Extract from Gypsies under the Swastika

Taken from Chapter 2 'The Non-Aryan Aryans'

The Race Hygiene Research Centre and Robert Ritter

The origins of German research into Gypsies go back to Alfred Dillmann, a senior police officer who in 1899 founded an Information Service on Gypsies in Munich, later called the National Centre for the Fight against the Gypsy Menace. The main Nazi institution concerned with research into the Gypsies was established in 1936 by Dr Robert Ritter at the instigation of the Ministry of the Interior. One year later it became the Race Hygiene and Population Biology Research Centre of the National Health Office. Ritter and his staff published numerous writings on the Gypsy question and suggested possible ‘solutions’. They were also engaged in drawing up genealogical tables of German Gypsies and classifying them as being of pure or mixed race. Purity of race was a Nazi obsession.

The Information Service in Munich already possessed over 18,000 files on Gypsies when Ritter started work. Some of the persons listed were not, however, ethnic Gypsies, and others had left Germany. Ritter’s intention was to have every Gypsy in Germany interviewed in order to build lists of other members of their families and thus to draw up complete genealogical tables. The aim was to track down every pure and part-Gypsy in the country, whether they lived in caravans or houses. By February 1941 Ritter had classified 20,000 persons as pure or part-Gypsy. By spring 1942 he said in an unpublished report that he had 30,000 files, a figure approximately equal to the total Gypsy population of Greater Germany (including Austria and other annexed territories).

Announcements concerned with the conscription of women and young men also indirectly reveal the progress of the classification and tend to bear out Ritter’s claims regarding the numbers of people covered. In 1940 recruitment of women to the Work Service began, but Gypsy and part-Gypsy women were to be excluded. The Criminal Police were asked to help the recruiting officers in doubtful cases on the basis of information they had to hand. If no official classification documents existed then they were to judge on appearance, manner of life, social position, literacy and so on. Only especially doubtful cases were to be referred to Ritter’s Centre. Thus classification was by no means complete at this date.

In 1941, this time in reference to the call-up of young men for military service, it was stated that all Gypsies should have been classified and the classifications be available in local police stations. Where the experts’ decisions were not to hand, the police were asked to inform the Central Police Office (RKPA). The classification must then have been almost complete and the researchers not as busy as in the previous year.

By 1944 official circles assumed that all Gypsies would have their classification documents. More importantly, it was noted that no future reference to Gypsies would be made in decrees concerned with the call-up. The unstated reason for this was, as we shall see later, that the majority of the German Gypsies were by then in concentration camps.

Ritter claimed after the war that he stopped working on the subject of Gypsies in 1941, well before the massacre of the German Gypsies. He was never tried. Documents discovered later show that his claim was untrue. One classification statement is dated 1943 and signed by Ritter himself. We shall return again to the subject of his guilt. His views on the Gypsies, part-Gypsies and non-Gypsy Travellers (the Jenische), however, can be found in a number of articles and an unpublished report. Unlike the writers we have previously mentioned, he does make a distinction between pure Romany nomadic Gypsies, whom he would preserve, and part-Gypsies who had often settled in houses. In 1938, in the state health journal Offentliche Gesundheitsdienst, he wrote that Gypsies could not be changed and he returned to this theme again in 1939, when he wrote: ‘What is the way to cause this travelling people to disappear? There is no point in making primitive nomads settle and their children go to school.’ In this article he says any sexual contact between Gypsies and Germans must be legally forbidden and that the Gypsies of mixed blood should be put in closed work colonies. The pure Gypsies should be given limited areas in which to wander, and winter quarters separate from those of the non-Gypsy Travellers.