Already in the 1950s and 1960s – before the nationwide organized civil rights movement gained momentum – German Sinti and Roma tried to obtain individual recognition of their Nazi persecution as well as financial aid from the compensation authorities of the FRG. Surviving files of these procedures show that Sinti and Roma in the immediate post-war period were not simply powerless victims, but also fought resolutely for their rights, drawing on the support of committees and lawyers.
Based on the compensation file of O. A., who was persecuted as a “Zigeunermischling” (Gypsy Mischling), a nuanced judgement can be made about the complex practice of compensation in the cases of forcibly sterilized German Sinti and Roma. It neither corresponds to the narrative of a generalized and systematic exclusion of the minority from compensation payments in the 1950s, nor does it relativize the high hurdles and discrimination with which the survivors were confronted by in the contemporary legal system.2 Based on A.‘s submissions, I want to highlight the perspective of those persecuted, in the face of a compensation practice that usually lacked empathy and denied the credibility of the given statements. In this I will proceed in a source-critical manner using historical approaches that centre mentalities and the legal perspectives.3
Fate of persecution
O. A. was born on December 19, 1907, in Hüls near Krefeld. He worked as a construction worker until 1943 and had four children. After being previously categorized as a “Gypsy Mischling” by the Nazis, A. was forcibly sterilized in a camp for Sinti and Roma in Schneidemühl (the present-day town of Piła, Poland) on December 6th, 1943. The German Selbstschutz set up this camp as a “collection point for Gypsies” in West Prussia shortly after the invasion of Poland in October 1939.4 Further forced sterilizations of “Gypsy mongrels” in Schneidemühl took place in 1943 and 1944. From 1943 onwards, sterilizations were a systematic method of genocide employed by the Nazi racial researchers and criminal police against Sinti and Roma, who were considered “socially adapted Gypsy Mischlinge” in the eyes of the perpetrators.5 The files do not provide information on whether O. A. was affected by further persecution measures after the sterilization, for how long he was imprisoned in Schneidemühl and how he experienced liberation from National Socialism.
Formal recognition
O. A. asserted his claims in the early phase of the compensation practice during which the transition from the regulations of the Allied occupation zones and the uniform federal compensation laws, passed from 1953 onwards, happened. In the zones of occupation, district committees organized by the victims, to which the survivors presented themselves, were responsible for recognition.6 O. A. told the committee in Kempen that he had been forcibly sterilized on December 6th, 1943, which would have resulted in a 50% reduction in his earning capacity. On January 28th, 1949, O. A. was formally recognized as a racially persecuted, forcibly sterilized “Gypsy Mischling” with the ID number 171.7
Key factor in compensation after 1945: the victim’s ability to work
On March 6th, 1950, O. A. submitted an application for a victim’s pension to the North Rhine-Westphalian Accident Insurance Authority’s, Special Department for Victims of National Socialist Terror, in accordance with the British Zone Act of 1947, using his identity card as a victim of racial persecution. In his application, A. cited damage to his sexual organs, headaches, back pain and a nervous disorder as the consequences of the sterilization. Although A. was officially recognized as a victim of racial persecution, compensation was made more difficult by the fact that the damage suffered to body and health was legally linked to a reduction in earning capacity. The decisive factor for a positive decision was not the physical suffering caused by persecution, but the extent to which this suffering impaired the ability to work in the assessment of the medical expert. Experts played a key role in determining the degree of reduction in earning capacity. They made estimates based on their own practical experience. As a result, they had a very wide margin of discretion.8 If medical examiners estimated a reduction in earning capacity of less than 25%, this resulted in a negative outcome for the victims. In the administrative practice, forced sterilizations were regularly given a reduction in earning capacity of 0%.9
One year after his application, A. had to undergo a two-hour medical examination at the municipal clinics, on the instructions of the authorities. After the examination, the doctor came to the following conclusion:
“Apart from the signs of a very slight arthrosis of the spine, which is undoubtedly due to fate, there is certainly no evidence of pathological changes as a result of the sterilization.“10
Although O. A. reported severe pain in his groin and back every day during his visit to the doctor, the expert set the reduction in earning capacity at 0%. After a further four months, he received a rejection of his claims from the claim handler, who based his decision verbatim on the medical report.
