why+and+how+were+the+Roma+persecuted?



** Q. why and how were the Roma persecuted? **
A. Soon after the Nazi takeover of 1933, they proceeded to persecute the Roma (gypsies). The Nazis found the gypsies racially “undesirable” or “asocial” and then advanced systematic measures of persecution against the Roma. First the Nazis had to make a definition of the Roma. Classifying who was Jewish was in this sense easier because records held by religious communities were readily available to the state. Roma in Germany had been Christian for centuries, so records were useless in determining Romani descent. So the Nazis used racial characteristics to identify who was a Roma. Dr. Robert Ritter became a key figure in the study of Roma. His specialty was criminal biology, which is the idea that criminal behavior was inherited genetically. Ritter performed medical and anthropological examinations to classify Roma. “Despite Ritter's own claims to document his decisions with pseudo-science, his teams resorted to interviewing Roma to determine and record their genealogy. Ritter's interviewers threatened their subjects with arrest and incarceration in concentration camps unless they identified their relatives and their last known residence”( United States Holocaust museum). In this way, Ritter established a register of almost all Roma then living in Germany. Ritter estimated that 90 percent of the Roma in Germany were carriers of “degenerate” blood and criminal characteristics. Since they allegedly meant a danger, Ritter recommended forced sterilization of the non pure Roma, and the pure blooded Roma should be put on a reserve for further studies. Little effort was made to find pure blooded Roma, so any one found was most likely persecuted. All Roma were given a black triangular patch, the symbol for “asocial”, or green triangle patch, the symbol for “professional” criminals. A brown patch is given to a gypsie. By the end of the holocaust at least 200,000 Roma were killed

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