Romani Holocaust

The Romani Holocaust was the genocide of European Roma and Sinti people during World War II. Beginning in 1933, Nazi Germany systematically persecuted the European Roma, Sinti and other peoples pejoratively labeled "Gypsy" through forcible internment and compulsory sterilization. German authorities summarily and arbitrarily subjected Romani people to incarceration, forced labor, deportation and mass murder in concentration and extermination camps.

Under Adolf Hitler, a supplementary decree to the Nuremberg Laws was issued on 26 November 1935, classifying the Romani people (or Roma) as "enemies of the race-based state", thereby placing them in the same category as the Jews. Thus, the fate of the Sinti and Roma in Europe paralleled that of the Jews in the Holocaust. Historians estimate that between 220,000 and 1.5 million Romani and Sinti were killed by Nazi Germans and their collaborators.

In 1982, West Germany formally recognized that Nazi Germany had committed genocide against Sinti and Roma people. In 2011, Poland officially adopted 2 August as a day of commemoration of the Romani genocide.

Within the Nazi German state, first persecution, then extermination, was aimed primarily at sedentary "Gypsy mongrels". In December 1942, Heinrich Himmler ordered the deportation of all Sinti and Roma from the Greater Germanic Reich, and most were sent to the specially established Gypsy concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Other Sinti and Roma were deported there from the Nazi-occupied Western European territories. Approximately 21,000 of the 23,000 European Roma and Sinti sent there did not survive. In areas outside the reach of systematic registration, e.g., in the German-occupied areas of Eastern and Southeastern Europe, the Roma who were most threatened were those who, in the German judgment, were "vagabonds", though some were actually refugees or displaced persons. Here, they were killed mainly in massacres perpetrated by the German military and police formations as well as by the Schutzstaffel (SS) task forces, and in armed resistance against the Nazi German occupation of Europe.

The term porajmos (also porrajmos or pharrajimos—literally, "devouring" or "destruction" in some dialects of the Romani language) was introduced by Ian Hancock in the early 1990s. Hancock chose to use the term, coined by a Kalderash Rom, from a number of suggestions which were given during an "informal conversation in 1993".

The term is mostly used by activists and as a result, its usage is unknown to most Roma, including relatives of victims and survivors. Some Russian and Balkan Romani activists protest against the use of the word porajmos. In various dialects, porajmos is synonymous with poravipe which means "violation" and "rape", a term which some Roma consider offensive. János Bársony and Ágnes Daróczi, pioneering organisers of the Romani civil rights movement in Hungary, prefer to use the term Pharrajimos, a Romani word which means "cutting up", "fragmentation", "destruction". They argue against the use of the term porrajmos, saying that it is marhime (unclean, untouchable): "[p]orrajmos is unpronounceable in the Roma community, and thus, it is incapable of conveying the sufferings of the Roma". Indologist Franz-Elias Schneck argues that "por-" might be related to the Sanskrit word वार (vāra), meaning "blow" or "assault". Even within the Roma community, the word either does not exist or is a distortion of the usage of "blow", which undermines the remembrance of the Roma Holocaust.

Balkan Romani activists prefer to use the term samudaripen ("mass killing"), first introduced by linguist Marcel Courthiade in the 1970s in Yugoslavia in the context of Auschwitz and Jasenovac. It is a neologism of sa (Romani for 'all') and mudaripen (murder). It can be translated as 'murder of all' or 'mass murder'. The International Romani Union now uses this term. Ian Hancock dismisses this word, arguing that it does not conform to Romani language morphology. Some Ruska Roma activists offer to use the term Kali Traš ("Black Fear"). Another alternative that has been used is Berša Bibahtale ("The Unhappy Years").

Linguistically, the term porajmos is composed of the verb root porrav- and the abstract-forming nominal ending -imos. This ending is of the Vlax Romani dialect, whereas other varieties generally use -ibe(n) or -ipe(n). For the verb itself, the most commonly given meaning is "to open/stretch wide" or "to rip open", whereas the meaning "to open up the mouth, devour" occurs in fewer dialects.