A fair fight against windmills
But O. A. did not give up and filed an appeal against this decision on September 20, 1951, without the support of a lawyer:
“Although it is completely incomprehensible to me that the medical commission simply dismisses the pension application with the remark that there is no damage to body or health involved, as a layman I can of course not allow myself to pass judgment on this, much less am I in a position to confront the doctors’ verdict. ”11
He expressed his incomprehension about the decision, but did not initially question the doctors’ judgment in principle, only to then place his individual fate in the overall context of the genocide of German Sinti and Roma:
“In their sense, then, it was probably quite right that the Gestapo did not let it be enough at the time to lock us up in concentration camps for years, but that we were sterilized on top of that because of our race. However, your rejection now only speaks of the consequences of sterilization, whereas the complaints that can be traced back to my long K.-Z. imprisonment are not mentioned at all. It should be obvious to everyone that a two-year imprisonment, especially one like the K.Z. imprisonment, does not remain in one’s clothes, but makes itself felt in some way and is by no means without serious consequences. “12
Due to the lack of perpetrator documents, it is not possible to reconstruct whether A. was deported alone or with his entire family. It is also possible that the family had already gone to West Prussia due to the pressure of persecution and were subsequently imprisoned there. To this day, the camp is not recognized as a National Socialist place of detention within the meaning of the Federal Compensation Acts. O. A. referred in particular to the arthrosis with complaints that were attributable to the long imprisonment in the concentration camp, which the medical expert also noted as such as being due to fate but did not include in his judgment regarding the reduction in earning capacity. O. A. disclosed the appearance of the doctor who relativized his suffering during the assessment:
“I also drew the examining doctor’s attention to these complaints at the time, whereupon he remarked with an ironic smile that he had the same complaints. I received no answer to my polite question as to whether he had also been in a concentration camp, but the mocking grin told me that my assumption was totally misplaced. As you know, no answer is also an answer. “13
A. attributed the doctor’s cynical behaviour to the social and mental context of the early 1950s, shortly after the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany, which was by no means free of National Socialist ideas:
“Unfortunately, there are still enough Germans today that even the total collapse of Germany has not yet been able to convert them to regard all people as equal, but who are still obsessed with the idea of racial purity and still regard the persecutions of Jews and Gypsies during the Nazi Regime as right. […] We have probably suffered enough, so that it should be a matter of course for every decent person to compensate for this injustice to some extent and not to do everything possible to avoid making amends. What was done to us because of our race is and remains an injustice, and even your laws do nothing to change that. I would therefore ask you to reconsider my application for a compensation pension.“14
O. A. is exemplary for thousands of German Sinti and Roma who tried to refute the prevailing socio-political narrative of self-inflicted persecution due to alleged “criminality” and “asociality” with their own evidence to achieve recognition from the restitution authorities.
A.‘s complaint had an effect: the authorities ordered a second medical examination, which O. A. had to undergo six months later, on March 21, 1952. By law, the authorities did not have to comply with the purely formal complaint.
However, the second doctor’s assessment was the same as the previous one. No less impartially, he not only trivialized A.‘s psychological suffering resulting from the persecution in a manner typical of the time, but also used anti-Gypsy topoi of the “lazy and instinct-driven Gypsy”. He insinuated that A. was “strongly fixated on money ”15. Moreover, A.‘s increased sex drive had nothing to do with the sterilization, but was “constitutionally or racially determined”.16 Whether the doctors entrusted with O. A.‘s fate – as has been proven in other cases – had been implicated in National Socialist crimes, perhaps even against German Sinti and Roma, could only be answered on the basis of further prosopographical research.17 On the basis of this second medical report, the appeals committee of the state pension authority again rejected the application.
O. A. took the passing of the first nationwide compensation law (BErG) in September 1953 as an opportunity to submit a third application to the newly created Office for Restitution:
“I would like to explicitly point out once again that the sterilization was only carried out for racial reasons and in no way for any other reasons, for which the evidence is available for you or the government.”18
Mr. A. consciously emphasized the “racial” reasons for the sterilization. People who had been sterilized between 1933 and 1945 on the basis of the “Gesetz zur Verhütung erbkranken Nachwuchses” (Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring) of July 1933 were systematically excluded from the Compensation Act, as the judiciary did not regard the law as a genuinely National Socialist persecution measure.19 This legal positivist interpretation was in the tradition of the “Erbgesundheitslehre” (Hereditary Health Theory), which once again categorized the victims into “real” and “fake” victims. Sinti and Roma, to whom judges and doctors regularly attributed “angeborener Schwachsinn” (congenital imbecility) as a supposed diagnosis due to their “alien racial inferiority”, were thus “lawfully” sterilized.20
However, the line drawn by the judiciary after 1945 between “lawfully” and “unlawfully” sterilized persons failed to recognize the extent to which this practice of persecution was motivated by ideas of racial hygiene. The Reich Criminal Police obliged the same hospitals and doctors who had already carried out sterilizations under the “Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring” to perform procedures on Sinti and Roma and then report this to the health authorities and local criminal investigation departments.21 There could be no talk of “lawful” sterilization. On August 2nd, 1955, A.‘s application was again rejected. The reasons given by the responsible case officer were brief and hardly differed from the first decisions, stating “the medical advisors conclusively established that the sterilization had not left the applicant with any measurable physical injury within the meaning of the law.”22 In the opinion of the case officer, a medical certificate from a specialist submitted by Mr. A. on July 15th, 1955, would also not provide any facts that would justify compensation.
