Customer Reviews

The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

I find this book personally insulting and full of revisionist conclusions. As a Romani who lost Grandmother and many Aunts and Uncles in the Porrajmos (the devouring in Romany)I am outraged that once again we, the victims of this insanity are blamed for the crimes committed against us. That ANY victims of the Holocaust are essentially blamed for their own demise is cruel and unjustified. I also contest, and detest, Mr. Lewy's conclustion that the Roma people were not racially marked for extermination: this is both absurd and untrue as withnessed by the nazi's own words, we were "lives unworthy of life, we were criminals due to our genetics, Germany must be cleansed of the Gypsy plague" etc. An inaccurate book full of racial sterotypes, the gist of which was used by the nazi's as justification for the extermination of the Roma in the first place and is still being used to justify the persecution of Roma today. Horrid book.

I originally was excited to see this book come out and hoped that it would bring to greater attention the overlooked genocide of the Roma. However, investigation of the book itself proved not only disappointing, but even disturbing.

Lewy _appears_ to present a very scholarly and thoroughly-researched work, and yet the many strange and significant gaps in his text can only suggest that he had an unspoken agenda: to actually deny the genocide of the Roma during the Holocaust .

Further, at least as far as I could find, he does not seem to have made any effort whatsoever to include in his research the work of Romani scholars and historians. This would seem to have been an obvious place to start. And while apparently standing as a defender of the persecuted, he actually writes about the Roma in prejudicial and condescending ways.

... Instead, that description accurately belongs to "The Gypsies During the Second World War." For anyone who's truly interested, _this_ is the work that should "become the standard work on the subject."

...

I hope that readers who came to this Amazon page with an interest in this subject will investigate The Gypsies During the Second World War, vol. 1 & 2, and the works of Ian Hancock.

This is an absorbing, well-written and quite readable text book by a noted 20th century historian, Guenter Lewy, and it constitutes a disturbing, graphic and poignant overview of the Nazi campaign against the gypsy population of central Europe. The German national socialist regime, always in search for helpless, infirm and unwell sectors of the population to scapegoat and persecute, found in the gypsies an ideal target by way of a collection of powerless, rootless, and socio-politically unsavory groups of individuals to prey upon. Yet this persecution has not been widely publized or recognized until now largely because of the nature of the gypsy population, i.e. due to their own lack of social and political visibility, no one has paid a lot of attention to their plight or to the multitude of ways in which they were persecuted, along with Jews and other political groups by the Nazis.

This book remedies that egregious oversight, painting a vivid, quite compassionate picture of the gypsies' dilemma, and at the same time marshaling a damning indictment of the general campaign of mistreatment, disenfranchisement, torture, and murder conducted by the Third Reich against all subjugated peoples both in greater Germany and also in the countries conquered as they pushed both east and west during the prosecution of the war. According to the author, the policy seemed to evolve as the Nazis encountered such groups in their conquests, and whatever policies as emerged did so more in relation to the local officials' negative views of the gypsies as being thieves, trouble-makers and undesirables than due to any overall pre-planned approach.

Of course, this sort of insight shouldn't come as a total surprise to students of Third Reich social policies. Even Himmler's well-documented plan for the "Final Solution" is now considered by a number of noted historians to owe more to the requirements of exigent circumstance that evolved as the Wehrmacht rolled through Poland during Operation Barbarossa than from any long-term plan to systematically exterminate all European Jews. The Nazis realized they could not feed or shelter the Jews and maintain their schedule for populating the hinterlands, and the extermination program was conceived of as a way out of that dilemma.

It should also be noted that the Nazi bureaucracy was rife with duplications and redundancies, and that this led to disorganization and confusion. As a result, it was exceedingly ineffective and inefficient. The history associated with the conduct of the army and its special branches toward extermination also reflects this disorganization and amateurish, rigid and unfocused leadership and direction. In spite of this lack of leadership or any clear and unambiguous policy, the local officials often improvised, with gruesome effect. As history shows, they were a deadly, murderous crew.

