Gypsies were among the groups singled out on racial grounds for persecution by the Nazi regime and most of its allies.

The Nazis judged Roma to be "racially inferior," and the fate of Roma in some ways paralleled that of the Jews. Roma were subjected to internment, forced labour, and massacre. They were also subject to deportation to extermination camps. Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units) killed tens of thousands of Roma in the German-occupied eastern territories. Further, thousands were killed in the Auschwitz-Birkenau, Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka extermination camps. The Nazis also incarcerated thousands of Roma in the Bergen-Belsen, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Dachau, Mauthausen, and Ravensbrueck concentration camps.

On September 21, 1939, Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Security Main Office, met with Security Police (Sipo) and Security Service (SD) officials in Berlin. He decided to deport 30,000 German and Austrian Roma to the east--from the Greater German Reich to the Generalgouvernement, a territory inside German-occupied Poland. This plan foundered on the opposition of Hans Frank, Nazi governor-general of occupied Poland, and on the decision to prioritize the deportations of Jews from Germany.

There were nonetheless several deportations of Roma. About 2,500 Roma were deported to Poland in April and May 1940. Most of them were starved and worked to death. Those who fell sick or became crippled were shot. Another 5,000 Roma were deported to Lodz, where they were held in a separate area within the Lodz ghetto. Those who survived the horrible conditions in the Lodz ghetto were later deported from the ghetto to the Chelmno extermination camp, where they were killed in gas vans.

Credit United States Holocaust Memorial Museum