After the Nazi seizure of power, police and local authorities intensified long-standing anti-Roma measures, escalating surveillance, harassment, and restrictions that laid groundwork for later mass internment and deportation.
The Nazis expanded the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor to include Roma and Sinti, further embedding racialized discrimination into state policy and enabling broader coercive policing and restrictions.
Physician Robert Ritter was appointed to lead the Center for Research on Racial Hygiene and Demographic Biology, which gathered genealogies, measurements, and records to racially classify Roma and Sinti—information later used to identify and persecute them.
Heinrich Himmler’s circular decree (Bekämpfung der Zigeunerplage) called for intensified, race-based regulation and identification of Roma and Sinti, formalizing police coordination and the racial-classification approach underpinning later deportations.
In the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, authorities ordered so-called “wandering gypsies” to stop traveling and settle, an early step toward concentration in camps and eventual deportation further east.
The Nazis deported more than 2,500 Roma and Sinti from western Germany via assembly camps (including Asperg) to occupied Poland, foreshadowing wider wartime deportations and deadly forced-labor conditions in ghettos and camps.
Vienna criminal police established the Lackenbach internment and transit camp, where Roma and Sinti were held under forced labor and later deported onward (including to Łódź and Auschwitz), making it a key node in regional persecution.
In the Protectorate, preexisting penal-labor camps at Lety u Písku and Hodonín u Kunštátu were repurposed and became Romani-only “Gypsy camps,” functioning as sites of internment, forced labor, disease, and later deportation to Auschwitz.
Himmler’s so-called Auschwitz decree ordered the deportation of Roma and Sinti living in Nazi Germany to Auschwitz; although it contained exemptions, these were largely disregarded in practice.
The first deported Roma and Sinti arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau’s BIIe “Zigeunerlager” (the so-called Gypsy family camp), where entire families were imprisoned together under brutal, lethal conditions.
Prisoners in the BIIe “Gypsy camp” refused to report and barricaded themselves, arming with tools and improvised weapons; the SS withdrew, and the mass killing planned for that moment was averted.
The SS liquidated the Auschwitz-Birkenau “family Gypsy camp,” murdering roughly 4,200 Roma and Sinti in the gas chambers—one of the best-documented single mass-murder events of the Roma genocide.
Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz on 27 January 1945; survivors included those Roma and Sinti who had been transferred out of BIIe to other camps or labor details before the August 1944 liquidation.
Persecution of Roma and Sinti under the Nazi Regime (1933–1945)
