suffering of this persecution , whose racial motives were not recognised until much later , was ignored . It is true that , within the framework of the flawed post-war denazification , it was not until the mid- 1960s that a series of high-profile trials ( Eichmann , Auschwitz ) confronted German and global public opinion with the genocidal nature of the destruction of the Jewish people . However , the legal journey for the Romani case was far more tortuous : according to the majority of German courts , what had happened to the “ Gypsies ” was not a consequence of Nazi racial ( nor national or religious ) persecution , but rather the consequence of police action to prevent crime . Although nuances were discussed ( for example , around the 1943 decree that massively deported Romanies from a large part of Europe to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp ), the legal discourse was based on the affirmation of the “ known ” asociality and criminal tendencies of “ Gypsies ”, thus perpetuating the Nazi legal-police logic .
Such a doctrine meant that for a long time , the persecution that sent thousands of Romanies to the ghettos and camps in Polish territories from 1940 onwards was not considered racially motivated . Nor was the persecution that , from the 1938 decree ( the so-called “ Combating the Gypsy Plague ”), sent many others to detention camps after confiscating their property and subjected them to racial tests . Neither was the forced sterilisation of men , women , and children from even earlier dates considered persecution . The case of Dr . Ritter , head of the unit for the study and identification of “ Gypsies ”, is paradigmatic : despite his involvement with the Nazi criminal police , after the war , he became a professor at the University of Tübingen and later joined Frankfurt ’ s health service , where he worked as a child psychologist . He was exonerated after an investigation initiated by complaints from his victims , in which his claims were accepted ( he argued that he did not know about the extermination and had only recommended sterilisation ). Experts consulted during the trial relied on Ritter ’ s own work as the scientific basis for their arguments about the nature of “ Gypsies ”, while the victims ’ testimonies were disregarded for their supposed lack of evidential strength . Eva Justin , his closest collaborator , who had written a doctoral thesis on the asociality of children with a “ live test subject ” who was later liquidated in the extermination camps , was also acquitted . Her youth and supposed inexperience were taken as mitigating factors in the trial .
Thus , administration experts and police officers who had participated in the persecution of the Romanies remained in the public service , while the criminal records and files constructed by the Nazis continued to be used for decades . The failure to acknowledge that the racial characterisation of the “ Gypsies ” by the Nazi regime was based on attributing a genetic criminality to all of them was closely related to the persistence of specifically anti-Gypsy racism , which was as ancient as it was socially widespread . In addition to the judicial and administrative disregard of the Romanies as victims , they continued to experience widespread prejudice and were treated as presumed criminals in everyday life . The fact that their suffering under Nazism had not sparked a societal shift in this regard was noted by historian Wolfgang Benz , who pointed out that the prejudices that had fuelled the Nazi anti-Gypsy racial machine were still alive in Germany . He wrote this in 1985 , at a time when there remained a tacit agreement that this persecution had been somehow justified .
This is not just a German problem . In France , for example , the work of Lise Foisneau shows that not only were the internment camps for the Romanies prolonged after the war , but post-war violence also manifested itself in accusations of collaboration , arrests , and murders , all tinged with an anti-Gypsy bias . Furthermore , legal discrimination persisted for decades , as it was not until 1969 that a law was revised which required “ nomads ” to carry an anthropometric identity card , placing them in a legal limbo subject to special police surveillance , despite the motto “ libertéégalité-fraternité ” emblazoned on the front of the document . Nor is this just a capitalist issue . On the other side of the wall , in the communist bloc ,
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Observing Memories Issue 8