In Kiel, a city on the Baltic Sea, Germany, Sinti and Roma lived as itinerant tradesmen, craftsmen, musicians and workers. Before 1933, they seem to have lived all over the city. From the mid-1930s onwards, there is evidence of only three residential locations; these were supervised pitches located south of Kieler Hörn in the Gaarden and Kronsburg districts. The vast majority of Sinti and Roma were forced to live in these places, which resembled detention camps.
The largest site, with around 80 residents living in caravans, was located behind Alte Lübecker Chaussee 11a, between a gasometer and railway tracks. At Alte Lübecker Chaussee 57, a building site next to a fishmeal factory, 21 people were detained in caravans. The third detention site was the municipal homeless shelter at Preetzer Straße 117–119, where 24 Sinti and Roma were detained. The police also recorded people living in flats on the west bank of Kiel as ‘Gypsies’ in a special list.
Sources and State of Research
For the period of National Socialism and before, the records for Kiel are fragmentary, and many of the available sources—files from the city administration and the police—only reflect the perpetrators’ perspective. In contrast, the Schleswig-Holstein State Archives hold files on claims for compensation by Sinti and Roma. These are supplemented by interviews from the 1990s (Lower Saxony State Agency for Civic Education). Many newspaper articles are also available for the period after 1945. Research into the persecution of the Kiel Sinti and Roma has made progress in recent years, but there are gaps in several areas, for example with regard to the local groups of perpetrators, continuities in police and municipal staff after 1945 and the everyday lives and survival strategies of the persecuted Sinti and Roma.
Commissioning, Management and Monitoring of Detention Sites
All three detention sites were under municipal administration. Homeless Sinti and Roma were stigmatised as ‘asocial’ by the city administration and sent to the municipal homeless shelter at Preetzer Chaussee 117-119. This had been built in 1937 in Gaarden-Süd on a city-owned site. It was located on the city boundary, next to a railway line and surrounded by allotment gardens. There had already been a poorhouse on the same site at the turn of the century. The shelter for the homeless consisted of 90 simple accommodations, known as ‘bunks’, and was fenced in. The building was not equipped with plumbing or sanitary facilities, which emphasised its prison-like character.1 Stadtarchiv Kiel, Sitzungen der Gemeinderäte 1938, II 48, Bl. 475. The residents of the homeless shelter included 24 Sinti—adults and children.
The camp administrator was cavalry major Otto von Reckowsky (1895–1981), a member of the NSDAP and block leader. He had a service weapon and a police dog2 Ibid., 32614, Stellenbesetzung bei der Gemeindevollzugspolizei und der Feld- und Forstpolizei; 72039, Personalangelegenheiten der Polizeiverwaltung. and moved into his official flat in an apartment block on the camp grounds, where some tradesmen also lived.3 Adressbuch 1938, Preetzer Chaussee 117–119. Reckowsky’s duties included monitoring the inmates and ensuring that the children attended school regularly.4 Stadtarchiv Kiel, 52979, Amt für Schulwesen, pp. 159, 179.
The detention sites at Alte Lübecker Chaussee 11a and 57 were continuously monitored by the criminal investigation department. Little is known about the topography of the two forced sites. A photograph published in a 1936 work of racial anthropology5 Cf. Block, Zigeuner, Figure 36. shows a square photographed from a bird’s eye view. There are caravans standing close together and it is surrounded on all sides by high walls and wooden fences. People are moving around the square. A wooden gate can be seen in the background, blocking the passage to a courtyard. A street can be seen behind it. The street could be Alte Lübecker Chaussee and the courtyard could be house number 11a. The photography may have been taken from the gasometer.
Registration and Deportation
The mayor of Kiel and NSDAP district leader Walter Behrens (1889–1977) reported to Council of German Municipalities (Deutscher Gemeindetag) in November 1938 about ‘Gypsies’ in his city and enquired about legal regulations, as the city needed the detention sites on the Alte Lübecker Chaussee for other purposes.6 Bundesarchiv Berlin, Rep_142-07_DGT_1-10-1-23, Letter of Mayor of Kiel to the Council of Municipalities, 29/11/1938. No legal regulations were passed, but a short time later Heinrich Himmler (1900–1945) announced measures in his circular decree of December 1938 with which the ‘Gypsy question’ was to be tackled centrally and ‘on the basis of their racial character’. A key component of these measures was the nationwide police and racial-biological registration of all Sinti and Roma. For Kiel, a registration by employees of the Racial Hygiene Research Unit (RHF) led by Robert Ritter (1901–1951) is documented: The ‘Gypsy lists’ compiled by the Kiel local police authority in 1939 show detailed personal information and a reference to ‘expert statements’ by the RHF.7 Stadtarchiv Kiel, 66679, Namensverzeichnis zigeunerischer Personen im Ortspolizeibezirk Kiel; Ibid., 66680, Namensverzeichnis der zigeunerisch begutachten und—für Lübeck—in das Generalgouvernement abgeschobenen zigeunerischen Personen aus Kiel und Lübeck (Abschrift). The lists contain the personal details of 163 people or 37 households and families; 125 people lived on the three forced sites and 38 people lived in flats. The lists were compiled in preparation for the Reich-wide May deportation, which began in Kiel early in the morning of 16 May 1940. The police surrounded the three detention sites and transported all Sinti and Roma without exception to Fruchtschuppen C, a rail freight warehouse at the Hanoverscher Bahnhof in Hamburg. Their property, such as caravans, was in all likelihood seized and confiscated in favour of the Reich. From Hamburg, the Kiel Sinti and Roma were deported together with other northern German Sinti and Roma to the Belzec camp in the General Government and from there to other camps and ghettos.
