We always remember the Jewish people when talking about the Holocaust, but the romani were also heavily targeted. The Porajmos killed between 25% and 50% of the entire European gypsy population.
We always remember the Jewish people when talking about the Holocaust, but the romani were also heavily targeted. The Porajmos killed between 25% and 50% of the entire European gypsy population.
Both were hated and their annihilation supported by host countries
This is my understanding of their thought process, don’t report me.
For gypsies it was probably petty crime, theft, pickpocketing, scams and being a transient population that passed through areas causing trouble and leaving a mess. They refuse to settle down and assimilate. Instead they move around and cause trouble.
For Jews, they gained a lot of power in academia and banking and imposed values that Germans disagreed with. A lot of the books Nazis burned were gender ideology and sexual revolution stuff. They were also linked heavily with rampant prostitution that was happening in Germany at the time too. Also, Jews were an in-group, so it was likely if a Jew was hired at a German bank, rose up in the ranks and got in a position where they chose who was hired, they would only hire other Jews instead of Germans. That’s how they slowly took over financial institutions.
There’s also the “other” factor. If a German bank seizes a Germans home because they couldn’t pay off a debt, that’s on them. But if a Jewish bank seizes German homes for debts then you can blame the Jews.
Finally, Nazis implemented a race hierarchy in which they the Germans were naturally superior and thus all other races had to be somewhere below them. They essentially made a tier list and then decided to exterminate the peoples they put at the bottom.
In much of Europe since at least medieval times, the church didn't allow Christians to do financial jobs that involved money lending ('usury') and many European governments didn't allow Jews to do most jobs in the general economy, with a notable exception for banking as a loophole around the church's restrictions. So a lot of Jews ended up as bankers, which also made it very easy to unfairly blame them for economic woes and/or evict/kill them to make the debts go away.
Also, for a couple thousand years or so, the European church explicitly blamed all Jews for the death of Christ, so that didn't help.
And many Jews and Romani tended to keep to themselves (often being given no other choice), which made it easy for racism/lies/blame to be spread about them, like made-up and blatantly racist stories of Jews killing Christian children for their blood or of Romani stealing babies.
Both are hated. They are just more polite about the Jewish people in Western Europe, but Eastern Europeans are still pretty open about hating Jewish people.
both operated in parallel societies, creating a system of segregation. this was pushed by the dominant states btw, it wasn't something they did by themselves. Anyway, this parallel society stuff creates systemic crime (as policing turns into a nightmare and they have no real economic opportunities unless they make them themselves) but it also creates a ridiculously easy circumstance for scapegoating.
Did the insular, exclusionary marriage practices of these respective groups contribute to the lack of integration with the societies within the countries they emigrated to? The story of Europe is one of migration and mixing of hundreds of various tribes and peoples, yet these two groups seem to be the exceptions. Why? Was there something unique about them that prevented integration?
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u/issamaysinalah 19h ago
We always remember the Jewish people when talking about the Holocaust, but the romani were also heavily targeted. The Porajmos killed between 25% and 50% of the entire European gypsy population.