Sir, - The announcement that compensation is finally to be made to Jewish victims of the Holocaust who lost property, both to Nazis and to Europe's banking system, during and after the second World War is greatly to be welcomed. However, it would be a pity if this were to be used to perpetuate an image of Jews as wealthy. It is also important that we keep in mind that other minorities, aside from the Jews, suffered equally during the Holocaust. It is likewise imperative that we recognise that the vast majority of victims of Nazi racism, including the Jews, were propertyless people who can never hope to benefit from this new culture of compensation.
European Gypsies certainly rank high on any list of the most brutalised, and the most neglected, victims of the Holocaust. Estimates of Gypsy killings during the second World War range from a quarter-of-a-million to half-a-million people or more. Gypsies then were labelled "asocials" and were widely considered, by Nazis as well as others sections of European society, as the lowest of the "inferior races". Throughout their very own private Holocaust they were remorselessly and silently dispatched to death camps without the public reaction that sometimes made the Nazis more circumspect in their tackling of the "Jewish problem".
In 1938 Heinrich Himmler, in a decree called "Combating the Gypsy Plague", declared that Gypsies of mixed blood were especially prone to crime. In so doing he set in motion plans for a strict policing of the social behaviour of Gypsies, plans which still influence popular perceptions of the "Gypsy problem" today.
Initially at least, anti-Gypsy racism was aimed at those of "mixed blood", including "part Gypsies" who had two or more great-grandparents of Gypsy background. In reality, however, local police all across Nazi-controlled Europe paid scant attention to the subtleties of this system of racial classification. They grasped at every opportunity for making their districts "Gypsy free" and in the end no Gypsy could be considered safe from the death camps.
During the war perfectly respectable German social scientists collected data on the genealogies of over 30,000 Gypsies. They did this by measuring Gypsy skulls, charting their blood type and classifying their eye coloration as a prelude to making Nazi Europe "Gypsy free". Only recently have European Gypsies become fully aware of the true nature of the silent Holocaust that resulted from this "scientific" endeavour. The great majority still know little of the elaborate and malicious documentation which damned their ancestors to some of the worst atrocities of Nazi rule, at a time when Europeans were shockingly indifferent to the plight of Gypsies in their very midst. - Yours, etc.,
Dr Jim MacLaughlin
Geography Department, University College, Cork.