During World War Two, while much of the world was fighting a war against Germany, Germany was fighting another war against what it considered the "undesirables" of its countries. Most of these undesirables were Jews. Although there are a number of other groups who were targeted during this time. One of those groups was the Gypsies or Roma. Not much research has been done on this group, due to the fact that many European Roma were targets of prosecution long before the Holocaust. However, the events during WWII against the Roma should not be excused due to the prosecution of the Roma before the Holocaust.
Although the Roma were prosecuted before the war, much this pre-war prosecution was not life threatening, and mostly constituted of laws preventing Romas from living in certain places. Unfortunately during WWII, it is estimated that Hitler's Nazis killed between 220,000 and 500,000 Roma. (Shulman, 2000) This was done through mobile killing units, work camps, and death camps. The number of Roma killed by mobile killing units is estimated to be 250,000 (Bergen, 2003.) Throughout German occupied Europe or the German Reich, death and work camps were set up to destroy the undesirables. Death camps included Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Majdanek, and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Some camps doubled as both a death camp and a work camp, while others were built purely for killing. This idea of a death camp was first proposed in 1942 during the Wannsee Conference. Within a few months after the opening of Chelmno, the first killing center, the SS had opened five more killing centers in German occupied Poland. Chelmno in total killed about five thousand Roma before closing in late 1942. Several thousand Roma were killed in Belzec before it was dismantled in fall of 1943. Almost twenty thousand Roma were killed in Auschwitz. In the fall of 1941 Romanian authorities began to remove the undesirables out of the country.
