The year 2024 will be a busy year sports-wise. We’ll have the UEFA Euro 2024 starting on June 14, and just over a month later on July 26—the Paris Olympic Games will start.
That’s why I wanted to remember Jewish athletes murdered during the Holocaust. However, I have done several blogs on that already, and that’s why I opted to remember a sporting hero—from the second largest group of victims during the Holocaust. When we remember one—they all are remembered.
Johann Trollmann—known by his family as “Rukeli,” a term from the Romani language (meaning tree) was born on 27 December 1907 in Wilsche, a district of Gifhorn. He grew up with his eight siblings in humble circumstances in Hanover’s Altstadt, the old part of the city.
He began boxing training at the tender age of eight. He started in the gym at the town‘s school—in Schaufelder Strasse, located in the heart of Hanover’s Nordstadt district.
He went on to make a meteoric career as a boxer. On 9 June 1933, he competed for the German light-heavyweight title, and even though he defeated his opponent Adolf Witt by points, the fight was judged “no result.” The spectators at the match rebelled, and the Nazi officials were forced to acknowledge Trollmann as the victor. However, six days later, he was stripped of the title.
Despite the championship being revoked, Trollmann’s manager was able to Despite the championship being revoked, Trollmann’s manager arranged another big match in Berlin. Before this match, Trollman was pressured to fight in an “Aryan German way.“ During the game, he should stand foot-to-foot with his opponent in the middle of the ring, and therefore, abandoning his dynamic fighting style. He felt compelled to meet these demands. He entered the ring with his hair dyed and skin powdered white. This was his way of criticising Nazis’ racial ideology. Trollmann lost the match.
Over the years 1933–1935, he fought in several other matches. However, he lost them all, or rather was forced to ‘lose’ them. Losing had been demanded by Nazi sports officials. He would fight nine more professional bouts before his licence was finally revoked, in 1935.
The persecution of Sinti and Roma in Germany dramatically increased in the following years.
Sterilization often preceded their internment in concentration camps, and Trollmann also underwent this operation. In 1939, he was drafted into the Wehrmacht and fought on the eastern front. He was wounded in 1941 and returned to Germany as a result. The Gestapo arrested him in June 1942. Shortly after, they transported him to the Neuengamme Concentration Camp near Hamburg. They murdered him in the Wittenberge Satellite Camp on April 9, 1944.
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Porajmos—sometimes spelt Porrajmos or Pharrajimos—means devouring or destruction—in some dialects of the Romani language, is the term for the Roma Sinti Holocaust during World War II. It was introduced by Romani scholar and political activist Ian Hancock in the early 1990s. He chose to use the term coined by Kalderash Roma when he picked it up during an informal conversation in 1993.
Like the Jews, the Roma were also persecuted for centuries in Germany.
The first German anti-Romani law was issued in 1416 when they were accused of being foreign spies, carriers of the plague, and traitors to Christendom.
In 1725, Friedrich Wilhelm I condemned all those 18 years and older to be hanged.
By 1922, all Romanies in Baden were to be photographed and fingerprinted. The Bavarian parliament issued a new law “to combat Gypsies, nomads and idlers.” The Provincial Criminal Commission endorsed another law dated 16 July 1926, aimed at controlling the “Gypsy Plague.”
Between 1933 and 1945, the Nazis murdered an estimated 500,000 Roma-Sinti people.
Below are two eyewitness accounts of survivors. The term Gypsy is used in the statement, and I know some people might find this offensive, but it is in the context of the time. It is also a term which is still used by Romani people themselves.
Hermine Horvath Mrs Horvath gave this interview because she wished her sufferings to be recorded for posterity.
She is a Gypsy but came from a respectable artisan family who had settled in Jabing (Burgenland). When the Nazis invaded Austria in 1938, her father was taken to Dachau, and her mother and 6 young siblings were sent to work. Mrs Horvath, aged 13, worked for the Ortsgrupppenleiter at Gross Petersdorf, who exploited her cruelly. When he tried to seduce her, she fled to Rechnitz. In March 1943, she was ordered to return home for registration, and two days later, she, her mother and sisters, with a 3-year-old brother, were sent to Birkenau.
At first, they were housed in stables without blankets, food or water. Later, they were given the usual starvation diet, and then, after being tattooed, they were allocated to various Arbeitskommandos. Gypsies were given the heaviest work, and only the German-speaking Gypsies were kept alive at least for some time. Foreign (Serbian) Gypsies were gassed straight away. When typhoid broke out, Mrs Horvath’s mother died. Mrs Horvath was taken to the Hospital Block, where 9-13 patients had to share a bunk. Food and water were practically non-existent, but patients were given some sweet tea and tablets. Mrs Horvath noticed that all who partook of them died soon afterwards.