The campaign as described in this well-documented and painstakingly researched book reflects that lack of coherent policy and disorganization in the actions taken against the gypsies. However, this lack of specific focus does not mean they were not massively and negatively affected by government policies. On the contrary, from the inception of programs against the gypsies began in 1938 to the bitter end, they suffered the fates of so many others; deportation to concentration camps, exclusion from school, work and social life, slave labor, involuntary sterilization, torture, medical experimentation, and extermination. This book fully documents the place of the gypsies as a class of victims in the Holocaust, and fills a void too long left vacant by scholarship and public recognition. This is an excellent book, carefully researched, well documented, and compassionate in its comprehensive consideration of the plight of European gypsies at the hands of the Third Reich.

I really wanted to read this book. I've read a lot about the Nazi persecution of Jews, as well as their persecution of Russians, Slavs, homosexuals, anarchists, Jehovah's Witnesses, and so on. But I hadn't read much about their persecution of the Roma, or Gypsies, and I wanted to learn about it. But the book is extraordinarily dry. The author did not bring the events to life at all. It's pretty hard to make a subject as inherently dramatic as the systematic persecution of an entire people not very interesting, but the author succeeded. What's worse, really, was that as other reviewers suggested, there was a powerful theme of underplaying the importance of what happened to the Roma. I was very disturbed by this. I give the book two stars instead of one because I did learn a few things. But I will be looking for another book on the subject, because I didn't learn enough.

Long ignored by most historians is the plight of the Gypsies at the hands of the nazis.

Subjected to every indignity and persecution as the Jews of Europe yet often ignored by most historians except brief. Often subjected to grizly medical experiments by men such as Mengele. Many of the photos of his victims are in fact of Gypsy children.

This book gives a good scope of what the nazis did to them.

But like most, it does not give a solid number on how many were murdered by the nazis. Nobody knows. Few Censusus covered them. Few records were kept. More often than not, they were shoved into the same trains as the Jews and gassed with them.

There are many gaps but this book does at least do some justice.

Hi.
There already is a review of this book, recently used in court to deny Romani survivors compensation for the crimes of WWII, written by the Romani intellectual and activist Ian Hancock (university of Texas).This can be found at [URL}, under "The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies", on the "Further Reading" page.

Suffice to say that, using narrow interpretations of The Genocide Convention, coupled with a literal approach to Nazi sources, the book makes a determined effort to belittle what happened to Roma and Sinti in WWII.
The only reason it came as a surprise to me to read that Guenter Lewy was one of the foremost obscurantists of the atrocities committed by Nixon and Kissinger's army during the USs invasion of Vietnam, was the remarkable pattern in his writings this suggested.

I give it two stars, because, despite the main thrust of the book (despite the author, almost), there are such things as photographs and isolated facts, which, if you've spent the money on the big volume, you might still find useful if you can identify them.

For some reason the URL I mention below has been expunged from my review.

[URL]

Additionally, the information there, re: the Holocaust and Roma and Sinti, bears much more of a relation to the human suffering imposed on these people than Lewy`s cold, insensitive book , with it`s "neutral" posturing at the expense of a people he himself professes to find reason to dislike.

Nicholas

This book was riddled with historical inaccuracies and a desire to blame the victim for the horrors that took place. It is an interesting read, but please do not let it be your only read. For further investigation into the subject please read works by Dr. Ian Hancock or Donlad Kenrick. They would be a far better use of your reading time.

Guenter Lewy seems to have one mission in life: to prove that there was only one genocide in world history, that of the Jewish people during WWII, and that no other ethnic or religious groups have ever been victims of genocide. In recent years, he has been publishing one book after another that attempt to demonstrate that various peoples (American Indians, Gypsies, Armenians) were never victims of genocide. To achieve his objective, he makes a selective use of historical documents, using only the ones that corroborate his thesis, and ignoring those that would prove him wrong. His reading of history is permeated with bias. I recommend anyone to read the negative review of this book by a world-class scholar of genocide, Robert Melson, in Holocaust and Genocide Studies (vol. 16, no. 1, 2002).

I purchased this book with great expectations when Oxford University Press published it in 2000; unfortunately, I have found upon reading it (at long last), it leaves much to be desired. So much so that I couldn't help wondering whether the authors who signed their names to rave accolades on the dust jacket of the hardbound edition even read the entire book.

