[7] 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.

[8] 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.

In December 1942, Heinrich Himmler ordered the deportation of all Roma from the Greater Germanic Reich, and most were sent to the specially established Gypsy concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

[15] Balkan Romani activists prefer to use the term samudaripen ("mass killing"),[16] first introduced by linguist Marcel Courthiade in the 1970s in Yugoslavia in the context of Auschwitz and Jasenovac.

Proponents of this approach attempted to validate the belief that races were not variations of a single species of man because they had distinctly different biological origins.

Proponents of this approach established a purportedly scientifically based racial hierarchy, which they believed defined certain minority groups as the other on the basis of biology.

[23] Roma in the Weimar Republic were forbidden from entering public swimming pools, parks, and other recreational areas, and depicted throughout Germany and Europe as criminals and spies.

"[26] The demand for Roma to give up their nomadic ways and settle in a specific region was often the focus of anti-Romani policy both in the German Empire and the Weimar Republic.

Following the passage of the Law for the Fight Against Gypsies, Vagrants, and the Workshy, public policy increasingly targeted the Roma on the explicit basis of race.

This body enforced restrictions on travel for undocumented Roma and "allowed for the arbitrary arrest and detention of gypsies as a means of crime prevention.

Under the "Law against Dangerous Habitual Criminals" of November 1933, the police arrested many Roma, along with others the Nazis viewed as "asocial"—prostitutes, beggars, homeless vagrants, and alcoholics—and imprisoned them in internment camps.

No decision was made regarding the remainder (about 10 percent of the total Romani population of Europe), primarily Sinti and Lalleri tribes living in Germany.

Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler suggested deporting the Romani to a remote reservation, as the United States had done to Native Americans, where "pure Gypsies" could continue their nomadic lifestyle unhindered.

The necessary legal foundation can only be created through a Gypsy Law, which prevents further intermingling of blood, and which regulates all the most pressing questions which go together with the existences of Roma in the living space of the German nation.

"[34] The decree made it law to register all Roma (including Mischlinge – mixed race), as well as those people who "travel around in a Gypsy fashion" over the age of six.

In late 1939 and early 1940, Hans Frank, the General Governor of occupied Poland, refused to accept the 30,000 German and Austrian Roma which were to be deported to his territory.

[55] On April 24, 1945, Ustaše soldiers brutally murdered between 43 and 47 Sinti and Roma members of a traveling circus named "Braća Winter" as they temporarily settled in Kraj Donji on their way to Slovenia.

"[58] Serbian Romani were parties to the unsuccessful class action suit against the Vatican Bank and others in the U.S. federal court in which they sought the return of wartime loot.

[61] In the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, Romani internees were sent to the Lety and Hodonín concentration camps before they were transferred to Auschwitz-Birkenau for mass murder – by poison gas.

What makes the Lety camp unique is the fact that it was staffed by Czech guards, who could be even more brutal than the Germans, as testified to in Paul Polansky's book Black Silence.

[70] Rudolph Rummel, the late professor emeritus of political science at the University of Hawaii who spent his career assembling data on collective violence by governments toward their people (for which he coined the term democide), estimated that, in total, 258,000 were killed by the Nazi regime in Europe,[71] 36,000 in Romania under Ion Antonescu[72] and 27,000 in Ustaše-controlled Croatia.

[73] In a 2010 publication, Ian Hancock stated that he agrees with the view that the number of Romanies killed has been underestimated as a result of being grouped with others in Nazi records under headings such as "remainder to be liquidated", "hangers-on", and "partisans".

[74] He notes recent evidence such as the previously obscure Lety concentration camp in the Czech Republic and Ackovic's revised estimates[75] of Romani killed by the Ustaše as high as 80,000–100,000.

[84] When on trial for his leadership of Einsatzgruppen in the USSR, Otto Ohlendorf cited the massacres of Roma people during the Thirty Years' War as a historical precedent.

The German historian Anne-Kathleen Tillack-Graf states that in the GDR, Sinti and Roma were not mentioned as concentration camp prisoners during the official commemorations of the liberation at the three national memorial sites Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, and Ravensbrück, just like homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses and asocial detainees.

Some political organisations have tried to block the installation of Romani memorials near former concentration camps, as shown by the debate over Lety and Hodonin in the Czech Republic.

[94] Before recognizing Romania's role in the Porajmos, Traian Băsescu was widely quoted after an incident on 19 May 2007, in which he insulted a journalist by calling her a "stinky gypsy".

[11] On 5 May 2012, the world premiere of the Requiem for Auschwitz, by composer Roger Moreno Rathgeb, was performed at the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam by The Roma and Sinti Philharmoniker directed by Riccardo M Sahiti.

[98] Since 2010, ternYpe – International Roma Youth Network has organized a commemoration week called "Dikh he na bister" (look and don't forget) about 2 August in Kraków and Auschwitz-Birkenau.