Mrs Horvath was saved by a Polish doctor who repeatedly succeeded in eliminating her name from the lists for the gas chambers. On the days of Blocksperre, no one was allowed out, and the air was heavy with the smell of burnt human flesh. On one such occasion, Mrs Horvath saw people being burnt alive in a large pyre outside the crematorium. She has been suffering from epileptic fits ever since. When Mrs Horvath was selected with other young women for medical experiments—she tried to escape but was caught and brutally punished. Owing to the fact that Mrs Horvath had a friend who was in the German Army, she finally managed to get sent to the Ravensbrück Camp with her sister. She had to work for Siemens & Halske. While a supervisor there sometimes gave her some food, her sister died of starvation.
Shortly before Ravensbrück was to be closed down, Mrs Horvath rallied her last strength to be passed as fit for work and was thus included in a march to another camp. After the march, she escaped and went back to her hometown.
See related report P.III.h. (Mauthausen) No. 794 for further information. Mrs Horvath died on 10 March 1958 at age 33.
Julius Hodosi “It was the hardest time of my life. It’s hard for me to remember. I would like to forget…”
My home is in Burgenland, where the majority of Austrian Gypsies lived. After the annexation of Austria, we heard different things about Nazi racial persecution. Many people believed they could escape this fate by registering voluntarily for the German army. Me too.
The captain of my Air Force unit liked me. When the order came to expel all Gypsies from the army, he wrote to Goering. The response was that I could stay if the captain thought it was justifiable. But for the local NSDAP[1] group of my hometown, it was shameful to have a Gypsy in the army. They complained about it, so the captain wrote to Hitler. Hitler answered briefly, “When it’s the local NSDAP group’s wish, you have to expel him.”
So I took off the uniform and went back to my hometown. One night, the SS[2] came into the village. They came with trucks and randomly loaded entire families. That’s why almost all the Gypsies hastily left the village. I moved to Gisshübel near Vienna and lived there in a subtenancy.
My little brother, who still went to school, was expelled. A Gypsy wasn’t an adequate member of society.
In 1941, my wife and I were arrested by the Gestapo[3] in Gisshübel. We went to the Lackenbach reception camp in Burgenland. In this camp, we got a foretaste of what was in store. The SS beat us. The food was horrible. I did the only thing possible and tried to flee. In fact, my wife and I were able to escape.
Together, we hid in Vienna and lived as so-called—submarine boats. We were not registered and didn’t get food cards. Because we had no money, I had to look for a job. That was very dangerous, but I had no choice. A coal trader was happy to get me as a delivery man because it was difficult to find male employees at this time. But it happened as I had foreseen. My cover was blown, and I was arrested by the Gestapo again. For three weeks, I was in Rossauerlände prison. During a hearing, the Gestapo official Schreiner said literally, “We will destroy you like cats!”
At home, I had a wife and two little children. Two girls, aged one and two years. I didn’t know if I would see them again. But when I was on the transport to Auschwitz, the Gestapo brought my wife and the children to the station. Together, we rode to the Birkenau Extermination Camp.
The transport was an agony. Penned up, without food, without water, and without light, we rode into the unknown. Finally, when the wagons opened, the SS received us with blows and bloodhounds—we were at our destination.
At that moment, we stopped being humans. We were just numbers. All that we had was taken from us. All of us (the women and children) had our heads shaved. All of us, my little girls too, were tattooed with numbers. Then, we were sent into the so-called entrance barrack.
We were in this barrack for about one week until we were called to different commandos. On the fifth day, we saw that there were more terrible things than getting almost nothing to eat. 300 people from Burgenland were selected for the gasification and immediately gassed. The SS visibly revelled in the agony of the people.
I came with my wife to the commando ”earthworks.” Amongst other places, we laid rails to the crematories.
Every day from 9–10, there was the so-called—punishment work. In this hour, we had to do work on the double. When someone fell down with a heavy barrow or tippler, they battered him to death immediately. So, we lost 50–60 people daily. In the morning, the SS whispered to the Capo[4] the number of people who should not return, and the Capo tried to fulfil this order.
For all children, the camp was certain death. There was no nourishing food, no milk, nothing a developing child needs for their body. In addition to that—the uncertain life. No minute were you safe. We had to muster in the night for hours— little children too—which made hounded, tortured beings of us. Very often, the drunken SS made fun of us. They lined us up and selected those who had to go to the gas. Sometimes it was true, sometimes not.
During this time, I lost my two young children. They literally died of hunger. The food was the following: 5 people would receive daily—1 army bread, and every prisoner—1 spoon of marmalade, ½ kg swede and sometimes 50 grams of ham and 20 grams of margarine. There were extra portions, but they were always for a select purpose. The result of the distribution led very often to affrays. There were always people killed. The hunger was enormous.
