In September 1942, Goebbels decided that “the asocial life of Jews and [Roma] should simply be destroyed”. Up to that moment, it seems that the idea about total annihilation of Roma had not appeared. On December the 16th 1942, [Schutzstaffel chief Heinrich] Himmler issued orders that all Roma be deported to Auschwitz. It was a definite turnaround in the policy of persecution against the Roma and commencement of mass deportations, with the aim of their total annihilation.
In Auschwitz, the Roma and the Sinti were interned in a separate section of the camp, in the […] “Family camp” (Familienlager), separated from other prisoners. It was exactly where Doctor Mengele’s laboratories were located, and he performed most of his experiments on imprisoned Roma. Deported Roma were mostly from Germany, Austria, Bohemia, Moravia, Holland, Belgium and northern France, totaling around 23,000. Somewhat over 3,000 survived.²⁶
In addition to Auschwitz, the Roma suffered in many other death camps, such as Majdanek, Bergen‐Belsen, Treblinka, Sobibor and Ravensbrück.
Hence,
In Serbia, […] the Day of Remembrance of the Roma killed in World War II is marked on the 16th of December, in memory of that date in 1942, when Himmler ordered the systematic deportation of Roma to concentration camps and their extermination.
Similarly with Palestinians today, it is actually surprisingly easy to find moderners who recommend lethal force against Roma and Sinti; many white Europeans continue to stereotype these Indo‐Europeans as congenitally lumpenproletarian. For example:
In one of the first substantial studies devoted to genocide against the Roma,¹ journalist and writer Christian Bernadac presents testimonies of two female concentration camp survivors, because, as he says,
Collecting certain stories and papers on deportation, I reached the conclusion that the Roma were avoided by all representatives of deported peoples, of which there were around thirty‐two or thirty‐five. As an illustration, it is sufficient to refer to some of the rare sentences mentioning the Roma in the survivors’ testimonies. “[Roma] women, dirty thieves, utter cowards, crybabies full of vermin […]”, “A herd of bohemians, disgustingly dirty, obtuse, thieves […]”, “One tall [Roma], thief and liar: just like others of his race, all he needed was one cue by an SS member to become a killer […]”.²
The author, in the paragraphs that follow, admits to having felt very disappointed when he noticed that even writers, university professors and priests from different countries share the same thoughts, quoting several of their statements from the post‐war period. Also, it was frightening to discover that the massacre of Roma was being ignored. “How is it possible to forget all those victims, to delete them from memory?”, he asks himself and others.³
(Emphasis added.)
See also: Remembering the Roma victims of the Holocaust
Click here for other events that happened today (December 16).
1941:
The SS’s annihilation of Jews in Liepaja, Latvia continued, but Axis troops in North Africa began to fall back towards El Agheila in Libya in earnest. To supply the Axis forces operating in Libya, the Regia Marina dispatched a convoy of four freighters from Taranto, Italy, escorted by a powerful fleet of four battleships, five cruisers, twenty destroyers, and one torpedo boat. Apart from that, Axis troops landed on Borneo at 0500 hours and captured the oil fields at Miri and Seria and the oil refinery at Lutong. The Allied authorities began to issue orders to destroy other oil related facilities to avoid further capture.
1942: Tenryu departed with supplies and troops onboard for Madang, New Guinea.
1943: The Axis slaughtered one hundred fifty Polish civilians in retaliation for a partisan attack in which two German officials died. Benito Mussolini gave Commander Ferrucio Ferrini the authorization to form a new naval infantry corps, and Axis troops counterattacked positions held by Allied ones outside of Orsogna, Italy before dawn; the Axis failed to gain ground, but the attack also exhausted New Zealand’s strength in the region. Lastly, the chief surgeon at Auschwitz reported that one hundred six castration operations had been performed on prisoners.
1944: The Battle of the Bulge commenced with the surprise offensive of three Axis armies through the Ardennes forest. Meanwhile, Benito Mussolini held his last public speech at the Teatro Lirico in Milan. Facing an increasingly likely defeat, the Duce hinted at the possibility of negotiating with the Allied forces while reiterating his attacks against the king and the Badoglio government. It was the last time that Mussolini made a public appearance.
1945: Fumimaro Konoe, the Imperial Prime Minister who oversaw the invasion of China in 1937, took his own life. The Fascist businessman, Giovanni Agnelli, dropped dead alongside him.
1980: Hellmuth Walter, Axis engineer, expired.
1984: Karl Marienus Deichgräber, Fascist philologist, left the earth.