The Nazi Germans regarded Sinti and Roma (Zigeuner, as they were referred to in official German documents of the period) as enemies of the Third Reich, and therefore sentenced them to isolation and extermination.
Nazi Germany followed pseudoscientific arguments supplied by the Institute for the Study of Racial Hygiene and established strict principles for dealing with the Sinti and Roma, whom it regarded as racially alien, inferior, and “asocial.”
In the first years after they came to power, the Nazis introduced a range of anti-Gypsy restrictions, including an obligation for them to register and submit to “racial examination”; later, they introduced limitations on freedom of movement. A commentary on the German race laws, issued in Nuremberg in September 1935, stated that the Gypsies were just as racially alien as the Jews, and therefore could not enjoy the rights of citizens of the Reich.
Soon after the start of the war, the Germans decided to remove the Sinti and Roma from the terrain of the Reich. They were ordered to resettle in the General Government, where they were placed in Jewish ghettos and camps for Jews (over 5 thousand German Sinti and Roma were placed in the Łódź ghetto, and majority of them were murdered soon afterwards at Kulmhof extermination center).
Finally, on December 16, 1942, Heinrich Himmler ordered the deportation of all remaining Sinti and Roma to a concentration camp. The implementing regulations for this order, issued by the RSHA on January 29, 1943, specified that Auschwitz was the place of deportation.
As a result of this ruling, the Gypsy family camp known as the Zigeunerlager (Gypsy camp), which existed for 17 months, was set up in Auschwitz-Birkenau sector BIIe.
The deportation of the Sinti and Roma began in February 1943 and continued until July 1944. The Sinti and Roma imprisoned in the camp came primarily from Germany, Austria, the Protectorate of Bavaria and Moravia, and Poland, with smaller groups arriving from France, the Netherlands, Yugoslavia/Croatia, Belgium, the USSR, Lithuania, and Hungary. There is also mention of Sinti and Roma citizens of Norway and Spain.
It is estimated that about 23 thousand men, women, and children were imprisoned in the camp. About 21 thousand were registered in the camp (including the more than 370 children estimated to have been born there). A group of about 1,700 Polish Sinti and Roma was murdered immediately after arriving at the camp, without being entered in the records.