Breakthrough through lawyer’s presentation
O. A. continued. However, he was now represented for the first time by lawyer Dr. Kurt Sternfeld. The lawyer told the authorities that between 1953 and 1956, due to the consequences of the forced sterilization, A. had to repeatedly interrupt his itinerant trade as a textile merchant for health reasons. The lawyer’s support was successful, although the exact reasons could not be determined due to missing documents in his compensation file.
On June 1st, 1957, seven years after his first application, O. A. received a positive decision from the NRW state pension authority in the form of a monthly pension of DM 120, justified by a persecution-related reduction in earning capacity of 30%, which had been caused by the forced sterilization.23 On July 27th, 1988, O. A. died. One year before his death, he wrote a handwritten letter to the State Pension Authority requesting an increase in his pension to the rate of a minimum old-age pension. The state pension authority rejected this on the grounds that, according to the Compensation Act, these claims could only be made by those born before January 1st, 1905. As A. was born in 1907, the application was rejected.24
Translation: Nils Bergmann
References
- See also the article by: Joey Rauschenberger, Behördliche Handlungsspielräume im demokratischen Rechtsstaat oder: Warum zwangssterilisierte Sinti trotz ähnlicher Verfolgungsschicksale nach 1945 unterschiedlich entschädigt wurden, www.ns-kontinuitäten-bw.de ( accessed on 27.05.2024).
- The compensation file of O. A. is part of the collection of the Verband Deutscher Sinti und Roma – Landesverband Bayern e.V., which has been providing legal assistance to members of the minority in compensation proceedings since the 1990s. The collection will be digitized in a project until December 2025 and evaluated for a historical didactic publication according to scientific standards. In the following, the file is cited as “LVSR-A-O-1_respective numbers”.
- Immediately after the invasion of Poland in 1939, the SS recruited tens of thousands of members of the German minority in Poland who were fit for military service for the “Volksdeutsche Selbstschutz”. Michael Zimmermann, Rasseutopie und Genozid. Die nationalsozialistische “Lösung der Zigeunerfrage”, Hamburg 1996, p. 277.
- Ibid, p. 359–362.
- Joey Rauschenberger, Wiedergutmachung, in: Enzyklopädie des NS-Völkermordes an den Sinti und Roma in Europa, edited by Karola Fings, Research Center Antiziganism at the University of Heidelberg, Heidelberg February 15th 2024.
- LVSR-A-O-1_0040.
- Federal Minister of Finances in collaboration with Walter Schwarz (ed.), Die Wiedergutmachung nationalsozialistischen Unrechts durch die Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Volume IV, Das Bundesentschädigungsgesetz, Erster Teil (§§1 to 50 BEG), Bonn/Munich/Zurich 1981, p. 384.
- Ibid, p. 211.
- LVSR-A-O-1_0034.
- LVSR-A-O-1_0033.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- LVSR-A-O-1_0029-0032.
- Ibid.
- Arnold Spitta, Entschädigung für Zigeuner? Geschichte eines Vorurteils, in: Ludolf Herbst, Constantin Goschler (eds.), Wiedergutmachung in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Munich 1989, 385–401, here p. 391.
- LVSR-A-O-1_0027.
- Karola Fings, Ulrich F. Opfermann (eds.), Zigeunerverfolgung im Rheinland und in Westfalen 1933–1945. Geschichte, Aufarbeitung und Erinnerung, Paderborn 2012, p. 330.
- Hansjörg Riechert, Die Zwangssterilisation reichsdeutscher Sinti und Roma nach dem “Gesetz zur Verhütung erbkranken Nachwuchses” vom 14. Juli 1933, in: Waclaw Dlugoborski (ed.): Sinti und Roma im KL Auschwitz-Birkenau 1943–1944 vor dem Hintergrund ihrer Verfolgung unter der Naziherrschaft, Auschwitz-Birkenau 1998, 58–75, here p. 71.
- Zimmermann, Rassenutopie und Genozid, p. 358.
- LVSR-A-O-1_0024.
- LVSR-A-O-1_0007.
- LVSR-A-O‑1.