Weiss-Wendt, Anton, ed.. A People Destroyed: New Research on the Roma Genocide, 1941-1945. : University of Nebraska Press, 2025. 342 pp. $70.00 (cloth), ISBN 9781496234537.
Reviewed by Ilsen About (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales)
Published on H-Diplo (February, 2026)
Commissioned by Seth Offenbach (Bronx Community College, The City University of New York)
Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=62342
A People Destroyed: New Research on the Roma Genocide, edited by Anton Weiss-Wendt, may mark a turning point in the academic institutionalization of historical studies devoted to the genocide of Roma in Europe during the Second World War. During the 1990s and 2000s, a first series of edited volumes made it possible to bring together the state of knowledge, which at the time was particularly fragmented.[1] Since the 2010s, the work of a new generation of scholars has marked a new stage and has led to several major collective publications, opening up numerous innovative perspectives.[2] Special journal issues have also more recently demonstrated this inclusion within the academic field by addressing specific territories in Europe and calling for consideration of the different, and often autonomous, dynamics that were at work.[3]
This new volume, following an initial collection published in 2013, has as its principal merits the ability to make visible the current state of knowledge, to highlight the differentiated methodologies mobilized by historians, and to propose a significant advance in assessing the human toll of the genocide at the European scale. In several cases, this volume also brings together research sometimes already known to specialists but previously available only in their original languages. Indirectly, this collection of essays also illustrates some of the imbalances that characterize knowledge production in this field of research and invites a rebalancing of the state of knowledge.
It thus appears, without any doubt, that studies on Germany and Austria are particularly well developed and now make it possible to explore the local dimensions of persecution. Case studies devoted to anti-Gypsy persecution—by Théophile Leroy on Karlsruhe (chapter 1), Sebastian Lotto-Kusche on Flensburg (chapter 2), and Patricia Pientka on Berlin through the history of the Marzahn camp (chapter 3)—demonstrate an increasingly refined understanding of the mechanisms of repression. These works are part of a broader historiographical continuum, extending to publications released since the 1990s focusing on Munich, the Rhineland and Westphalia, Upper Swabia, and, more recently, the city of Göttingen.[4] The methodology deployed in these studies combines, in a remarkable manner, the cross-analysis of police sources, reports produced by the Institute for Racial Hygiene, testimonies where they exist, photographs, and information contained in postwar compensation claims. While shedding light on the mechanisms of repression, each of the authors also seeks to follow as closely as possible the trajectories of the targeted groups, from the first operations of control and internment, through racial assessments, their everyday experiences during periods of confinement, deportations to Poland beginning in May 1940, successive deportations after January 1943, and the trajectories that can be traced through the end of the war.
Alongside the now well-known repressive apparatuses operating in territories under direct National Socialist control, the volume gives significant space to other configurations that make it possible to evoke the polycentric character of the genocide. In a highly significant manner, the other chapters emphasize the importance of several criteria taken into account by the authorities responsible for repression: distinctions between Roma and Sinti according to whether they were considered nationals or foreigners, “nomadic” or “sedentary,” depending on their supposed degree of integration into majority society, or whether they had already been registered as “Gypsies” prior to the war or were identified as such during wartime census operations. The identity attributed to them proved decisive in determining the fate that awaited them.
This is particularly evident in Laurence Schram’s study devoted to the Mechelen transit camp in Belgium (chapter 4), which underscores the prior existence of police registration systems and the mobilization of long-standing policing practices in the roundups carried out in preparation for the convoy to Auschwitz-Birkenau assembled in January 1944. The exemplary study by Maria Schwaller-Rosvoll focuses on the fate of a single individual, Zolo Karoli, and makes it possible to address the deportation of Norwegian Roma from Belgium (chapter 5). This study resonates both with Martin Holler’s work on Sinti from East Prussia and Michèle Descolonges’s study of a Romani woman interned in France.[5] The term odyssey is particularly appropriate for describing the forced migrations of a group expelled from one border to another until it ultimately found itself caught in the vise of deportation. The individual scale also makes it possible to perceive attempts to evade repression and to resist, collectively, a programmed death, sometimes in vain. Milovan Pisarri’s study, centered on persecution in Serbia (chapter 6), clearly exposes the multiplicity of actors involved—the various German authorities and the Serbian police—and their respective roles in a destruction described as “bureaucratic,” which claimed several thousand lives within a particularly compressed time frame, between the spring of 1941 and the spring of 1942 (p. 146).