In addition came epidemics of typhus, malaria, mange, etc. The sick people were gassed. So they reduced our number from 24,000 to 7,000 within one year.
1944, in Birkenau and as I heard in Lackenbach (Burgenland), they selected (especially) dark-skinned Gypsies (men and women) for transports to Bergen-Belsen. They were experimented on to learn how long a man could survive without food and drink.
At the end of this year, they organised further transports. They separated people who were fit for the military and such young women and men who agreed to be part of sterilisation experiments in the hope of freedom. They were promised release from the camp. In truth, it was very different. 8 days after such an operation, which was done without anaesthetic, they had to go back to work. Many perished because of that.
I became part of the so-called Bewährungstruppe and was installed at the front near Cottbus on 12 April 1945. Those who did not die during the fighting were killed by the SS from behind. From 4,000 men, just 700 survived. We were happy to get into Russian imprisonment. Later, I heard that none of the 4,000 who stood in Birkenau lived anymore. They were all gassed.
__________ It is just so important that the stories of all Holocaust victims are heard. Only when we educate ourselves—we can tackle hate.
I am passionate about my site and I know you all like reading my blogs. I have been doing this at no cost and will continue to do so. All I ask is for a voluntary donation of $2, however if you are not in a position to do so I can fully understand, maybe next time then. Thank you.
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The picture above is one of the most iconic images of the Holocaust, For decades it was believed that the girl in the picture was Jewish.
In December 1992, Dutch journalist Aad Wagenaar started to research her identity. By following the number on the outside of the wagon, number 10, 16 or 18, the description of the wagon, and the identity of a single suitcase that appears in the shot, he quickly discovered that the transport took place on 19 May 1944 and that it was a mixed transport of Dutch Romani and Jews. On 7 February 1994 at a trailer camp in Spijkenisse, Crasa Wagner, who had been on the transport with the girl, was able to remember and identified her as Settela(Anna Maria) Steinbach. A few of her siblings were born in my home town Geleen. Ironically one of my cousins is married to someone from the Steinbach family.
The picture is a still from a video taken on May ,19 1944. You can see Setella peak through the doors at about 2.16 minutes. Just prior to that you can see a lady, who is clearly ill, being wheeled on the platform towards the train, only het suitcase is taken off, The lady is then wheeled back, presumably to another section of the train.
The video is a good historical record of how the transport system worked. Aside from the lady being wheeled in there is another disturbing element, you can see that it’s not the Nazis closing the doors of the cattle cars, but Jewish Kapo’s. I don’t say this to judge, far from it, it was a job they had to do in order to survive themselves, I probably would have done the same.
I am passionate about my site and I know you all like reading my blogs. I have been doing this at no cost and will continue to do so. All I ask is for a voluntary donation of $2, however if you are not in a position to do so I can fully understand, maybe next time then. Thank you.
To donate click on the credit/debit card icon of the card you will use. If you want to donate more then $2 just add a higher number in the box left from the PayPal link. Many thanks.
I have written about Settela before. She was also known as Anna Maria Steinbach. One of the reasons I want to highlight the sad story of Settela is because there is a chance she may be related to me, be it via marriage or one of my cousins. Yet, another clear indication of how near the Holocaust still is. She was a Dutch girl murdered by the Nazis in the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Initially identified as a Dutch Jew, but in 1994 it emerged she was actually Sinti. Now through this post, I will be using the name gypsies, because that is what the group of Romani and Sinti were called during World War II, and indeed that is how they still often refer to themselves.
Settela was born in 1934 in Born—other sources say Buchten or Geleen, but that area in part of Limburg in the Netherlands is quite small and within a cycle distance of each other. In her youth, she travelled through the Limburg countryside with her nine brothers and sisters. Susteren was one of the permanent locations of the Steinbach family—on the Baakhoverweg, on the slope of the road, next to the orchard of de Zeute, the family caravans resided. Local residents remember that the children of the Steinbachs regularly came to ask for water. On summer evenings, they could hear the melodious sounds of the family’s violins in the village.
In 1943, the Steinbach family moved to the well-known caravan camp ‘De Zwaaikom’ in Eindhoven. The camp, built in 1929, was designated by the government after the travel ban in the summer of 1943 as one of the central camps for gypsies.
Early Tuesday morning, 16 May 1944, Settela and her family were awakened by banging on the trailer and screams. It was a raid. The police officers and land rangers had a list of the gypsies staying at the caravan camp and carried out the raid. Eventually, 21 (especially women and children) were driven out of the camp (via the police station) to Eindhoven station. Some men were arrested a week earlier and taken to Camp Amersfoort. So was the fate of Settela’s father.
