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The Nazi Genocide of the Roma: Reassessment and Commemoration . Edited by Anton Weiss-Wendt . New York and Oxford : Berghahn Books , 2013. Pp. 284. Cloth $95.00. ISBN 978-0857458421 .
Vermessen und Vernichten. Der NS-"Zigeunerforscher" Robert Ritter . By Tobias Schmidt-Degenhard . Stuttgart : Franz Steiner Verlag , 2012. Pp. 246. Cloth [euro]44.00. ISBN 978-3515092777 .
Featured Book Review
Thirty years have passed since debates on the "forgotten victims" of the Nazi regime first placed the murder of Roma and Sinti on the agenda of Holocaust research. The persecution of this heterogeneous group has since entered into textbook accounts of the Holocaust and gained a more prominent position within the commemorative landscape of various European states. While this process of inclusion has been slow and often frustrating to the descendants of Romani survivors who feel deprived of proper recognition of their families' suffering, a new volume bringing together old and new essays on the subject shows how far scholarship has come over the past decades.
The programmatic title of the volume under review, The Nazi Genocide of the Roma, highlights the key concept used to bind together most of the contributions: genocide. A term originally coined by Raphael Lemkin in 1943, it has come to define the comparative study of different victims of the Nazis, as well as other perpetrators of mass murder. Remaining squarely in this comparative mode, several prominent scholars (including, most recently, Guenter Lewy, The Nazi Persecution of Gypsies [2000]) have challenged the notion that the Nazi persecution of Roma and Sinti amounted to genocide. According to this school of thought, the lack of a clearly articulated and systematically executed policy to kill every last Roma makes the term inapplicable to their case. Other scholars, as well as Romani activists, have, by contrast, insisted that the term is not merely accurate, but also one that illuminates the similarities between the extermination of Jews and Roma during the war and suggests that both groups merit equal treatment in memorial culture and scholarship. This volume weighs in on these debates on the side of those who claim that the term is appropriate and productive.
Choosing to organize a collection of essays on the Romani Holocaust...