Bavaria: Study shows discrimination against Sinti and Roma – Bavaria

Even the tattooed concentration camp number was recorded in the files of survivors as an “identifier” – a “particular shamelessness”, says Romani Rose, chairman of the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma. Or even some situation when the Bavarian police captured “Gypsies” who had escaped murder during the dictatorship in the young Federal Republic: officers with submachine guns surrounded caravans.

It’s about the Landfahrerzentrale, at that time also “Gypsy Police”, which started work shortly after the State Criminal Police Office was founded in 1946. It was abolished in 1965. In the nearly two decades, officials registered the minority, also according to principles and terms from the imperial era, the Weimar Republic and the Nazi dictatorship.

The history and its “continuities and discontinuities” are now being dealt with by a doctoral thesis by a historian – a discussion “with this socio-politically very important but neglected topic”, as LKA President Harald Pickert says, is a concern of the authority. A “lesson” from this is to “raise awareness even more during training of the injuries Sinti and Roma have been exposed to in the past, and to show that they are responsible for ensuring that something like this cannot happen again”. The scientific work comes from in-house, so to speak.

Chief Detective Inspector Eveline Diener has devoted herself to the Landfahrerzentrale for the past seven years, parallel to her job in the prevention of the LKA in a doctorate at the Hagen Open University. The recently published dissertation was presented on Tuesday. For this purpose, it was able to use a previously barely developed inventory of sources and documents of the authority. A partial exemption also counts to support the project by the LKA. Your doctoral supervisor assured “distance and scientific independence” on Tuesday.

Diener worked out that Bavaria played a pioneering role early on in the crackdown on Sinti and Roma. At the turn of the century, under the aegis of Alfred Dillmann, Police President in the Kingdom of Bavaria, a “Gypsy headquarters” was set up in Munich, and in 1905 the “Dillmannsche Zigeunerbuch” came into being, which collected information and distributed it in a decentralized manner – against the “harmful foreign body” with “an unsteady lifestyle and its affection on illegal asset acquisition “.

In 1926 the “Law to Combat Gypsies, Rural Travelers and Workers shy” was passed, and Bavaria shaped the national police policy in the Weimar Republic. According to Diener, the National Socialists finally relocated the Munich central office, along with its staff and documents, to Berlin. Nevertheless, a cruel execution then began, with the Reich Main Security Office and state racial hygiene.

The language codes of the National Socialists remained

In 1946, according to the historian, “the end of the Nazi regime was not viewed as a break” on this issue. The Landfahrerzentrale also worked with the compensation authorities for victims, but rarely only with a positive decision: reports justified persecution as a preventive police measure. The “language codes” in documents have also remained “relatively unchanged”.

Diener also sees the “strongly antigypsyist attitude” in large parts of the population at the time as the basis. And yet there have been changes since the mid-1950s: inquiries to local police authorities to report the minority remained unanswered, there was a generation change overall, and there was also distancing within the LKA from the position.

Open detailed view

Romani Rose praises the fact that the policewoman and historian was able to “enormously expand and empirically support” the previously incomplete level of knowledge. But he could envision a further investigation of the continuity after 1965 by independent historians. Later, for example, there were also abbreviations for Sinti and Roma in police computers.