They were brought to Transistria, an annexed part of Romania on the boarder of the U.S.S.R. Transistria became home to several ghettos and camps where 24,686 Roma would eventually die. In total almost twenty five percent of all living European Roma would die by Nazi hands.
The treatment of the Roma during the war was almost or equally as horrifying as the Jews. Some five thousand Roma were subject to beatings, starvation, and disease in Lodz a ghetto located in German occupied Poland. Other examples of this bodily harm can be seen through out German occupied Europe. The German government encouraged thugs to attack Roma on the streets (Bergen 2003.) In Romania, some discharged Roma soldiers were deported to Transistria, while others volunteered to be deported to join their families. While in work camps, Romas and others were subject to life threatening conditions everyday. Prisoners were forced to work for hours without food or water sometimes in the freezing weather. Ghettos caused life-threatening conditions as well. The German authorities compelled Romas and others living in the surrounding areas to move into the closed ghetto, thus exacerbating the extremely crowded and unsanitary conditions. (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2012) To a certain extent Roma had worse treatment then the Jews due to the fact that Roma were subject to many experiments at the beginning of the war. SS leader Himmler was fascinated by Roma. He set up a department called the Radical Hygiene and Population Research Center. Its main goal was to study approximately thirty thousand German Roma, draw up genealogies of them and identify those considered "pure." This information helped locate Roma and kill them. (Bergen, 2003) The German government heavily funded experiments on Roma, which were either very painful or life threatening to the test subject.
Many people disregard the Roma during this time because there was already a common agreement that Roma were outsiders.