Authors: Lynn H. Nicholas
Soon the professor and his assistants, among them the impeccably Nordic Eva Justin (who would later write her doctoral thesis on Gypsy children), using research methods remarkably similar to those of the more extreme Anglo-American eugenicists, were rushing from Gypsy enclosures to concentration camps taking blood samples, making plaster casts of heads, taking photographs, and recording family histories. To make their subjects more relaxed, they sometimes posed as missionaries. By 1937, they were able to produce an extraordinary document “several meters in length on which, in tiny millimeter sized letters and numbers the genealogical tree of all Gypsies living in Germany for the last ten generations had been charted.”
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Ritter was sympathetic to the pure, itinerant Gypsies, whom he felt should be left to pursue their lifestyle. But both he and Miss Justin had concluded in their travels and observations that the hereditary weaknesses of those of mixed German-Gypsy blood absolutely required that they be sterilized. After this had been done, Ritter fantasized, these “bad” Gypsies might be sent to live in remote and strictly supervised reservations where they could, “in keeping with their gifts and talents, practice a satisfying vocation; they could run their own little household, read books at their leisure, go to the cinema, enjoy music or engage in sports.”
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These idyllic reservations would not long be an expense to the government: Eva Justin had also determined that children with Gypsy blood could not ever become socially well-adjusted adults even if they were removed from their families and sent to special schools, and that they too must be sterilized. Their generations would thus be finite.
The government’s own idea of the Gypsy future was rather less romantic than that of Dr. Ritter. In May 1938, SS chief Heinrich Himmler upgraded the small Office of Gypsy Affairs of the Munich criminal police to the Central Reich Agency for Fighting the Gypsy Plague and moved its headquarters to Berlin. On December 8, in a formal decree, all Gypsy affairs were consolidated under control of the Kripo, or criminal police.
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In early 1939, Himmler, moving right along on the issue, demanded more precise data on each of the 30,000 or so mixed and pure Gypsies in the
Reich. This included names, addresses, and places of employment. Individuals would then be issued identity cards of varying colors indicating their degree of Gypsy blood. An overwhelmed Ritter fussed that he had to “deliver at least three thousand racial diagnoses by April first.”
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The classifications were not easy, given the fact that by Ritter’s own estimate some 90 percent of the Gypsies involved had some degree of German blood, thus necessitating five different categories ranging from non-Gypsy to pure Gypsy, with “hybrids” arranged by percentage of German blood in between.
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The examinations took a lot of time, as the Sinti Gypsy Franz Wirbel later testified.
The Wirbel family had lived in Allenstein, East Prussia, for six years by the time Ritter and Justin arrived on their mission. Franz, seventeen, was apprenticed to a violin maker. In the late summer of 1939, he and his entire family, the youngest being six years old, were ordered to report to the local health department. Refusal to do so, they were informed, would result in incarceration in a concentration camp. At the health office they were greeted by Ritter, Justin, and two assistants. Miss Justin, speaking fluent Sinti, reassured them and told the family that the examination was routine. They were told to undress completely. Questions were asked about previous illnesses. Skull and chin shapes, height of brow, size and shape of nose, color and setting of eyes, and much more were measured and called out to Dr. Ritter, who sat at a long table and filled in forms for each person. Finger- and footprints were also taken, as were samples of blood and hair. At the end, each subject had to sign his form. At no time were they informed of the purpose of the examination. It is not clear if Ritter and Justin knew the exact purpose either.
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But Himmler did. Only weeks after the examination of the Wirbels, German forces invaded Poland. Here there would be plenty of room for Gypsy “reservations” rather different from those envisioned by Ritter.
In mid-October 1939, all Gypsies were forbidden to change their place of residence. Police were then ordered to take a census and analyze the “social worth” of each family. From this information lists for deportation to the newly formed General Gouvernement area of Poland were to be compiled. The census takers were required to refer to Ritter’s data in making their decisions, which were often delayed while the impatient officials waited for the documents to arrive. But numerous apparent Gypsies were, in fact, excused by Ritter’s classifications, which were taken as gospel.