At Centraal Station, Settela had to board a passenger train with the other arrested Sinti and Roma, which travelled to Den Bosch, where an additional 51 people boarded. It then continued the journey north to Camp Westerbork around 4 o’clock. A few days later, they deported her to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Right before the doors were about to close, she stared through the opening at a passing dog or the German soldiers. Rudolf Breslauer, a Jewish prisoner in Westerbork, who was shooting a movie on orders of the German camp commander, filmed the image of Settela’s fearful glance staring out of the wagon. Crasa Wagner was in the same wagon and heard Settela’s mother call her name and warn her to pull her head out of the opening. There was something peculiar about the car she was in. She noticed it had vertical planks, in contrast to most of the other rail cars of the 19 May transport. Most cars had planks arranged horizontally. Why that is, or its importance, I do not know.
On 22 May, the Dutch Romani, among them Steinbach, arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau. They were registered and taken to the Romani section. Romani, fit to work, were dispatched to the ammunition factories in Germany. The remaining 3,000 Romani met their fate at the gas chambers to their deaths in mid-summer 1944. Steinbach, her mother, two brothers, two sisters, aunt, two nephews and niece were part of this latter group. Of the Steinbach family, only the father, Heinrich ‘Moeselman’ survived. He died in 1946 and was buried in the cemetery of Maastricht.
After the war, the image of Settela became famous. She was known as “The Girl with the Headscarf” and was assumed to be Jewish. Her name and Sinti identity were established in 1994 by Dutch journalist Aad Wagenaar. Settela became a symbol of the Roma and Sinti genocide during the Holocaust. At age 9, the Nazis murdered her at the Camp in August 1944. On the basis of the evidence available to date, historians estimate that the Germans and their allies killed between 250,000 and 500,000 European Roma during World War II.
Seventy-nine years ago, Settela was 9 when she died in 1944. She would have been 88 today if she lived. Who knows what her future would have held if she had been allowed to live? She was born so near where I grew up—I could have easily bumped into her.
This is an excerpt from John Davis’ book, Rainy Street Stories.
It tells the story of a survivor he met at Flossenburg, who had survived Auschwitz, Ravensbruch, and finally, Flossenburg.
Z-1557 While vacationing many years ago, my wife Jane and I decided to visit Flossenburg, West Germany. This charming little town is nestled among rolling hills, fresh brooks, and quaint farmhouses. In the late 1930s, though, the Nazis chose Flossenburg as the site of a concentration camp. It was for that reason we drove along a particularly pleasant road in search of this place.
The German town is, from all outward appearances, wholesome, sturdy and solid. It was difficult to find the old camp. We finally asked a pedestrian where the former concentration camp was and he indicated it was up a hill on the way out of town. We drove there and parked in a shaded lot. A guided path led us along memorials to the thousands of Europeans murdered there. Indeed, the actual incinerator was still in place. The strange feelings that overcame us were difficult to get a handle on.
The symbolic crosses and memorial tablets were fitting. Fitting is the appropriate word. Not moving. Not horrifying. A few flowers, recently placed, were what moved us. They were, in this park-like setting, perhaps the only scene that associated the place with the dread and terror of those many years ago. Real people, just like us, were rounded up, beaten, whipped, hung, shot and hacked to death there. Yet there was no sense conveyed that any of that had happened. Except, of course, from the anonymous people who placed the flowers. They had lost someone and still felt the loss.
One of the last stops at the concentration camp is a re-created barracks building. Inside is a museum. Scenes in black and white somehow make it all seem distant and unreal. We stopped at a marker dedicated to famous inmates killed there – Admiral Wilhelm Canaris and Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer. And then we turned to go.
As we arrived at the parking lot, we were approached by two strangers. They’d been in the museum at the same time we were. He asked me what I thought of the memorial. He thought we were English, and was surprised to discover we were Americans. I told him I really had gotten no sense of the dread reality of events at this place.
“No,” he said in German. “It is like a park. We were recently in Auschwitz. I can tell you that as a retired engineer, with one company of engineering soldiers I could have Auschwitz fully operational in 30 days.”Yet at Flossenburg, I said, there didn’t seem to be any sense of what it had really been like.
“Nor for us,” he said. “My wife could not even recognize the place when we drove in. You see, she was an inmate here.”
It was then that I noticed the woman. She was dark, small, and very thin. She wore long sleeves on a hot August day. I asked how she came to be put there. “Racial hatred,” she said. “I was a Roma, a gypsy, living in Danzig. In 1941 my entire village was rounded up. We were put into cargo trains and brought to Auschwitz, where they kept us crammed like animals in barracks for five months.”
She pulled up her sleeve, revealing the tattoo – Z-1557. Z for Zigeunerin, or Roma, a gypsy. “Then, one day, they had a formation to select women who could work,” she continued. “I was chosen and sent at 3 o’clock by train to Ravensbrueck, a concentration camp for women. I only learned this week, due to the remarkable records the Nazis kept, that my family together with all the other Romani then held in Auschwitz were massacred four hours later that very evening.”
