Many do not realize that the Holocaust killed 500,000 Gypsies'. They went through the same hardships Jews did, with discriminations spreading through Western Europe. Gypsies were considered by the Nazi's as "asocial". They were seen as racially alien people who lowered the "Aryan Race". The Gypsies were viewed by the Nazi's with racial stereotypes of dark-skinned thieves, pickpockets, swindlers, beggars, and fortunetellers, incarcerating them as criminals. They were separated from the German community even at the beginning of the twentieth century, where certain restrictions were placed if they could not prove local residency and occupation. .
The main focus during this time was to set up regulations, which kept the Gypsies' behavior under control. Nazis believed associating behavior with race, criminality with Gypsies. They mainly suffered the persecution of police. In 1936, Heinrich Hammer, the leader of the German police in the Reich Ministry of Interior, gave orders to the police that the freedom of Gypsies should be restricted. New laws were ordered restricting Gypsy's travel and trade, also incarcerating them. Multiple studies and research done by Robert Ritter on Gypsies were performed in to classify them, and keep the racial stereotypes, as well as to identify them among the German people. Even though Ritter's study of Gypsies had no scientific truth it was an important investigation that classified most of the German and many of the Austrian Gypsies from pure to non-gypsy. .
Most of the laws passed in 1934 that had to do with the deportation of Jews also had to do with Gypsies who could not prove their German citizenship. The Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary diseases was applied to the sterilization of Gypsies. Gypsies were belived to be "feebleminded", but it can be seen that the sterilizations for such racial reasons were illegal. Among others, they were sterilized as `unworthy of human reproduction', only to be ultimately annihilated as not worthy of living.