Indirectly, these chapters also reflect the many questions that remain under discussion for other countries in Western Europe (France, Italy, the Netherlands), Central Europe (Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia), and the countries emerging from the former Yugoslavia, which are not represented in this volume. The scale of decision-making, the diversity of authorities involved, the intensity of repression, and the diversity of individual and collective trajectories all remain areas requiring further investigation, despite recent studies devoted to these countries.[6]
Petre Matei’s study, devoted to the conditions of the deportation of Romanian Roma to Transnistria (chapter 7), by contrast, reflects the increasingly refined knowledge produced by a research agenda opened by historians Viorel Achim and Michelle Kelso. Following a specific census of Roma in Romania in May 1942, which distinguished between “nomadic” and “sedentary” populations, historians are now questioning the differentiated fates associated with each category. Matei focuses in particular on petitions preserved in archival collections, which reveal the resources mobilized to resist bureaucratized repression—an aspect that remains to be explored for other European countries.
Piotr Wawrzeniuk’s study, devoted to the Galician District (chapter 8), suggests the existence of a “Lemberg paradox,” a site of concentration and repression but also of refuge, where hundreds of individuals escaped deportation. Based on an impressive cross-analysis of police and judicial sources, this study raises two distinct questions: Did other pockets of refuge and rescue exist elsewhere in Europe? And is it possible to write an equally precise and well-documented history for other parts of occupied Poland, particularly in continuity with the pioneering work of Piotr Kaszyca, who as early as 1998 identified 188 sites of Roma massacres in Poland, the histories of which remain to be written?[7]
The combined use of the archives of the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes (1943–45), German Army archives, and local police archives has made it possible to significantly expand knowledge of the countries affected by the Eastern Front. This is illustrated by Weiss-Wendt’s study, devoted to the ethnography of murdered populations in Estonia (chapter 9), and by the work of Mykhaylo Tyaglyy, who examines the mapping of genocidal actions in Ukraine (chapter 10). These chapters also show that research on entire countries sometimes depends on the persistence of a small number of scholars whose work explores, step by step, all dimensions of a deep and particularly intense repression. The Estonian case thus demonstrates the possibility of writing a singular history of one of the most radical campaigns of repression at the European scale. The Ukrainian case, by contrast, shows how difficult it appears to be to construct a comprehensive history of repression in a country at war, where access to archives remains extremely challenging.
Only one study, by Katrin Kühnert, whose presence almost raises questions of its relationship to the rest of the book, addresses memorial aspects through the analysis of several autobiographical narratives published exclusively in German (chapter 11), thus extending the work of Marianne C. Zwicker.[8] A thematic approach to testimonies such as those of Otto Rosenberg and Zoni Weisz offers interesting perspectives, particularly with regard to experiences of dehumanization and survival. From a historical standpoint, however, it seems that language of publication alone cannot constitute the sole criterion for selecting a corpus of published testimonies and that other criteria may need to be taken into account, such as the community of origin of the witnesses, their gender, the sites of persecution, and the nature of the experiences they endured. At the same time, the recent development of multiple strands of research on compensation, memorial struggles for recognition, testimonies—written and oral—artistic expressions (literature, visual arts, cinema, etc.), and sites of memory suggests that the field of memory studies has now established itself as a domain in its own right.[9] A single essay focusing on only one dimension of memorial questions thus invites reflection on whether the time has come to distinguish between fields of a different nature—history and memory—or to confront their intersection directly. The work of Ari Joskowicz (Rain of Ash: Roma, Jews, and the Holocaust, 2023) has shown, for example, the need to question, in a cross-cutting manner, the conditions under which historical knowledge emerged on the one hand, and, on the other, the experiences of witnesses through the collection of oral testimonies or the publication of written testimonies. It may also be time to grant a genuine historical place to the study of testimonies, written and oral, whether contemporary with the events or produced later, whose analysis would make it possible to better apprehend the experience of persecution, as well as the long-term effects endured by the targeted groups and the phenomenon of silencing imposed for several decades.