My wife and I were stunned. We’d never met an actual inmate of such a place. We didn’t know what to say. She finished her story. “After being held in Ravensbrueck, I was sent to Buchenwald, and after that to this place.”
“Did you see the photographs inside?” her husband asked. “Did you see the one where the commandant and guards of Flossenburg were being tried?”
I recalled a photograph that showed about 50 German prisoners being tried by an American tribunal. “Did you see the look on the Germans’ faces?” He inquired. “They looked like bored opera viewers. Their faces said, ‘So what are you going to do to me?’ Only a dozen or so of those tried received the death penalty. Three times that number were free men within eight years. They really did escape from justice. I think that the whole lot of them should have been finished off,” he said.
“We’ve just visited all the places where my wife was once held. She could not bring herself to go into Auschwitz,” he said.
That camp, in Poland, and some others – Buchenwald, in what was East Germany, for another – seem more as they might have been when in use. Not Flossenburg. “This place is a park,” he continued. “Who can even tell that there was a camp here? I think that here in the West the memory of such a place will go away in another generation.”
The tears his wife cried that day were for the murdered who were still part of her life after all these years. Can we imagine ourselves there? Can we imagine our own families in such a place?
Such places as Flossenburg were huge operations during the war. They were immense and readily visible from afar. Whether those who were alive back then knew, is a question for the past. Whether those of us alive today remember and do all in our power to stop such things from ever happening again, anywhere, is a question that we must answer.
It has been said that to do good and avoid evil is not enough. We have to do good and undo evil. Why did we meet these strangers in a parking lot in Flossenburg?
I think the sensation I had at Flossenburg was an awareness of evil. That evil was smug, and evil was present. It was smug because it was waiting. Waiting for us to forget in the park that is Flossenburg.”
The biggest group of Holocaust victims were the Jews, an estimated six million were murdered between 1933 and 1945.
The second biggest group were the Gipsies (Roma and Sinti).
During World War II, it is estimated that more than 500,000 Sinti and Roma from all over Europe were murdered by the Nazis in what has come to be known as the Porajmos. Before the Second World War, approximately 4,500 Sinti and Roma lived in the Netherlands. From July 1943 Sinti and Roma were no longer allowed to travel in the Netherlands. On 16 May 1944, raids took place: 578 Sinti, Roma and were arrested by mainly Dutch police officers and taken to Camp Westerbork.
Three days later, on 19 May 1944, 245 Sinti and Roma were deported from Westerbork to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Most had yet to turn 18. Only 31 of them would survive the war.
But as with the Jewish population, the persecution of the Roma and Sinti was gradual.
In addition to the compulsory registration of Jews in 1941, all Roma and Sinti were required to be registered. On 29 March 1943, the situation for the Roma and Sinti changes completely. The head of the SS and German police in the Netherlands, Hans Alvin Reuter, wanted to put an end to ‘nomadic life’ in the Netherlands. About 335 Roma and Sinti horses are confiscated during roundups. The horses come into the ownership of the Wehrmacht or are sold by the Nazis to farmers.
Sinti and Roma had to live in assembly camps outside cities from 22 June 1943, such as near The Hague or Eindhoven. Ordered by the Nazis, the caravans were pulled together here and the Sinti and Roma concentrated. From that moment on, the Sinti and Roma were forced to live in the assembly camps or in a house.
The travel ban for Sinti and Roma, or the towing ban, was introduced on 1 July 1943. The wheels of the caravans were confiscated or had to be removed.
On 14 May, a telegram arrived at the police presidents in the cities of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Eindhoven, Arnhem and Groningen. According to the report, “all persons residing in the Netherlands, who possess the characteristic of gipsies, must be immediately be transferred to Camp Westerbork by personnel of the Dutch police”.
The national raid took place on 16 May 1944, carried out by members of the Marechaussee, land guards and the Dutch state police.
From all over the Netherlands, Roma, Sinti and caravan dwellers come by train to the Judendurchgangslager Westerbork. Registration takes place until well into the evening. Of the 578 arrested men, women and children, some are lucky. About 200 Roma and Sinti turn out not to meet the characteristics of a gipsy and are released. Also, 50 Roma and Sinti are allowed to leave the camp, because they are in possession of a neutral passport from Switzerland, Italy or Guatemala.
All property, money, and jewellery were taken under the guise that everything will be returned. Then follows the ‘medical examination,’ ‘delousing,’ and their hair shaved off. About 245 Roma and Sinti, including at least 123 children, were locked up in secluded barracks, destitute, bald and dismayed.
