Most Roma people were murdered in mass shootings in areas occupied by Nazi Germany. Sinti and Roma people were also deported to concentration camps and extermination camps, where they were gassed or died from starvation, disease, and sporadic executions.
Mass shootings of Sinti and Roma
Sinti and Roma people were murdered in mass shootings as early as the time of the Nazi invasion of Poland in autumn 1939.
When Nazi Germany then went on to invade the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, special SS units known as Einsatzgruppen were tasked with rounding up and shooting political opponents, Jews and Roma in the conquered parts of Eastern Europe. Mass shootings took place in cooperation with the police and locals and with some help from the German army. Some countries, allied with Nazi Germany even carried out mass shootings on their own initiative.
A large number of cases went unreported, so it is difficult to know how many Sinti and Roma people were murdered in mass shootings. Shootings of Roma groups went unrecorded for the most part, and preserved documentation and witnesses relating to these events are very rare to find. However, scholars agree that most of the Roma people murdered during the Holocaust were killed in mass shootings in rural areas.
Main photo: Women forced to work at Ravensbrück. Mahn- und Gedenkstätte Ravensbrück
Deportation train from Westerbork to Auschwitz-Birkenau in May 1944. Video: Acessed at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum with courtesy of Nederlands Instituut vor Beeld en Geluid.
Extermination camps
During the winter of 1941 and the spring of 1942, the Nazis set up four dedicated extermination camps in occupied Poland to murder Jews, for the most part. People in the extermination camps were murdered: they were gassed to death and then buried in mass graves. The Nazis began burning the corpses from the summer of 1942.
Many of the people deported to the extermination camps came from the ghettos. As Sinti and Roma people had been forced to live in ghettos, most of them were also deported to one of these extermination camps.
At least 4,300 Sinti and Roma people were murdered at the Chełmno extermination camp, and another 2,000 or so at Treblinka. There is no documentary evidence for the other two camps, Bełżec and Sobibor, to indicate that people from Roma communities were murdered there. Still, testimonies and archaeological finds would suggest this.
Besides the four dedicated extermination camps, there were also two combined concentration and extermination camps. Around 21,000 Sinti and Roma people were murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau; and an unknown number at Majdanek, as no documentation is available.
Josef Mengele
"The Angel of Death"
In May 1943, SS doctor Josef Mengele was appointed chief physician of the Roma section at Auschwitz-Birkenau. In fact, he set up a nursery for Sinti and Roma children under the age of six. The purpose of this was to provide him with subjects for medical experiments.
Josef Mengele conducted all kinds of medical experiments, many of which resulted in permanent injury and, in some cases, death. He sometimes performed surgeries on prisoners without anaesthetic. Josef Mengele had a particular interest in identical twins, and on one occasion he operated on a pair of Roma twins in an attempt to create Siamese twins.
Besides conducting medical experiments, Josef Mengele was also particularly active in selecting which prisoners were to be murdered straight away and which ones were to be used as slave labour. He was known as “the Angel of Death” during his time as a doctor at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Josef Mengele fled to South America after the war and was never tried for his crimes.
Dina Babbit
Annemarie Dina Babbit, née Gottliebová, was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia in 1923. Dina Babbit was Jewish and studying art when Nazi Germany invaded her country in 1939. In 1942, she and her mother were arrested and taken to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Both were sent to Auschwitz the following year.
In Auschwitz, she was selected by SS doctor Josef Mengele to paint portraits of Sinti and Roma people in the Roma section. She was able to save the lives of herself and her mother by painting these portraits.
When the war came to an end, she moved to the US and worked as an animator. She married Art Babbit, and they had two daughters.
Seven of her paintings of Sinti and Roma were found in the 1970s and purchased by the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. When Dina Babbit confirmed that the paintings were hers and asked for them to be returned, the museum rejected her request. Since then, a legal battle has been ongoing over the rights to the paintings.
Dina Babbit passed away in 2009, and now her daughters are leading the legal battle for the return of their mother’s work.
Celine and the little boy
The woman with the blue headscarf is Celine, a French Sinti or Roma woman whom Dina Babbit chose to paint on account of her beauty and her sad eyes. When the painting was done, Celine’s two-month-old baby had just died of starvation because she was unable to breastfeed.
Dina wanted to paint her as a Madonna with her headscarf draped over her shoulders, but Mengele wanted her ear to be visible in the painting. Celine did not survive Auschwitz and probably died on 2 August 1944. Today, some Roma groups refer to her as the Roma Madonna.
Dina also made a painting of a small Sinti or Roma boy, his name is unknown. Dina Babbit said he was Mengele’s errand boy and that the boy wanted the rage he felt about his imprisonment to be reflected in the painting. As soon as Mengele left the Roma section on an errand, the boy wanted to show Dina around the barracks so she could see how the Roma people lived. That little boy probably did not survive Auschwitz-Birkenau.