A final chapter by Weiss-Wendt (chapter 12), which stands somewhat apart from the rest of the volume and will undoubtedly generate considerable debate, addresses the human and numerical toll of the genocide of Roma and Sinti in Europe. This work is the result of a patient process of cross-checking information gathered across European countries, through collaboration with scholars, bibliographic research, and data that are not always easily accessible. This study also makes it possible to historicize the very question of numerical assessment, aligning it with comparable work on the genocide of the Jews, and places into perspective the use of undocumented figures employed as instruments of memorial claims in a manner that is counterproductive, or at the very least debatable.[10] As the author recalls in his introduction, the circulation, within both scholarly debate and the public sphere, of numerous contradictory figures ranging from 80,000 to more than one million deaths justifies a measured and nondogmatic approach. Through this work, he thus provides shared and more dispassionate knowledge regarding what constitutes the sum of human lives destroyed one by one. The author arrives at a precise estimate: between 92,741 and 105,826 deaths, representing 11.6 percent of a Roma population estimated at between 831,000 and 885,000 in 1939 (pp. 286–87, 289). He confirms earlier assessments, particularly those produced by Michael Zimmermann in 1996.[11] Above all, Weiss-Wendt calls for renewed scholarly engagement with the numerical state of Roma and Sinti populations in Europe on the eve of the genocide, whether or not they were identified by the authorities, as this remains a subject almost entirely absent from historical research. Despite the existence of numerous censuses as early as the late nineteenth century and extensive police registration, knowledge in this area remains particularly superficial. Moreover, no nominal lists of victims at the national level, established according to a shared methodology, currently exist in any European country. Thus, the new numerical assessment proposed by Weiss-Wendt may be revised in the future should dedicated research programs be developed, with the aim of producing databases similar to those created by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem for the genocide of the Jews. The author does not claim to close a question that remains open and will require further revision and updating in the future.
This volume, notably through its title, which refers to the three-volume work of Raul Hilberg (The Destruction of the European Jews, 2003), distances itself from debates that, as recently as the 2000s, questioned the existence of an ontologically genocidal nature of German anti-Gypsy policy in comparison with the genocide of the Jews. It marks the maturity of a historiography shaped by several generations of scholars who contributed to it despite numerous difficulties, a certain isolation, and even hostility from the academic world or majority society. It also reflects a determination to share methodologies and to develop an integrated history of the genocide of Roma and Sinti that apprehends both the violence of the perpetrators and the experiences of the victims. Some final questions emerge from the reading of this book: How were the individual, familial, and collective memories formed by survivors and their descendants shaped in relation to the history of the genocide? How were these lived experiences, recounted by historians, transmitted, and what does this memory—so little studied—of the genocide of Roma and Sinti in Europe ultimately reveal for those who bear and inherit this history? While the establishment of facts and circumstances continues, new histories still remain to be written.
Notes
[1]. Jan Parcer, ed., Memorial Book: The Gypsies at Auschwitz-Birkenau, 2 vols. (K. G. Saur, 1993); Karola Fings, Herbert Heuß, and Frank Sparing, ed., The Gypsies During the Second World War, vol. 1, From “Race Science” to the Camps (University of Hertfordshire Press, 1997); Donald Kenrick, ed., The Gypsies During the Second World War, vol. 2, In the Shadow of the Swastika (University of Hertfordshire Press, 1999); Donald Kenrick, ed., The Gypsies During the Second World War, vol. 3, The Final Chapter (University of Hertfordshire Press, 2006); Wacław Długoborski, ed., Sinti und Roma im KL Auschwitz-Birkenau 1943–1944: Vor dem Hintergrund ihrer Verfolgung unter der Naziherrschaft (Verlag Staatliches Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau, 1998); Michael Zimmermann, ed., Zwischen Erziehung und Vernichtung: Zigeunerpolitik und Zigeunerforschung im Europa des 20. Jahrhunderts (Franz Steiner Verlag, 2007); János Bársony and Ágnes Daróczi, eds., Pharrajimos: The Fate of the Roma During the Holocaust (International Debate Education Association, 2008); and Felicitas Fischer von Weikersthal, Christoph Garstka, Urs Heftrich, and Heinz-Dietrich Löwe, eds., Der nationalsozialistische Genozid an den Roma Osteuropas: Geschichte und künstlerische Verarbeitung (Böhlau, 2008).
[2]. KZ-Gedenkstätte Neuengamme, ed., Verfolgung der Sinti und Roma in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus (Temmen, 2012); Anton Weiss-Wendt, ed., The Nazi Genocide of the Roma: Reassessment and Commemoration (Berghahn Books, 2013); Eliyana R. Adler and Kateřina Čapková, eds., Jewish and Romani Families in the Holocaust and Its Aftermath (Rutgers University Press, 2020); and Karola Fings and Sybille Steinbacher, eds., Sinti und Roma: Der nationalsozialistische Völkermord in historischer und gesellschaftspolitischer Perspektive(Wallstein, 2021).
[3]. Patrick Desbois, ed., “Des territoires d’extermination à l’Est de l’Europe (1941–1944),” special issue, Études tsiganes, nos. 56–57 (2016); Ilsen About, ed., “Persécutions des Roms et Sinti et violences génocidaires en Europe de l’Ouest, 1939–1946,” special issue, Revue d’histoire de la Shoah, no. 217 (2023); and Volha Bartash and Neringa Latvytė, eds., “Memory and Recognition of the Nazi Genocide of Roma in the Baltic Context,” special issue, Journal of Baltic Studies 54, no. 1 (2023).