On Friday 19 May 1944 the 96th train transport with overcrowded wagons leaves Westerbork. This outgoing transport, which also includes the Roma and Sinti, was filmed by the Jewish filmmaker Rudolf Breslauer (1903-1945) on behalf of the camp commander Albert Gemmeker (1907-1982) and this recording is known as the ‘Westerbork film’. From this film comes the well-known photo of Settela Steinbach, the girl with the headscarf.
The long train consists of three parts. The front section with Jewish ‘prisoners’ has Bergen-Belsen as its destination, the rest of the train Auschwitz. In the rear carriages, the 245 Sinti and Roma are locked up with one bucket of water and another bucket to relieve themselves.
On 21 May 1944, the train transport arrives in Auschwitz-Birkenau. The Dutch Roma and Sinti are registered, tattooed and brought to Lagerabschnitt B II, the Zigeunerlager. It is remarkable that the families in the Zigeunerlager are allowed to stay together. People quickly become aware of the mass murders, because the Zigeunerlager is located next to the crematorium. In the gipsy camp, unimaginable unsanitary conditions prevail and many people died of typhoid fever, diarrhoea or of starvation. Selections take place in the gipsy camp between the end of May and the beginning of July 1944 and many men and women were transferred to other concentration camps.
In connection with the expected arrival of large numbers of Hungarian Jews, all Roma and Sinti who remained behind with their children were taken from the Zigeunerlager on the nights of 2-3 August 1944 and driven into the gas chambers. It is chaotic. The people, including children, understand what awaits them and yell, “murderers” and “traitors” at their German guards. Their dead bodies are burned in the open because the furnaces are out of order.
I am passionate about my site and I know you all like reading my blogs. I have been doing this at no cost and will continue to do so. All I ask is for a voluntary donation of $2, however if you are not in a position to do so I can fully understand, maybe next time then. Thank you.
To donate click on the credit/debit card icon of the card you will use. If you want to donate more then $2 just add a higher number in the box left from the PayPal link. Many thanks.
The title of the blog is ‘The Steinbach Family’ but is really a blog about the Romani people. The reason why I picked the Steinba,ch family name is twofold. Firstly the picture at the start of the blog is of Settela Steinbach. It is one of the most iconic pictures of the Holocaust. Initially she was identified as a Dutch Jew, but the facts of her real identity were discovered in 1994.
Secondly at least one of her siblings, Philibert Steinbach, was born in my hometown, Geleen. Only recently I found out I have connection with the Steinbach family via spouses if some of my cousins.
Philibert was born in Geleen, on the 4th of September 1932 and murdered in Auschwitz, on the 3rd of August 1944.
The Romani were forced to live in assembly camps outside cities from 22 June 1943, such as near The Hague or Eindhoven. At the behest of Nazi regime in the Netherlands , the caravans were pulled together here and the Romani people were concentrated.
From May 16, 1944 to May 19, 1944 Philibert Steinbach and the rest of his family were imprisoned in Camp Westerbork.
On 19 May thee Steinbach family were put on a transport together with about 240 other Romani to Auschwitz-Birkenau on a train that also contained Jewish prisoners. Right before the doors were being closed, Setella hauntingly stared through the opening at a passing dog or the German soldiers. Rudolf Breslauer, a Jewish prisoner in Westerbork, who was shooting a movie on orders of the German camp commander, filmed the image of Settela’s fearful glance staring out of the wagon. Crasa Wagner was in the same wagon and heard Settela’s mother call her name and warn her to pull her head out of the opening. Wagner survived Auschwitz and was able to identify Settela in 1994.
On 22 May the Dutch Romani, among them the Steinbach family , arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau. They were registered and taken to the Romani section. Romani who were fit to work were taken to ammunition factories in Germany. The remaining three thousand Romani were gassed in the period from July to 3 August. Steinbach, her mother, two brothers, two sisters, aunt, two nephews and niece were part of this latter group. Of the Steinbach family, only the father survived; he died in 1946 and is buried in the cemetery of Maastricht.
The Steinbachs were all accomplished musicians and never harmed anyone.
The Romani were seen by the Nazis as an inferior race and were persecuted for that reason. About 500 were deported from the Netherlands, almost the entire community. Across Europe, it is estimated that some 500,000 Sinti and Roma were murdered in concentration camps.
In contrast to Anne Frank, who left us her diary, Settela did not leave us anything apart from this one haunting image .Just a few fleeting seconds in a film about Westerbork transit camp. Millions of people have been moved by this image without realising who this girl was.
On 15 November 1943, Himmler ordered that Romani and “part-Romanies” were to be put “on the same level as Jews and placed in concentration camps.”
