Sinti and Roma in Germany (1871-1933) by Simon Constantine

Author:Simon Constantine [Constantine, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Europe, Germany, Modern, 19th Century, 20th Century
ISBN: 9781351185493
Google: S-bkDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2020-05-12T01:38:42+00:00

Conclusion

There was nothing covert about the systematic collection of the Sinti and Roma’s personal data. From the outset of the programme officials supplied the press with annual updates on the number of Gypsies whose correct identity had supposedly been ascertained through their fingerprints. In Bavaria it was reported that of 474 people who had supplied officials with false names in 1913, and who had subsequently been correctly identified from their prints, one hundred were Gypsies. Higher annual numbers were reported in the 1920s.46 Cleary, no-one felt that this or any other aspect of policy should be hidden from the public, and there was nothing either in the way of a public outcry.47 There seems to have been no discussion in the press of the legality or morality of the implementation of tighter controls in the 1920s, including the mass exercise of 1927. Newspaper reports on the surveillance of the Sinti and its refinement merely relayed the policy decision or practice and did not challenge it in any way, all of which suggests a public supportive of, or at best indifferent to, this element of their persecution.48

The lawyer Werner Höhne appears to have been one of very few to question its legal basis. He argued that whilst targeted raids of ‘preventative’ fingerprinting and photographing might be justified on the basis of Prussia’s Allgemeines Landrecht and its equivalent in other states, which (in article 10) permitted police to secure ‘public peace, security and order’, these measures, and much of the rest of Gypsy policy, contravened article 109 of Weimar’s constitution, which was meant to guarantee equality before the law and ensure that Reich subjects should not be treated differently on account of their birth.49 Höhne recognised that by the 1920s Gypsies had become fully enmeshed

in a tight net of exceptional precautionary measures and investigative activity that in practice imply – beyond the circles of officials – that Gypsies are simply harmful people that one should be wary of, whom one should keep an eye on, and from whom it is good to keep one’s distance. In practice this means that above and beyond the instructions issued to subordinate officials they are humiliated and demeaned in the eyes of the other inhabitants of the Empire, to the extent that it is visibly an encroachment on their personal honour and freedom.50

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.