[4]. Ludwig Eiber, Eva Strauss, and Michail Krausnick, eds., “Ich wußte es wird schlimm”: Die Verfolgung der Sinti und Roma in München, 1933–1945 (Buchendorfer Verlag, 1993); Karola Fings and Friedrich Opfermann, eds., Zigeunerverfolgung im Rheinland und in Westfalen 1933–1945: Geschichte, Aufarbeitung und Erinnerung (Ferdinand Schöningh, 2012); Esther Sattig, Das Zigeunerlager Ravensburg Ummenwinkel: Die Verfolgung der oberschwäbischen Sinti(Metropol, 2016); and Rainer Driever, Die Verfolgungsgeschichte der Göttinger Sinti: Kaiserreich, Weimarer Republik, Nationalsozialismus und Bundesrepublik Deutschland bis 1980(Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2025).
[5]. Martin Holler, “Deadly Odyssey: East Prussian Sinti in Białystok, Brest-Litovsk, and Auschwitz-Birkenau,” in Mass Violence in Nazi-Occupied Europe, ed. Alex J. Kay and David Stahel (Indiana University Press, 2018), 94–120; and Michèle Descolonges, “Kali, une figure ‘autre’ de la résistance à l’internement: Parcours d’une internée rom en France durant la Seconde Guerre mondiale,” Revue d’histoire de la Shoah, no. 217 (2023): 215–36.
[6]. For France, see Lise Foisneau, Les Nomades face à la guerre (1939–1946) (Klincksieck, 2022); for the Netherlands, see Amanda Kluveld, “Le Zigeunertransport du camp de transit de Westerbork: La déportation des Sinti et Roms des Pays-Bas en mai 1944,” Revue d’histoire de la Shoah, no. 217 (2023): 51–80; for Italy, see Paola Trevisan, La persecuzione dei rom e dei sinti nell’Italia fascista: Storia, etnografia e memorie (Viella, 2024); and for Hungary, see László Csősz, “Slaughtering the Scapegoats: Anti-Roma Violence in Hungary in the Last Months of World War II,” Holocaust: Studii și cercetări 16, no. 1 (2024): 233–74; and Anders E. B. Blomqvist, “Deportations of Roma from Hungary and the Mass Killing at Kamianets-Podilskyi in 1941,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 38, no. 2 (2024): 200–15.
[7]. Piotr Kaszyca, “Die Morde an Sinti und Roma im Generalgouvernement 1939–1945,” in Długoborski, Sinti und Roma im KL Auschwitz-Birkenau, 117–43.
[8]. See Marianne C. Zwicker, “‘Auschwitz Still Lives and Breathes in Me’: Auschwitz-Birkenau in Romani Writing,” in The Routledge Handbook to Auschwitz-Birkenau, ed. Sarah M. Cushman, Joanne Pettitt, and Dominic Williams (Routledge, 2026), 241–49.
[9]. See Caterina Preda, “Artistic Memorialization of the Roma Holocaust in Romania: Rendering Visible the Historical Trauma and Documenting the Suffering,” Holocaust: Study and Research, no. 12 (2019): 123–48; Celia Donert and Eve Rosenhaft, eds., The Legacies of the Romani Genocide in Europe Since 1945 (Routledge, 2022); and Volha Bartash, Tomasz Kamusella, and Viktor Shapoval, eds., Papusza/Bronisława Wajs, Tears of Blood: A Poet’s Witness Account of the Nazi Genocide of Roma (Brill, 2024).
[10]. Dieter Pohl, “Just How Many? On the Death Toll of Jewish Victims of Nazi Crimes,” in Denial of the Denial, or the Battle of Auschwitz: The Demography and Geopolitics of the Holocaust; The View from the Twenty-First Century, ed. Alfred Kokh and Pavel Polian (Academic Studies Press, 2012), 129–48.
[11]. Michael Zimmermann, Rassenutopie und Genozid: Die nationalsozialistische ‘Lösung der Zigeunerfrage’ (Christians, 1996); and Michael Zimmermann, “Die nationalsozialistische Zigeunerverfolgung in Ost- und Südosteuropa, ein Überblick,” in Der nationalsozialistische Genozid an den Roma Osteuropas, ed. Felicitas Fischer Von Weikersthal, Christoph Garstka, Urs Heftrich, and Heinz-Dietrich Löwe (Geschichte und künstlerische Verarbeitung, 2008), 23–24.
Citation: Ilsen About. Review of Weiss-Wendt, Anton, ed.. A People Destroyed: New Research on the Roma Genocide, 1941-1945. H-Diplo, H-Net Reviews. February, 2026.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=62342
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