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The deportations also had to be delayed for some months due to conditions in Poland, which, as we shall see, were chaotic. Not all Nazi officials agreed with these measures. In January 1940, Dr. Leonardo Conti, the
Reich Health Leader, wrote that deportation seemed to him mere expediency that would not achieve “radicalization.” In his opinion:
The final solution of the Gypsy problem can only be achieved through the sterilization of full and part Gypsies.… I think that the time for a legal resolution of these problems is over, and that we must immediately try to sterilize the Gypsies and part Gypsies as a special measure.… Once sterilization is completed and these people are rendered biologically harmless, it is of no great consequence whether they are expelled or used as labor on the home front.
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Despite Conti’s objections, some 2,500 Gypsies were sent to Poland in 1940. Everyone over fourteen had to sign a release agreeing to be sterilized if he or she returned to Germany. This first group, after a time in labor camps, was not well supervised, and scores of the exiled families were left to fend for themselves. Many starved or were picked up again and sent to other camps, but, to the disgust of race authorities, a few managed to find their way back to Germany.
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Ritter, meanwhile, continued his meticulous classifications of each individual Gypsy in Germany and Austria. Himmler, who was fascinated by all sorts of racial research, and even sponsored SS racial investigations in Tibet, strongly supported Ritter’s theories. This admiration led him to exempt certain clans of “pure Gypsies, who were possibly valuable Aryans,” from persecution and deportation, a decision much deplored by other Nazi officials but one that saved thousands of lives.
Mixed German Gypsies were not so lucky. On December 16, 1942, Himmler issued his so-called Auschwitz Decree, which ordered their deportation. Mixed individuals could still be exempted for a number of complex reasons, including having important war-related jobs, being married to a German spouse, or being a decorated or wounded veteran, but for many, the exemption required that they agree to sterilization for themselves and their children. As the volume of deportations increased, impatient police officials often made arbitrary decisions without consulting Ritter’s lists. But it must be said that more than a few families were saved by delaying tactics on the part of sympathetic local officials and by procrastinations of various kinds.
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By March 1943 the deportations of Gypsies, like those of Jews, had become a flood, and included hundreds of unaccompanied children who were removed from foster care and children’s homes, including those run by the churches. The thirty-nine children Eva Justin had studied for her
Ph.D. thesis were taken from St. Josephspflege, in Mulfingen (Württemberg), on May 9, 1944. The pursuit of these children was relentless, and appeals to the normal authorities were swept aside with contempt in the name of the Reichsführer SS. The hunters even went so far as to provide a round-trip ticket to a pure Gypsy (and therefore exempt) baby nurse to take a one-year-old “bad” Gypsy orphan to Auschwitz.
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The Gypsies were, rather exceptionally, allowed to remain together as families at Auschwitz. Their part of the camp was therefore known as the Gypsy Family Camp. It is not clear to this day what future the Nazis had in mind for them, but true to Ritter’s policy, their wives and daughters were used to test new sterilization methods and an estimated 9,432 boys and girls under fourteen became laboratory animals for the much written about Dr. Joseph Mengele, who used them in his eugenics experiments on twins and for research on various diseases.
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When it suited him, Dr. Mengele hugged the children and fed them candy; he even set up a little kindergarten painted with fairy-tale scenes for some of them. But a child he seemed to dote on one day could be killed with total indifference the next, so that he could examine its organs. The conditions under which the children were used were terrible, as a former prisoner assigned to take care of some of them described:
The anthropometrical examinations took place as follows: the children were stripped naked and measurements were made for hours (two to five hours)…. This was a difficult ordeal for the children. Terrified, worn-out, hungry and shivering, they had to get up at six in the morning and walk the one-and-a-half-kilometer road from the block to the out-patient hospital.… The room in which the tests were conducted was unheated. The children … stood before the x-ray screen from five to fifteen minutes, since the exposure on display was being talked over and discussed.… After they returned [to the block] the children had fevers, caught colds, terrible coughs, sinus infections and even pneumonia.… Particularly traumatic were the morphological tests. Blood was collected from the children’s fingers, then from their veins, sometimes two or three times from the same victims. The children screamed, shielded themselves, would not let themselves be touched. They were very afraid of being pricked.