For starters, Lewy's explanation of the Rom's "mysterious" 13th to 14th century arrival in Europe is completely laughable. Yes, as Lewy notes, the Rom originated in India. But there, his accuracy ends. Rom myths alone cannot explain their history of traveling (nor could mythology of any people be cited as historical fact).

As K.S. Lal has noted in his books on the Muslim conquest of the subcontinent (Legacy of Muslim Rule in India and Muslim Slave System in Medieval India), it was Islamic practice to subject entire conquered populations to slaughter and mass deportation as slaves --- and India's Muslim conquerors deported millions of Indians as slaves --- as well as destroying tens of thousands of Hindu temples and building mosques over their ruins.

Equally important, as Ian Hancock has so ably noted in his scholarly works on the Rom (e.g., Pariah Syndrome: An Account of Gypsy Slavery and Persecution and We Are the Romani People: Volume 28 (Interface Collection), they were slaves for 500 years in Europe before their liberation in the 1840s. Thus laws that prosecuted them for practicing traditional trades, traveling in caravans, camping on the edges of towns, and so forth, were hardly limited to Bavaria, and had roots in the statutes that originally governed Rom slaves --- which closely resemble the Islamic Shar'ia laws governing all non-Muslims, or dhimmis, that is, second class persons.

Unfortunately, Lewy mentions none of this important history or context --- all of which should be included in any scholarly work on the Nazi genocide of the Rom.

Like another reader here, I too had to force myself to read this book --- not, surprisingly, due to the horrific Nazi deeds that targeted Europe's Rom people. Rather, I was physically repulsed by the author's emotionless tone, and his sterile, heartless prose, which generally accepts without comment, Nazi terminology to describe these persecuted people.

It would be understandable, for example, to refer to the Nazi term, "work-shy," frequently used to describe the Rom in the early 1930s, while at the same time rejecting it. But Lewy so often repeats this derogatory epithet (and others of similar quality and intonation) --- without comment or dispute --- that this reader began to believe early on, Lewy seems to sympathize with the oppressors, and would himself have followed racist Nazi policies to the T.

Another serious problem is the assumption that the occasional Nazi release of Rom prisoners somehow made the persecution of Rom any less Genocide than it was. Of course, however, in the early 1930s, when these Rom prisoners were occasionally released, Jewish prisoners were also occasionally released. And the Holocaust was nevertheless the Holocaust.

This is not to say that the Nazi genocide of the Rom (what they term the Porajmos, or Devouring) was on the same scale as the Holocaust, or Shoah, of the Jewish people. The Nazis were clearly not so focused on the extermination of any other people as the Jews --- of whom they destroyed roughly two thirds of the European population, and one third of the world's population.

Nevertheless, I find it shameful for a scholar to deny that the Rom were targeted by a Nazi Genocide. They lost, at minimum, 500,000 during their Devouring. And since population statistics on Europe's Rom were (and remain) so poor to begin with, 500,000 is ONLY the lowest reliable possible estimate.

Actually, the extent of the mass murder may well have been 1 million or 1.5 million. We simply do not know. But of this there is no doubt: it was Genocide.

Like the Jewish people, the Rom were often murdered by the Einsatzgruppen, the "mobile" Nazi murder machine that reined death on targeted populations as their army marched further and further East.

These Einsatzgruppen units kept far less scrupulous statistics than their brethren SS commanders in "concentration camps." The Nazis established Lety (documented in Black Silence: The Lety Survivors Speak) --- a concentration camp for Rom alone, where the preferred means of murder was drowning in barrels. There may have been other, as yet "undiscovered," Rom camps as well. Finally, the bulk of Europe's Rom population actually lived (and still do) in the East --- Albania, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Hungary, Macedonia, Romania, Serbia and so on.

With Guenter Lewy's 2005 issue of The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide (Utah Series in Turkish and Islamic Stud), in hindsight, his book on the Gypsies should now appear to all readers more of a Genocide Denial tract than balanced scholarship.

For (again as others have noted) the referenced to Rom sources is sparse, at best, and the reliance on Nazi documentation, terminology and legislation, is another sign of sympathy with the oppressors.

As a collector of books, video and musical materials on, about and by the Rom, concerning their history and culture, I found this book one of the most disappointing in my collection thus far. I will keep it--- but only as a sample of what scholarship on the Rom should NOT be.

--Alyssa A. Lappen