Checking a few notes that I copied from this book, I was originally only going to post this in our social democracy subcommunity, but doing research on this phenomenon I realised that it was even worse than I thought.

In case somebody is unable to read that page, it says that in 1926, Bavaria adopted a law for fighting Roma, Sinti, vagrants, and the workshy, mandating registration for all Roma along with Sinti, and this law became a model for other German states.

Read that again: the Weimar Republic (because remember that this is 1926!) adopted laws explicitly designed to persecute Roma, Sinti, vagrants and the workshy. The Weimar Republic started those laws. Not the Third Reich. Similarly, in 1929, it was the Weimar Republic’s national police commission that established a centre for antiziganism headquartered in Munich. Four years before the Third Reich even existed.

Unlike many of the regulars here, I do not subscribe to the theory that ‘social democracy is the moderate wing of fascism’ (perhaps that is another topic for another time), but I have to admit that protofascist phenomena like these do not exactly help with my case either.

Now then, quoting Herbert Heuss’s German policies of Gypsy persecution 1870–1945 in The Gypsies During the Second World War: From “race science” to the camps, pages 23–25:

In 1886 Chancellor Bismarck sent a letter to all the component states of the empire in order to unify, at least in theory, the various decrees in force against [Roma and Sinti]. He recommended the expulsion of all foreign [Roma] “in order to free the territory of the country completely and permanently from this plague.”⁵

State discrimination: the Gypsy Centre in Munich

[Antiziganism] in [the Second Reich] took an unprecedented turn with the setting up, in March 1899, of an Information Service on Gypsies by the Security Police in the Imperial Police Headquarters in Munich. Here, for the first time, the total registration and surveillance of an entire population group was planned and organised.

This Gypsy Centre had all the modern aids at its disposal — a telegraph service, photographs, fingerprint systems, identification cards — the technical developments available at the time were set up in a model way by the police authorities in order to put a comparatively small number of people under the prescribed total supervision.

Alfred Dillmann, an officer of the Munich police, published his Gypsy Book, giving brief details of over 3,500 [Roma or Sinti] and “persons travelling as [them]”, in 1905. Even for the conditions of the time the book was contrary to the law. In contained a collection of personal information about members of a particular minority group, many of whom had no criminal convictions.

A similar collection about Catholics in Prussia or Jews in Hessen would have given rise to a strong protest, not only from the group concerned but from a wider public, yet, because the group singled out here were [Roma and Sinti], no public outcry ensued. This taken for granted, silent or overt consent to anti[ziganism] will be met again in the course of German history.

The Gypsy Centre in Munich survived, almost unchanged, the transition from Imperial Germany to the Weimar Republic — and later to Hitler’s Third Reich. In 1925 the Centre already had 14,000 individual and family files on [Roma and Sinti] from all over Germany.

By October 1938, when it was incorporated into the National Criminal Police Office (RKPA) as the National Centre for the Fight against the Gypsy Menace, it held over 18,000 files in which 33,524 people — representing some 80–90% of the [Romani] population at the time — were recorded. Along with these files the personnel of the Munich Centre was, of course, taken over by the Criminal Police Office.

Race science and the persecution of the [Roma and Sinti]

On July 16th 1926 Bavaria hurriedly adopted the Law for the Fight against Gypsies, Vagrants and the Workshy. In the justification of the law, its meaning and purpose were made clear:

“It is expected that the large [insert slur here] population will avoid Bavaria on its journeys and the remainder of the travelling people will be kept under control so that there is no longer anything to fear from them with regard to safety in the land.”⁶

The ministerial decision putting the law into operation brought the definition of Gypsy (Zigeuner) “in accordance with the study of race” into the state’s repertoire.

“The concept ‘[insert slur here]’ is generally known and needs no further explanation. The study of race will give the information as to who is [one].”⁷

This Bavarian law became the model for other German states and even for neighbouring countries, for example Czechoslovakia. In 1929 in the state of Hessen the then Minister for the Interior, Wilhelm Leuschner, proposed a Law for the Fight against the Gypsy Menace, the aim of which was to lead to a “unified fight against the [insert slur here] plague”.

In the past, “in spite of energetic action, the rooting out of this evil had not been possible”. This aim was incorporated in the instructions for carrying out the law, where the direct words “fighting the [insert slur here]” were used.⁸

The basic premise had changed, from fighting crime, to fighting a people — and the target group was to be determined not on juridical but on racial grounds.

Tracing the development of anti[ziganist] laws in Hessen, we see how general trends in the German state reflected, more and more, that classical liberal justice with its emphasis on punishment of the deed was changing towards a focus on punishment of the doer. As the identity of the doer came to the forefront of decisions about punishment, classification as [Romani] became an important factor in judgement of the deed.

This simultaneously eroded the rôle of lawyers in decision‐making, bringing a new coterie of experts — doctors, anthropologists, race experts — into active involvement in state institutions.

Two opposing interests came together to promote this development. The police authorities were greatly interested in changing classical criminal law which, by preventing the criminalisation of groups, deprived crime prevention of a starting point.

On the other hand, paying attention to the identity of a criminal was also a matter of concern to advanced circles who wanted social background and family circumstances looked at in connection with crime and indeed with the aim of reforming the doer. The study of race, a new, modern science that was just seeking recognition, created common ground for these different interests. The Fight against the Gypsy Menace was the lowest common denominator on which all the powerful parties and institutions could agree.

Massive discrimination against [Roma and Sinti] — who, for the most part, were German citizens — was therefore a reality long before the handover of power to the [Fascists] in January 1933. Indeed, even before 1933, [Roma and Sinti] in Germany had been classified by racial criteria in laws and decrees.

In spite of all this, it must be made clear that the potentiality for destruction which the Third Reich was about to unleash was not, so to speak, traditional discrimination. The potential for destruction required, on the one hand, the possibility of thinking about destruction. This was provided for Germany by […] concepts of race hygiene.

But it also needed a transformation, a remodelling, of the existing legal framework, in order to allow [antiziganism] to be extended into […] outright annihilation. The policy of the Third Reich, therefore, represents not just the sharpening of traditional discrimination but, with the introduction of race science as the foundation of a new order of lawmaking, the beginning of new depths of persecution.

1933: National Socialist persecution

On January 30th 1933 German President Paul von Hindenburg named Adolf Hitler as Chancellor, thus ushering in the Third Reich. With this there began a policy that built on the authoritarian structures of the Weimar Republic in so far as it continued the Weimar method of government through emergency orders.

(Emphasis added in most cases. I thought about replacing all instances of that antiziganist slur, but it would have looked so clunky and distracting that I only did it inconsistently. I can do it consistently anyway if any Roma or Sinti ask me to do so.)