Berlin, the capital of Germany, was home to many Sinti and Roma in the 1930s. On 16 July 1936, police officers removed over 600 people persecuted as ‘gypsies‘ to a camp on the outskirts of the city. This detention camp for Sinti and Roma, euphemistically referred to as a ‘rest area’, existed from 1936 to 1945.
The persecutors used it as a central instrument for the segregation, isolation and surveillance of more than 1 200 people who were held there over the years. From 1938, it served as the starting point for the deportation and murder of the Sinti and Roma detained there.
Foundation
The Berlin Welfare Office and the Berlin police authorities had been planning the establishment of the detention camp since 1934 at the latest. These plans were realised in the course of the circular decree on ‘Combating the Gypsy Menace’ issued by the Reich and Prussian Minister of the Interior on 6 June 1936. The decree concluded with the minister’s announcement that he had given the Berlin police chief ‘authorisation to carry out a one-day statewide manhunt’ in Prussia in advance of the Olympic Games.1Circular decree of the Reich and Prussian Minister of the Interior of 6 June 1936 concerning the fight against the Gypsy Menace, in: Ministerialblatt des Reichs-und Preußischen Ministeriums des Innern 1936, p. 27, 75. Those responsible in Berlin used this order to implement the plans they had prepared together with the welfare office and district offices.
On 3 July 1936 the Gestapo office for the Berlin state police district issued a police order. This order covered ‘camping by gypsies’ and instructed that ‘all gypsies camping in Greater Berlin’ should ‘be transferred to the rest area near Marzahn’.2This order has not yet been found. It is mentioned in a letter from the Schutzpolizei (Schupo) dated 10/07/1936. Cf. Federal Archives, R 8077/236, pp. 83–85, here 83.
After the camp was founded, the Berlin Welfare Office and the police authority shared the administrative and criminal police supervision of the internees as well as the administration of the camp.
Living Conditions
The Berlin camp was located in the Marzahn district on the outskirts of the capital, on a field without water or electrical services. It was situated between Falkenberger Weg, the railway tracks of the Wriezener Bahn railway line, a sewage farm and the municipal cemetery. At the time of its foundation, the only facilities in the camp were a well, a privy and a pond.
The life of all Sinti and Roma in the camp was characterised by the disastrous housing situation, the lack of food, medical care and hygienic washing and cooking facilities, forced labour and violence. It was not until 1938 that the city council had three residential barracks built. Before that, the men, women and children held in the camp lived in dilapidated caravans and dwellings that they built themselves.
The activities of the racial researcher Gerhard Stein (1910–1979), which began immediately after the camp was founded, marked the beginning of a regime of physical and mental abuse, which was later continued by the staff of the Racial Hygiene Research Unit (RHF). In addition, the Sinti and Roma detainees suffered violent attacks by camp guards and their employers.
The situation deteriorated further with the tightening of National Socialist racial policy from 1938. The camp in Marzahn increasingly served as an assembly centre for the removal of Sinti and Roma to concentration camps. At six o’clock in the morning on 16 June 1938, Berlin criminal police officers, with the support of employees of the 257th police precinct in Friedrichsfelde, arrested an unknown number of men and boys in the Marzahn camp. The Sinti and Roma seized on that day and in subsequent arrests were sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp and only released from ‘preventive custody’ in individual cases. Clear evidence of further transfers to Sachsenhausen can be found in the surviving sources for February 1939.
Women and girls were also arrested and sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp under the pretext of the ‘preventive fight against crime’. Because research has so far been limited, it is not possible at present to date these transfers precisely. The survivor Oskar Böhmer (1920–unknown) reported that the arrest of a large number of women and girls took place centrally on a day that he remembered as being in ‘late 1938’.3Forschungsstelle für Zeitgeschichte, Hamburg, WdE 1025 (Regine Böhmer, Other Materials): Oskar Böhmer, Wenn ich daran denke…: Oskar Böhmer erzählt sein Leben, aufgeschrieben von Karin Guth [Oskar Böhmer, When I think of it…: Oskar Böhmer recounts his life, written down by Karin Guth].
