Although the Allies regarded the persecution of
the Gypsies during the Third Reich as a Nazi crime, wide circles of German
society, its bureaucracy and political establishment did not share till
the early sixties, and in some aspects till much later, the moral conviction
of the Allies. They regarded the persecution of the Gypsies as a struggle
of the German state against a traditional antisocial and criminal element,
a persecution that was indeed brutal but not inexplicable. The crimes carried
out by the Nazis did not create empathy or compassion among the German
public towards Gypsy victims and did not mitigate the manifest dislike
of them. A public opinion poll in 1994 revealed that almost two thirds
of Germans would not like to have Gypsies as their neighbours. Although
at the end of the fifties and the beginning of the sixties investigations
were conducted against the main perpetrators who had been responsible for
the persecution of Gypsies in the Third Reich, all of them remained free
and most of them even carried on careers in the public service. For example,
in 1947 Robert Ritter became the Chief Youth Physician in the municipal
health office of the city of Frankfurt-on-Main.
Again, although the Allies regarded Gypsies as having been persecuted
on racial grounds there was disagreement among the officials of the German
Compensation Authorities regarding the right of the Gypsies to be officially
recognized as having been persecuted on racial grounds. In order to be
officially recognized for reparations the Gypsies in Germany had to prove
that they had a fixed dwelling and steady occupation. In the German Democratic
Republic (East Germany) proof of a democratic anti-fascist attitude was
also required. After the issuing of the Compensation Laws of the States
(Länder) in 1949-50 most of the prominent German bureaucrats claimed
that the Gypsies were not persecuted for racial motives but because of
their antisocial and criminal behaviour and therefore were not entitled
to official recognition as victims of Nazism. Most of the German courts
which then considered the appeals of Gypsies against the decisions of the
Compensation Authorities tended to uphold the decisions. Final sanction
was given in 1956 by the Federal Supreme Court (Bundesgerichtshof) in Karlsruhe
which determined that only those Gypsies who were imprisoned after the
issuing of the Auschwitz Decree of 1 March 1943 were persecuted for racial
motives. The Court decided that the measures taken against Gypsies before
that date had had a preventive character and stemmed from the interests
of national security. Therefore the victims were not entitled to receive
compensation under federal compensation law. The main group affected by
this decision were the survivors of the deportation to Poland in May 1940.
In 1963 the Federal Supreme Court revised its former
decision and determined that Gypsies were persecuted for racial reasons
beginning in 1938. Official recognition of responsibility for the persecution
of Gypsies took place only in 1985 after years of public debate concerning
the issue. In 1985 the German President Richard von Weiszäcker counted
the Romanies and Sinti among the victims of Nazi Germany. In his ceremonial
speech for the 40th anniversary of the end of the Second World War before
the German Federal Parliament (Bundestag) in November of the same year
Helmut Kohl and the representatives of all the political parties in the
Bundestag recognized German responsibility for the persecution of the Gypsies
in the Third Reich and the continuing discrimination by the German authorities
towards them after 1945.
Gilad Margalit, Jerusalem.