In some places, such as the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, almost the entire pre-war Romani population was wiped out. Roma from Germany, Austria, the Czech lands, Croatia, the Netherlands, the Baltic states and parts of the occupied Soviet Union suffered the heaviest losses. In every country brought under Nazi control during the Second World War, Roma, like Jews, were persecuted on racial grounds. But he was clearly aware of the danger involved in being labelled a ‘wandering Gypsy’ – a category created by a 1927 law regulating the movements of people ‘living like Gypsies’, adopted in the democratic First Czechoslovak Republic – in the unsettled conditions of postwar Europe. It is impossible to tell from this petition whether he identified as Roma in his private life. really a ‘Gypsy’? The authorities claimed that his lifestyle marked him out as such, but he argued the opposite. His petition to the Prague authorities in 1948, shortly after a communist regime had been established in Czechoslovakia, shows that institutionalised discrimination towards ‘Gypsies’ – a derogatory term used to refer to a large and diverse ethnic minority who might see themselves as belonging to a number of groups, including Roma, Sinti, Manouche or Jenisch – did not end with the cessation of military conflict. was one of hundreds of thousands of people persecuted as ‘Gypsies’ between 19 as a direct result of racial policies adopted by Nazi Germany and its allies across Europe. I am requesting that my name be removed from the Gypsy register, and that my registration card be cancelled. Despite this, I’ve been put on the new register of Gypsies in 1947, and I was issued with a Gypsy registration card.

After returning from the concentration camp I did my military service, and then moved with my family to the village of B., as part of the drive to resettle the borderlands … My family and I lived decently from what I earned as a forestry worker I didn’t live like a Gypsy, and I always had a fixed residence. In 1944, I was deported to the concentration camp in Terezín, where I was imprisoned until May 1945. Robert Ritter, head of the Racial Hygiene and Demographic Biology Research Unit of Nazi Germany’s Criminal Police, conducting an interview with a Romani woman, 1936 © Galerie Bilderwelt/Hulton Getty Images.

Farm golden rule borderlands