The Roma and the Holocaust: The Romani Genocide Under NazismBy MariaSierra, Translated by Margaret Clark, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024. 213 pp. $30.95 (paperback). ISBN: 978‐1‐35‐033308‐6

The genocide of the Roma is an aspect of Nazi racial violence that is woefully under-researched by scholars, with relatively few appropriate resources for use in the classroom. For that reason, Maria Sierra's The Roma and the Holocaust: The Romani Genocide under Nazism is a welcomed addition to the literature. The book is part of the Bloomsbury Academic's “Perspectives on the Holocaust” series that provides students with an in-depth exploration of a specific aspect of the Holocaust. As such, the book is not based on any new archival research but is more synthetic, drawing upon some of the latest secondary sources and published memoirs. The book was originally published in Spanish in 2020 as Holocausto Gitano. El genocidio romani bajo el nazismo. In the introduction, Sierra clearly explains that since the “Holocaust” is generally accepted as referring to the destruction of six million European Jews, she distinguishes between the Jewish and Romani Holocausts. By using such terminology, she is interested in the comparisons that can be drawn between the Jewish and Romani experiences and treatment by the Nazis. Furthermore, she makes clear her intention to heighten awareness of the Romani Holocaust that was forgotten and unacknowledged by scholars and the public alike after 1945. Sierra has organized the book into two parts. The first examines the history of “anti-Gypsyism” in European society, persecution and perpetration of genocide of the Roma at the hands of the Nazis, and the struggle for recognition of the Roma as victims of Nazi racial genocide following the war. The second is devoted to an examination of the Romani genocide through the lens of survivor memoirs. Sierra traces the history of the Roma in Europe and places the wide-ranging and varied patterns of prejudice and persecution they faced not just in the context of Germany but across Europe. She effectively shows that the Roma held a diversity of social and economic roles within European society, but that their widespread stereotyping as vagrants and criminals became rooted in the scientific racism of the late nineteenth century as Roma were increasingly pursued by modern police methods. This legacy as perceived criminals translated easily into the Third Reich's policies of “racial hygiene” as the Roma were subjected to discrimination, sterilization, and imprisonment as a group deemed “asocial” based on their perceived racial characteristics, with many German cities and municipalities forcing local Roma into enclosed and policed camps. By emphasizing the Nazis' racialized view of the Roma, Sierra is providing historical support to the idea that the murder of an estimated 500,000 Roma was, in fact, a genocide and not merely an aspect of normal policing procedures toward a supposed criminal element in society, which was a widespread view after the war. With the outbreak of war and Nazi conquests, Roma now faced deportation to ghettos in the East, such as Łódź, and were also subjected to mass executions by the Einsatzgruppen following the German army into the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941. Sierra draws upon the examples of the different occupied areas of Europe and Nazi satellite states to underscore the varied treatment of the Roma depending on local political conditions. In Bulgaria, for example, Roma faced various forms of discrimination, but generally the authorities did not comply with the Nazi request for their deportation to concentration and extermination camps, while in Croatia the fascist Ustasha actively targeted the Roma with about 75% of the Romani population murdered during the war. A key juncture in the descent to complete genocide was the December 1942 “Auschwitz Decree” put forth by Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer of the SS and head of a sprawling police and security apparatus. Prior to that point, Himmler pursued a vision of a “Gypsy Reservation” protecting a portion of “pure” Roma for racial study. With the decree, Himmler now directed that the entire Roma population be deported to the Auschwitz “Gypsy camp” and other camps. In Auschwitz, entire families were held, subject to horrific conditions and medical experiments by the notorious Josef Mengele, with over 90% of the 23,000 Roma in the camp ultimately murdered. To be sure, Sierra draws brief comparisons to the Jewish experience at the hands of the Nazis, but she could do more to situate her narrative on the Roma more clearly in the vast existing literature on the Jewish Holocaust and the growing number of works on the Romani Holocaust to better explain the evolution from persecution to exclusion and, finally, to genocide. She often briefly references other historians' works without much explanation, and she describes a myriad of specific episodes of persecution and violence toward the Roma emerging from the jumbled and often contradictory policies in place. However, it would be useful for students to have a more systematic and complete discussion of how historians have understood the interaction of various situational factors that came together to escalate Nazi policies to mass murder toward the Roma. At one point, Sierra fleetingly mentions the “intentionalism” versus “functionalism” debate in Holocaust studies, in which historians have weighed the long-term intent of Adolf Hitler to murder Europe's Jews versus more local initiatives from lower levels of the Nazi bureaucracy, but she fails to explain fully what the terms mean and whether such approaches are relevant in understanding the dynamics of the Romani Holocaust. The author is on her most solid footing when discussing the legacy of the Romani Holocaust and providing analysis of the Romani memoirs. This is not surprising given her background as a research leader of a project examining the Roma's contribution to the European public space. Sierra includes an important chapter examining the challenges the surviving Roma faced in finding acknowledgement as victims of Nazi racial persecution and establishing the Romani Holocaust into public memory. She points out, for example that the Federal Republic of Germany's courts did not recognize the Roma as eligible for reparations based on racial persecution until the early 1960s, and that the first public memorials for the Roma were not established until the early 1980s. With a goal to recover the previously ignored experiences of the Roma, Sierra relies heavily on Romani memoirs throughout the book, giving an important personal perspective on the unfolding of events. In the last chapters of the book, she provides a fascinating discussion of the challenges and benefits of using survivor memoirs as historical sources, focusing on a “history of emotions” approach in which the emotion, memory, and language expressed in memoirs are not just a response to experience, but reflect the complex interplay of culture and historical context in the past and present. In her discussion, Sierra focuses on several Romani individuals, but she also draws heavily from well-known memoirs from Jewish survivors, such as Primo Levi, as she elaborates on how the survivor memoirs reflect and work through emotions of bewilderment, fear, guilt, anger, mistrust, courage, and pride. There is much to like about this book, as Sierra has comprehensively examined a very underexplored aspect of the Holocaust in an accessible manner. Furthermore, the book includes 51 illustrations that help bring to life the diversity and vibrancy of Romani lives in their own right, along with displaying their harsh treatment by perpetrators. In addition, Sierra provides an extensive annotated bibliography that could be of great use to students interested in further research. Unfortunately, the book is marred by some mistranslations and misspellings of the German. To give just one example, on page 82, Oberscharfhürer (sic) is translated as “chief sniper” instead of “senior squad leader,” as the SS rank is typically known. Furthermore, occasionally, the translation from the Spanish is a bit awkward, even unclear, with odd and redundant word choices that are distracting to read. Even with these problems, Sierra has provided a solid resource for use in the classroom in which the long-ignored Romani Holocaust is reclaimed, and the experiences and voices of the survivors can be heard by a student audience. The author declares no conflicts of interest.