During World War II, some individuals and groups helped Romani people and others escape the Porajmos conducted by Nazi Germany.
[7] While initially not all rescue efforts were successful: for example, the Nazis ignored the pleas of a group of three respected Crimean Tatar elders in the village of Asan-bey who begged them to spare the Roma who had been just rounded up.
[11][12] Nazi reports on murders of Crimean Roma also would refer to the victims by a variety of ambiguous terms such as "asocials" and "saboteurs," complicating attempts to figure out how many Crimean Roma were killed by the Nazis.
[14] This ambiguity in their survival rate is complicated by the fact that it is unclear how many alleged "tatar-gypsies" killed by the Nazis were actually Gadjo victims of mistaken identity; for example, the surviving residents of Burlak-toma[b] village unanimously gave sworn testimony that the victims of the massacre in their village on 28 March 1942 were all just Gadjo Crimean Tatars falsely accused of being "tatar-gypsies" by the local village headman, Matvei Krivoruchko.
[3] The Bosniaks from Zenica published a declaration stressing the special position of the so called White Gipsy/Bijeli cigo a sedentary Muslim Roma community, and with help of religious authorities in Sarajevo, the declaration influenced the Ustaše authorities to make a special provision in May 1942 to spare Muslim Roma residing in Bosnia and Herzegovina from deportation to the concentration camps to Jasenovac.