Porrajmos

Goya, Saturn Devouring his Children

 

The Devouring (is not a Holocaust)

'We have been able to establish that more than 90% of so-called native Gypsies are of mixed blood…Further results of our investigations have allowed us to characterise the Gypsies as being a people of entirely primitive ethnological origins, whose mental backwardness makes them incapable of real social adaptation….The Gypsy question can only be solved when the main body of asocial and good-for-nothing Gypsy individuals of mixed blood is collected together in large camps and kept working there, and when the further breeding of this population of mixed blood is stopped once and for all.' (Robert Ritter, 1940)

In 1940, 250 Gypsy children in the concentration camp at Buchenwald were used as guinea pigs for testing the Zyclon B cyanide gas crystals, a lethal insecticide which from 1941 onwards was used for mass murders at Auschwitz/Birkenau.

3,000 men, women, and children perished in the gas chamber during the night of August 2-3, 1944, as the Germans liquidated the so-called Gypsy family camp (Zigeunerfamilienlager) in Auschwitz II-Birkenau.

No-one from the Gypsy community was called to give evidence at the Nuremburg trials.

It was the porrajmos, the Great Devouring,