Romany Soldiers

Romany Soldiers

The Porajmos (Romani: /pʰo.ɽaj.mos/) (also Porrajmos or Pharrajimos, literally, devouring or destruction in some dialects of the Romani language) was the attempt made by Nazi Germany and its allies to exterminate the Romani people of Europe during World War II. Under Hitler's rule, both Roma and Jews were defined as "enemies of the race-based state" by the Nuremberg laws; the two groups were targeted by similar policies and persecution, culminating in the near annihilation of both populations within Nazi-occupied countries.

Because Eastern European Romani communities were not organised, and largely relied on an orally transmitted culture, Porajmos was not well documented. Estimates of the death toll of Romanies in World War II range from 220,000 to 1,500,000. According to Ian Hancock, director of the Romani Archives and Documentation Center at the University of Texas at Austin, there also existed a trend to downplay the actual figures. He surmised that almost the entire Romani population was killed in Croatia, Estonia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. Rudolph Rummel, a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Hawaii who spent his career assembling data on collective violence by governments towards their people (for which he coined the term democide), estimated that 258,000 must have been killed in Nazi Germany, 36,000 in Romania under Ion Antonescu and 27,000 in Ustaše-controlled Croatia.

West Germany formally recognised the genocide of the Roma in 1982.