Men, women and children from the camp performed hard forced labour, for example in road construction or armaments production, both in factories and in private households. In addition, film director Leni Riefenstahl (1902–2003) exploited internees from the Berlin-Marzahn detention camp as well as Sinti and Roma who were held in the Maxglan detention camp in Salzburg as extras for her film project ‘Tiefland’.
Registration and Deportation
Following the ‘circular decree on combatting the Gypsy Menace’ of 8 December 1938, an ‘Office for Gypsy Affairs’ was set up at Berlin police headquarters on Alexanderplatz; it was headed by Leo Karsten (1898–unknown). The persecution measures actively pursued by the department from the summer of 1939 at the latest were carried out in cooperation with other departments of the Berlin criminal police—such as the Crime Prevention Unit, the RHF, the Gestapo and sometimes overzealous employees of the welfare authorities, registry offices and hospitals.
In the context of the nationwide deportations of Sinti and Roma to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp in spring 1943, the persecutors also deported almost all of the men, women and children still living in the Marzahn camp at the time. The deportees were taken to the police headquarters on Alexanderplatz and held there until their transfer. They were informed in writing that they would be deported to ‘KL Auschwitz-Birkenau’, and had to confirm this with a signature or the imprint of their right index finger. The passenger trains departed from Schlesischer Bahnhof, today’s Ostbahnhof, under the guard of police and members of the Wehrmacht. Very few deportees survived.
After the deportations and until the Marzahn camp was liberated in April 1945, just over 30 people were still living there. Living in poverty, with their former homes confiscated or destroyed and their families scattered, some of the survivors were forced to remain on the site until 1947.
Recognition and Remembrance
Persistent racism against Sinti and Roma in West and East Berlin meant that the suffering of the few survivors of the Berlin-Marzahn detention camp was only recognised in a few rare cases. Commemorative initiatives, such as those proposed by the civil rights activist and writer Reimar Gilsenbach (1925–2001) in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) as early as the 1960s, only gradually began to take shape from the end of the 1980s. On 29 June 1986, the first memorial event organised by the Protestant Church took place not far from the former camp site. On 12 September of that year, the first memorial stone commemorating the detention camp was unveiled at the Marzahn cemetery as part of an event that was not made public. The inscription read: ‘From May 1936 until the liberation of our people by the glorious Soviet army, hundreds of Sinti and their families suffered in a detention camp not far from this site. Honour to the victims.’
Working with Reimar Gilsenbach, the survivor and then chairman of the newly founded Cinti Union Berlin (today: Landesverband Deutscher Sinti und Roma Berlin-Brandenburg), Otto Rosenberg (1927–2001), arranged for an additional marble plaque to be laid on 16 June 1990. Its inscription reads: ‘To the Berlin Sinti who suffered in the Marzahn Gypsy camp and died in Auschwitz. May 1936 – May 1945, Atschen Devleha [Romanes: Stay with God].’ Since 1991, a copper plaque has completed the memorial ensemble in the Marzahn cemetery. It reads: ‘In the run-up to the 1936 Olympic Games, the Nazis set up a “Gypsy rest area” on a former sewage f north of this cemetery, where hundreds of Sinti and Roma were forced to live. Crammed together in gloomy barracks, the camp inhabitants eked out a miserable existence. Hard labour, illness and hunger claimed their victims. People were arbitrarily deported and arrested. Humiliating “racial hygiene examinations” spread fear and terror. In the spring of 1943, most of those “arrested” were deported to Auschwitz. Men and women, old people and children. Only a few survived.’
In 2007, a square and a street on the site of the former Nazi detention camp were named after Otto Rosenberg. In 2011, on the initiative of the Landesverband Deutscher Sinti und Roma Berlin-Brandenburg e.V., a ‘place of remembrance and information’ was created.