Between 1933 and 1945, Roma and Sinti in Europe were targets of Nazi persecution. The Nazi regime, building on long-held prejudices, viewed Roma as “a-socials” (outside “normal” society) and as racial “inferiors.” During World War II, the Nazis and their collaborators killed hundreds of thousands of Roma men, women, and children across German-occupied Europe.
Mass killings of Roma reached their pinnacle on July 31–August 2, 1944, when the Germans began the liquidation of the Zigeunerlager (“Gypsy camp”) at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Almost 3,000 Roma were put to death in this single operation.
Under the rule of Nazi Germany, the Roma were persecuted, detained and executed as part of the Holocaust. Roma calls the Roma Genocide the Porajmos, which means “Devouring” in Romani language.
Drawing support from many non-Nazi Germans who harboured social prejudice towards Roma, the Nazis judged Roma to be “racially inferior.” The fate of Roma, in some ways, paralleled that of the Jews. Under the Nazi regime, German authorities subjected Roma to arbitrary internment, forced labour, and mass murder. German authorities murdered tens of thousands of Roma in the German-occupied territories of the Soviet Union and Serbia and thousands more in the killing centres at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. The SS and police incarcerated Roma in the Bergen-Belsen, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Dachau, Mauthausen, and Ravensbrück concentration camps. Both in the so-called Greater German Reich and in the so-called Generalgouvernement—German civilian authorities managed several forced-labor camps in which they incarcerated Roma.
Under Adolf Hitler, a supplementary decree to the Nuremberg Laws was issued on 26 November 1935, classifying the Roma as “enemies of the race-based state.”
Under the July 1933 sterilisation law, many Roma were sterilised against their will.
August 2nd is assigned Roma Holocaust Memorial Day because, on the night of 2nd August 1944, the remaining 2,897 Roma women, old men and children from the so-called “Zigeunerlager” or “Gypsy” camp were killed in gas chambers. There were no Roma and Sinti survivors from the Auschwitz Concentration Camp.
SS medical researchers assigned to the Auschwitz complex, such as SS Captain Dr. Josef Mengele, received government authorisation to choose human subjects for pseudo-scientific medical experiments from among the prisoners. Mengele chose twins and dwarves, some from the Gypsy family camp, as subjects of his experiments. Approximately 3,500 adult and adolescent Roma were prisoners in other German concentration camps; medical researchers selected subjects from among the Roma incarcerated in Ravensbrück, Natzweiler-Struthof, and Sachsenhausen concentration camps for their experiments, either on-site in the camps or at nearby institutes.
German military and SS-police units also shot at least 30,000 Roma in the Baltic States and elsewhere in the occupied Soviet Union, where Einsatzgruppen and other mobile killing units killed Roma at the same time that they killed Jews and Communists. In occupied Serbia, the German authorities killed male Roma in shooting operations during 1941 and early 1942. The total number of Roma killed in Serbia will never be known. Estimates range between 1,000 and 12,000.
In France, Vichy French authorities intensified restrictive measures against and harassment of Roma after the establishment of the collaborationist regime in 1940. In 1941 and 1942, French police interned at least 3,000 and possibly as many as 6,000 Roma, residents of both occupied France and unoccupied France. French authorities shipped relatively few of them to camps in Germany, such as Buchenwald, Dachau, and Ravensbrück.
Robert Ritter was a German racial scientist doctor of psychology and medicine with a background in child psychiatry and the biology of criminality. In 1936, Ritter was appointed head of the Racial Hygiene and Demographic Biology Research Unit of Nazi Germany’s Criminal Police to establish the genealogical histories of the German Gypsies, both Roma and Sinti and became the architect of the experiments Roma and Sinti were subjected to. His pseudo-scientific “research” in classifying these populations of Germany aided the Nazi government in their systematic persecution toward a goal of “racial purity.”
Roma woman with a German police officer and Nazi psychologist Robert Ritter
Sometimes known as the “Forgotten Holocaust,” the Roma Genocide was excluded from the history of World War II for decades after the end of the war. There were no Roma witnesses at the Nuremberg Trials.
The genocide of the Roma people wasn’t formally recognised until 1982. Until then, the West German government denied that Roma were subjects of racially motivated persecution. Instead, it was insisted that Roma were imprisoned for their ‘asocial’ and ‘criminal’ characteristics, allowing the government to avoid responsibility for racial discrimination and compensation for genocide.
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There are some in Germany and other countries—who portray all of those involved in the 20 July plot as heroes. I believe this is a misinterpretation. Firstly, they are not heroes because they did not succeed, and secondly, there were quite a few of them who had no issues with the Nazi policies but had more of an issue with Adolf Hitler.
Arthur Nebe was one of the plotters. He was to lead a team of 12 policemen to kill Himmler, but the signal to act never reached him. After the failed assassination attempt, Nebe fled and went into hiding.