The survivor Sintiza Elsa Krause (1913–1982) reports that the SS (Schutzstaffel) took her and her family back to Reich territory in 1944. There they were imprisoned in the Höherweg camp in Düsseldorf and—in the face of the Allied advance—taken to the Preetzer Straße detention site in Kiel, which they were not allowed to leave.8 Landesarchiv Schleswig, Abt. 761, No. 12562. In April 1944, Sinti and Roma who were not living in the detention sites and had been spared in 1940 were deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp.9 Ibid., No. 26399.
After 1945
Probably a third of Kiel’s Sinti and Roma survived the genocide and returned to a city that had been largely destroyed and was overcrowded with refugees. Although they were not initially recognised as victims of National Socialism, some of the survivors fought for compensation payments in the 1950s under the Schleswig-Holstein Compensation Act and in the 1960s under the Federal Compensation Act.
However, these positive cases must be contrasted with the continuity of repression: The police continued to use the deportation list from 1940, noting the returning Sinti and Roma with crosses and marking them with a red ‘Z’ in the municipal household registers.10 Archiv des Kieler Einwohnermeldeamtes, Zigeunerlager Preetzer Str. 119, Hausstandsbücher 2a und b. The municipal administration refused them the free choice of housing and in 1946 assigned them to the Preetzer Straße 117–119 homeless shelter. The administrator was still the same officer as before 1945 and he continued to apply his old management methods on instructions from the Public Order Office. Complaints from individual residents against his continued deployment remained unsuccessful. The living conditions in the homeless shelter were inhumane; the residents lived without sanitary facilities and running water in the few remaining intact rooms or in old buses and caravans.
As the city council considered the homeless shelter to be an eyesore, a new shelter was to be built in the early 1960s, consisting of old railway carriages and modelled on the campsite in Cologne. A hollow on the Langsee lake in the Elmschenhagen district was chosen as the site. The opaque planning procedure led to protests among local residents, who rejected having the site in their neighbourhood, as well as among the residents of the homeless shelter, who complained that they had had no say in the matter and wanted the shelter to be repaired and renovated instead. In October 1964, however, the buildings on Preetzer Straße were demolished and the forced relocation took place. By contrast with previous arrangements, only Sinti and Roma lived in the new accommodation on Rundweg. The strict geometric arrangement of the railway wagons, the large lampposts, the lack of sanitary facilities and an earth wall that shielded the site reminded many of them of a concentration camp.
From 1974, the families were able to rent single-family homes in various neighbourhoods in Kiel. At the beginning of 1995, the last two families left the accommodation on Rundweg, which was subsequently demolished. Due to the continuing difficult housing conditions, the Schleswig-Holstein Association of German Sinti and Roma initiated the ‘Maro Temm’ (Romanes for ‘Our Place’) housing project for Sinti and Roma in 1999. It was financed by the state of Schleswig-Holstein and the city of Kiel, among others. The housing estate was completed in Kiel-Gaarden on 19 December 2007.
Commemorative Initiatives
In 1979, the ‘Verein zur Durchsetzung der Rechte der Sinti’ (Association for the Enforcement of Sinti Rights) was founded in Kiel by the Sinto Matthäus Weiß (born 1949), whose parents had survived the concentration camp, and non-Sinti. The aim was to draw attention to the Nazi genocide and ongoing racism. This initiative led to the founding of the State Association of German Sinti and Roma in 1989, which played a key role in the inclusion of the German Sinti and Roma as a national minority in the state constitution of Schleswig-Holstein on 14 November 2012. The state association saw this as moral reparation for the survivors of the concentration camps.
In May 1997, a memorial stone was dedicated in Hiroshima Park for the Sinti and Roma deported from Schleswig-Holstein in 1940; a commemorative event is held there every year. Since 2021, a travelling exhibition organised by the State Association has been presenting the more than 600-year history of the minority in Schleswig-Holstein from the perspective of the Sinti and Roma. In addition, an exhibition on the National Socialist crime scene at Preetzer Straße 117–119 is to be opened at the Centre for the History of Kiel in the 20th Century in 2025.
