Parallel Fates? Roma and Jews in the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia

The Nazi genocide of Roma and Jews in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia left only a remnant of each community alive in their native land. The common fate of most Jews and Roma in the western provinces of the former Czechoslovakia suggests a certain congruity to their wartime experience: both groups suffered persecution, dispossession, incarceration, and ultimately deportation and murder. In the years before mass transports to ghetto and killing centers, however, the German occupiers and native Czech authorities approached the Protectorate’s Jews and Roma quite differently. Whereas Jews endured an almost relentless series of measures intended to segregate and isolate them, Protectorate authorities initially exerted considerable efforts to forcibly integrate Roma into the majority population through restrictions on movement and mandatory schooling. That program met with local resistance from the start but was only fully abandoned once the Nazis moved to murder the territory’s Roma and Sinti. Once the mass deportation of both communities began, Jews and Roma came into contact with one another to an unprecedented degree in spaces of detention and destruction. Those forced entanglements manifested themselves most intimately in the work of Jewish doctors in the camps of Lety, Hodonín, and in Auschwitz-Birkenau

Nazi Germany · Nazism · Poison control · Protectorate · Central European national history · European history and politics · Human Factors and Ergonomics · Religion, Theology, History, Judaism, Christianity