this has a lot to do with how they were treated in history

04:35with the Holocaust of the Romani peoples of Europe,

04:41and in part also the treatment of Academia

04:47and how they failed to address this genocide after 1945.

04:55Academia focused on the Holocaust of the Jews,

04:59but very recently only started to professionally get involved in studying

05:05and researching the genocide of the European Jews.

05:09So the relation between academia, between scholars, and the communities

05:14is shadowed by this failure to study the suffering of the Sinti and Roma much earlier.

05:21Joey, one of the major transformations of international norms

05:25to come out of the 20th century genocides was the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

05:30and perhaps more significantly the UN's passage of the Convention on the Prevention

05:34and Punishment of Genocide.

05:37As a historian, to take things to today and to kind of apply that system that emerged to today,

05:43why do you think that there's so much controversy in describing what's happening in Gaza, for example,

05:49as a genocide, especially as rights groups and legal experts worldwide have indeed done so in recent months?

05:56Well, the discussion on the Gaza war and the genocide term is, of course,

06:05in the country where I am from, Germany, a special case.

06:10I think Germans in general are very reluctant to apply the genocide term,

06:17in the same term, that has been used for the destruction of the European Jewry in World War II

06:26because of our very special relation to the Israeli people.

06:33Does that same, I mean, was that the case, was the debate as controversial in Germany

06:39when it came to talking about the genocide of the Romani population?

06:44It was very controversial because there is always this feeling like the genocide of the Jewish people

06:58is absolutely unprecedented and something that has never happened anywhere else.

07:04So, and of course, there were other genocides in history already before World War II

07:09and the Nazis themselves also persecuted other groups like the Sinti and Roma.

07:14So, there were parts maybe of very philo-semitic groups in Germany

07:20that were reluctant to accept this for this reason.

07:25But, on the other hand, it was always said to the Sinti and Roma

07:31that they were not persecuted for the same reason as the Jews, that is, for racial reasons.

07:37And this has a lot to do with anti-Gypsyist prejudice

07:41because Sinti and Roma were told,

07:44yeah, well, you might have been persecuted and some of you might have been killed,

07:49but this was not because of your racial origins,

07:54but because of your behavior, because of your social behavior

07:57and because you being asocial, basically, and tend to commit crimes and so on.

08:05And this is, of course, the anti-Gypsyist gaze

08:08that these people have always been faced with this story of being work-shy,

08:18being criminal, being dishonest, and so on.

08:21As a final question for you, Joe, I mean, there have also been multiple genocides

08:26in several regions of the world since the Second World War, the Holocaust.

08:30So, what does this suggest, again, as a historian,

08:33about the international rights-based order?

08:36Do you see it as defunct or obsolete?

08:41Well, international law challenges some very serious problems

08:47and challenges at the moment, I think.

08:52This has to do with the problem that international law has always failed

08:58of, you know, mechanisms that held it up in the moment

09:05where it was really crucial and at stake.

09:08So, right now, international law has been violated by the Russian government.

09:16And, of course, when the German Chancellor Friedrich Merz says

09:21he will have, he will welcome the Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu in Germany,

09:29regardless of what international courts say,

09:32this is also a problem, yeah,

09:35because it is always a problem if you start to recognize international law

09:41when it suits your interest and you don't when it's not.

09:46Do you think it's ever worked, international law,

09:47to prevent a massacre or a genocide at large?

09:53International law had worked to prevent genocide?

09:57Yes.

09:57I'm not sure about this, but it will probably have been,

10:06it was helpful, I think, in some cases to coming to terms

10:09with the past after genocide, you know.

10:12So, thinking about the wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s

10:18or conflicts in Africa and Rwanda also in the 1990s.

10:23So, perpetrators of genocide, and this is only since the evolution of international law,

10:31so to say, perpetrators of genocide and government leaders who commit genocide

10:36have to fear, it's not necessary that they are punished,

10:41but they have to fear that they are punished for what they are doing.

10:44And I think this is the, this is what international law can contribute

10:48to the prevention of genocide as well.

10:51Historia and Joey Rauschenberger, that's all we have time for.

10:54Thank you very much for coming on the show today.

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