Angry gypsies are pressing to settle old scores
When they first appeared in Germany 500 years ago, one chronicle denounced them as an "uncouth, dirty and barbarous" people who "live like dogs and are expert at thieving and cheating." During the Middle Ages, aristocrats out on a hunt considered them fair game, along with birds and boar. More than 400,000 of them were murdered by the Nazis in the course of the Holocaust that also claimed 6 million Jewish lives. Even today West Germany's gypsies are openly persecuted. Says Grattan Puxon, general secretary of the Roma World Union, an international gypsy organization based in Bern, Switzerland: "We are the forgotten victims of Fascism."
A race of dark-eyed, olive-skinned traders who began migrating out of India a millennium ago and still speak their own language (a guttural tongue with Aryan roots called Romany), gypsies have been vilified wherever they have gone. Of the 10 million who now live outside India, roughly half have settled in Eastern Europe, while a million are in Western Europe and 500,000 are in the U.S. But only 50,000 gypsies are in West Germany. It is the home, they believe, of the worst prejudice against them.
Though studies have shown that the rate of violent and sexual crimes is lower among gypsies than among the German population as a whole, they remain marked as dangerous people, as well as chronic pickpockets and con men. Tellingly, the German name for gypsy, Zigeuner, literally means "wandering swindler." Complains Romani Rose, a German gypsy activist: "If a sandwich is missing in the schoolroom, a gypsy child gets blamed."
Attempts by gypsies to move into decent neighborhoods invariably touch off protests. Most gypsies are confined to ghettos; in Bad Hersfeld, a town of 30,000 near the East German border, 200 gypsies live in old refugee housing that lacks hot water and indoor toilets and is so overrun by rats from a nearby garbage dump that children are not allowed out at night. In summer, when gypsies take to the highways in camper trucks as wandering salesmen and secondhand dealers, the treatment that they encounter is especially rough. Owners of almost 90% of West Germany's campsites, claiming that the gypsies would pester vacationers by peddling their wares, have tacked up signs reading GYPSIES FORBIDDEN. Police periodically descend on camping gypsies with guard dogs and submachine guns and force them to move on. "We are the original campers," Rose complains. "Yet now everyone can live like a gypsy in West Germany except gypsies."
As part of Hitler's drive to exterminate "inferior races," the Nazis in 1938 established a Central Office for Combatting the Gypsy Menace, which arbitrarily classified thousands of gypsies as common criminals and sent them to concentration camps. Later, gypsies became targets of the Nazi crusade for racial purity.