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Far from these distressing scenes, and secure in his racial opinions, Robert Ritter, Mengele’s fellow scientist and provider of his guinea pigs, beavered on and finally completed his list of 23,872 German Gypsies in March 1944.
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By that time thousands had been sterilized and the Family
Camp would soon be liquidated. In the end, more than 11,000 German Gypsies perished in Auschwitz alone, including twenty-three members of violin maker Franz Wirbel’s family, whose examinations by Ritter and Justin could, in retrospect, hardly be called “routine.”
Forced sterilization and other eugenic procedures, relatively easy to apply to small groups of the racially alien—especially to those of low economic status, who were universally regarded as inferiors in the white world—although useful, would in no way suffice to rid Germany of the half-million overwhelmingly middle-class Jews who held full citizenship. Nor, in the early days of the Nazi regime, was there any way to isolate them. The old ghettos were long gone, and thousands of Jews had not only become completely assimilated, but had served Germany well in war and were major and respected contributors in the economic sector, the professions, and the arts. Extreme anti-Jewish measures would also not help Germany’s cause in its byzantine maneuvers to keep Europe appeased while rebuilding its economy and armed forces. Hitler was fully aware of these things, but his determination to be rid of the Jews was beyond reason: it was an all-consuming obsession that he often could not conceal, even in the least suitable circumstances. United States Ambassador William Dodd, in diary entries in the late summer and fall of 1933, noted that one American visitor received by the Führer had reported that Hitler had “talked wildly about destroying all Jews, insisting that no other nation had any right to protest and that Germany was showing the world how to rid itself of its greatest curse.” Hitler had spoken in a similar vein to New York bankers Winthrop Aldrich and Henry Mann, who reported, with supreme irony, that Hitler “considers himself a German Messiah.”
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But Hitler was a consummate politician and, despite these slips of the tongue and intermittent violence by his most fanatic followers, would for five years manage to orchestrate the anti-Jewish campaign with great skill, varying its intensity to fit the mood and needs of the moment, alternating terror with lulls of apparent indifference, which allowed both the German people and the Jews to become accustomed to the latest outrageous regulations and foreign governments to avoid taking concerted action. The process again and again gave false hope to the Jewish population, which was constantly kept off balance by the belief that the worst was over.
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The basic idea was to make life so untenable for Jews that they would leave the country. Between 1933 and 1938 a series of laws and decrees
would gradually deprive them of most means of employment and virtually every civil right. Along with this went “educational” and propaganda campaigns intended to convey the idea that the Jews, like the other alien races, were biologically dangerous and not quite human. In the new Nazi religious pantheon, they were cast as the foul embodiment of evil. Waxing and waning as events permitted, the Nazi racial poison was fed into Germany’s social and psychological fabric, reviving and even surpassing the worst superstitions and intolerances of the past, and validating the vicious urges of those elements of society whose counterparts can be found in any place where prejudice is ingrained and one group is put at the absolute mercy of another.
Indeed, such a process had already reached its ultimate stage in the Soviet Union, only two days’ journey from Berlin. Between 1930 and 1938, at exactly the same time as Hitler was setting in motion the process of the elimination of Jews and other alien races from Germany, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, using the weapons of starvation, deportation, and murder, was ridding himself of millions of mostly Ukrainian kulaks, or land-owning peasants, and their families, who as a nationality and a class rather than a race (the basis for extermination is not important, it seems) had become an obstacle to his collectivization of Soviet agriculture. In the winter and spring of 1932–33, this process reached its zenith in what became known as the Terror-Famine, in which some seven million of the eventual eleven million dead are thought to have succumbed.