Before this part of the plot, Nebe rose through the ranks of the Prussian police force to become head of Nazi Germany’s Criminal Police (Kriminalpolizei; Kripo) in 1936, which was amalgamated into the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) in 1939.
In an August 1939 speech, he defined crime as “a recurring disease on the body of the people.” This disease was supposedly passed hereditarily from criminals and “a-social individuals” to their children. In the Nazi state, a-socials were people who behaved in a way considered outside of social norms. The category included people identified as vagabonds, beggars, prostitutes, pimps, and alcoholics; the arbeitsscheu (work-shy); and the homeless. This category also included Roma. The Nazi regime viewed Roma as behaviorally abnormal and racially inferior. Defining crime as a disease connected to certain groups radicalized Kripo’s practice.
Kripo officials from the KTI developed early techniques to gas people en masse. In October 1939, Nebe instructed the KTI to experiment with methods of killing people with mental and physical disabilities. This effort was conducted in cooperation with the Euthanasia Program. A KTI chemical engineer/toxicology expert, Albert Widmann, tested possible killing methods. He ultimately suggested carbon monoxide gas. In the fall of 1941, Widmann helped create gas vans. The vans used carbon monoxide gas generated from exhaust fumes.
Planners of Operation Reinhard killing centres adopted this development. At Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, large motor engines were used to generate carbon monoxide gas for the gas chambers.
In 1941, during Operation Barbarossa, Nebe volunteered to serve as the commanding officer of Einsatzgruppe B, one of the four mobile death squads of the SS. During Nebe’s tenure, this deadly unit was responsible for the mass murders of 45,000 people in the areas around Bialystok, Minsk, and Mogilev. Many of these victims were Jews. Nebe was not forced to take control of this unit—he volunteered.
In July 1941, Arthur Nebe reported that a “solution to the Jewish problem” was “impractical” in his region of operation due to “the overwhelming number of the Jews”, as in there were too many Jews to be killed by too few men. By August 1941, Nebe came to realize that Einsatzgruppe’s resources were insufficient to meet the expanded mandate of the killing operations due to the inclusion of Jewish women and children since that month. This means to some: a person with a conscience, but the only reason he said these things was—not because he didn’t want to kill more Jews but because—he believed he didn’t have enough men to do the job. Just let that train of thought sink in for a minute.
In late 1941, Nebe was posted back to Berlin and resumed his career with the RSHA. Nebe commanded the Kripo until he was denounced and executed after the failed attempt to kill Adolf Hitler in July 1944.
Nebe was arrested in January 1945 after a former mistress betrayed him. He was sentenced to death by the People’s Court on 2 March and, according to official records, was executed in Berlin at Plötzensee Prison on 21 March 1945 by being hanged with piano wire from a meat hook, by Hitler’s order that the bomb plotters were to be “hanged like cattle.”
I was watching a documentary last night called Lost Home Movies of Nazi Germany. The documentary contained footage taken by German civilians and soldiers. Some of the footage was truly horrendous, but some of the footage appeared at first glance quite pleasing. For example, it showed a young, attractive woman dancing topless for some German soldiers.
However, when I thought about it later and put it in context, those pleasing images suddenly became extremely disturbing. The film material was taken in the USSR during Operation Barbarossa, and the young woman dancing was a Roma. It occurred to me that she wasn’t dancing half-naked because she enjoyed it, she was dancing because she thought it would please the monsters that had invaded her village. In her culture as in many other cultures, women would not show themselves naked in front of men—unless it was their husband.
Initially, I didn’t want to post the pictures, but I thought it was important to show the forgotten side of the horrors of the Holocaust. Also to celebrate the beauty of this young woman, not only her external beauty but also her internal beauty and the courageous soul she was. She must have realized that this could also result in her being raped.
The footage also showed how hypocritical and condescending the Nazis were. One soldier got his hand palm read while sneering at the woman.
Other young women tried to look their best, again to find favour with their occupiers.
Roma were seen as subhumans by the Nazis, but when it suited them they were willing to temporarily ignore that. If it would suit the purpose to make them feel good about themselves or play God over these women, they would even flirt with them. Knowing well that these women would possibly be murdered, even by themselves.
I don’t know what happened to these women, even if they survived the war, there was a chance they would have been punished after the war for “entertaining” the enemy.
That same enemy would stare from a distance at a beautiful woman dancing half-naked for her survival, risking being raped or worse. The gawking soldier looks more like a Peeping Tom.
I am passionate about my site and I know you all like reading my blogs. I have been doing this at no cost and will continue to do so. All I ask is for a voluntary donation of $2, however if you are not in a position to do so I can fully understand, maybe next time then. Thank you.
To donate click on the credit/debit card icon of the card you will use. If you want to donate more then $2 just add a higher number in the box left from the PayPal link. Many thanks.
History of Sorts 
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