Roma and Sinti were persecuted in Germany from 1933 under vagrancy and 'asocial' laws, then racially defined by the Reich Central Office for the Combating of the Gypsy Nuisance and the research unit of Robert Ritter, and confined from 1936 in municipal camps such as Marzahn in Berlin. Deportations began in 1940. In the occupied Soviet territories the Einsatzgruppen shot at least 30,000 Roma alongside Jews. Himmler's decree of 16 December 1942 sent about 23,000 Roma to a separate family camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where roughly 21,000 died of disease, starvation and gassing, including between 4,200 and 4,300 killed in a single night on 2 August 1944. Romania deported some 25,000 Roma to Transnistria, where about half died, and the Independent State of Croatia killed most of its Roma population at Jasenovac. Estimates of the total killed run from at least 250,000 to around 500,000. Survivors were long excluded from West German compensation on the ground that they had been detained for policing rather than racial reasons; Chancellor Helmut Schmidt formally acknowledged the genocide in March 1982.
Nazi Germany and its allies registered, interned, deported and killed Roma and Sinti across occupied Europe
No pre-war state counted Roma reliably; the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the standard literature work from an estimated European Roma and Sinti population of roughly 1-1.5 million before the war, of which the territories under Axis control held perhaps 700,000-1 million. Death estimates range from about 130,000 to 500,000, with 250,000-500,000 the figure most often cited.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum gives at least 250,000 European Roma killed, with a possible total of around 500,000. The range reflects missing prewar population data, the frequent recording of Roma victims simply as partisans or asocials, and disagreement over whether deaths in Romanian, Croatian and Hungarian custody are counted in full.
Racial registration and sterilisation, internment in municipal and concentration camps, mass shootings by the Einsatzgruppen and gassing at Auschwitz-Birkenau and Chelmno are documented in German police and camp records summarised by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Poland, Austria, Germany, Romania, Moldova