The Swiss Confederation, a democratic federal state comprising at the time 25 cantons, was one of the neutral states during World War II. Nevertheless, Swiss policy had a considerable impact on the lives of many Sinti and Roma, particularly because of firmness with which it closed its doors to people fleeing Nazi persecution.
Policies against ‘Gypsies’ before 1930
The presence of the ancestors of today’s Sinti and Roma is documented for the territory of present-day Switzerland as early as 1422. At the same time, Switzerland was the first Western European country in which they were banned from stopping or settling and expelled as early as 1471. The ban on entry and residence formally lasted until 1972. As these bans were directed exclusively against ‘travellers’, many families were nevertheless able to settle in Switzerland.
The modern Swiss state, founded in 1848, introduced a new form of citizenship: One had to prove Heimatrecht, or right of domicile, in a municipality in order to obtain citizenship rights in a canton and thus also in Switzerland. As municipalities had withdrawn or denied this right to people for various reasons over the centuries, there were a considerable number of stateless Swiss, and not just among ‘vagrants’ or ‘travellers’. With the Stateless Persons Act of 1850, the federal government attempted to naturalise these people against the will of the cantons and municipalities. At the same time, the law prohibited a ‘travelling way of life’. Article 18 of the law provided for arrest or forced labour for ‘vagrants and beggars roaming around without employment’.1Bundesgesetz die Heimatlosigkeit betreffend [Stateless Persons Act], 3 December 1850, Swiss Federal Gazette. Volume II, Vol. III, No. 62, 913–921. These practices with regard to Swiss citizenship had some dramatic consequences for those affected during the Nazi era.
Swiss ‘Gypsy policy’ was tightened even further before World War I. In 1906, the Federal Council issued a ‘border ban’ on foreign ‘Gypsies’. To enforce this, Edward Leupold (1855–1932), who was working in the Federal Police and Justice Department at the time, developed a procedure in close collaboration with cantonal police forces whereby foreign ‘Gypsies’ were immediately registered, interned and expelled from Switzerland. Men were mostly interned in the Witzwil penal workhouse in the canton of Bern, while women and children were generally sent to cantonal and private institutions for the homeless.
Another specifically Swiss measure introduced in the 1920s should be mentioned because it shows the rigour with which action was taken against ‘travellers’, although it almost exclusively affected Yenish People from German-speaking countries. The foundation Pro Juventute (Latin for ‘for the youth’), which was opened in 1912 and was close to the eugenics movement, established the Hilfswerk Kinder der Landstrasse (Aid Organisation for the Children of the Road) in 1926. The aim of the Hilfswerk was to bring the ‘travelling’ way of life to an end and break up large ‘vagrant families’. To this end, it forcibly removed children from Yenish families and placed them in new families or educational institutions. It is not possible to determine exactly how many children were taken away from families before this practice ended in 1972. A historical study documents 619 cases.2Leimgruber et al., Das Hilfswerk, 45–59.
Eugenic and Police Discourses and Measures
In the transition from the 19th to the 20th century, ‘Gypsy’ ceased to be simply the signifier of a ‘travelling’ way of life and became a category in a racist taxonomy. The eugenics movement had a significant influence on this. Eugenics was widely accepted in Swiss academic and medical circles and was supported by many intellectuals and politicians. Prominent Swiss researchers and scientists such as Auguste Forel (1848–1931), Eugen Bleuler (1857–1939) and Ernst Rüdin (1874–1952) were in favour of eugenic measures as an instrument for the ‘improvement’ of the human ‘race’ by means of selective breeding. Josef Jörger’s (1860–1933) research on Yenish People influenced the later work of Robert Ritter (1901–1951). Under the influence of eugenics, Article 97 of the new Civil Code of 1912 introduced marriage bans on grounds of ‘incapacity of judgement’ or ‘mental illness’, among other things. Forel and Bleuler had patients sterilised on psychiatric and eugenic grounds. This practice was adopted in many cantons and continued in individual cases until the 1990s.
Swiss officials were also heavily involved in the establishment of a European system of ‘combating Gypsies’, which aimed at an international, centralised registration of and coordinated measures against Sinti and Roma. In 1923, Switzerland was one of the founding members of the International Criminal Police Commission (ICPC) and in 1931 suggested the establishment of a ‘Gypsy Centre’. When the headquarters of the ICPC were to be transferred from Austria to Switzerland in 1938, the Swiss Confederation refused. However, Swiss delegates continued to collaborate, even when the ICPC moved to Berlin and came under the control of the head of the Reich Security Main Office, SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich (1904–1942).3Huonker, Roma, Sinti, Jenische, 60–75.
In the 1930s, no laws were passed in Switzerland that were aimed solely at ‘Gypsies’. However, existing laws were used specifically against all persons labelled as ‘Gypsy’: against alleged ‘itinerant work-shy’, ‘inferior’, ‘asocial’ or ‘criminal’ individuals. In addition, at the beginning of the 1920s, Switzerland had already mobilised all means at its disposal to deal the alleged ‘Gypsy problem’: Registration and expulsion of foreign ‘Gypsies’, coercive measures like those of the Hilfswerk Kinder der Landstrasse, psychiatric internment, forced sterilisation or imprisonment. There was no uniform application of these measures within Switzerland, as many French-speaking cantons were generally less strict towards local ‘travellers’.
Entry Bans and Expulsions
From the Swiss point of view, the movement of refugees from Germany that began in 1933 with the National Socialist seizure of power did not call for any changes in practice towards Sinti and Roma and Yenish People. The ‘border closure’ continued to apply to foreign ‘Gypsies’: they were not allowed to enter Switzerland and could be deported at any time. In practice, however, attempts were also made to find ways and means to expel Swiss ‘Gypsies’ or prevent them from entering the country, for example by not recognising their citizenship, not registering their children in their passports or by taking away the Swiss citizenship of women who married foreigners.
Establishing how many people were refused entry at the Swiss border and how many were deported would call for more research in regional and local police archives than has been carried out to date. The example of the canton of Geneva, where more than 23,000 people were checked and turned away at the border from the summer of 1942 until the end of the war, shows that the number was probably high. In the case of the canton of Ticino, it is estimated that 24,000 refugees were turned back at or near the border. The number is most likely higher because files were only created if people had managed to enter Switzerland and stay for some time, or if they were detained. The reasons for the deportations were generally not documented.
Several cases of expulsions and deportations of Sinti and Roma are known. One prominent example is the musician Jean ‘Django’ Reinhardt (1910–1953), who was refused entry at the border near Geneva on 24 November 1943. The reason why he was not allowed to enter the country is not recorded in the files. The story of Anton Reinhardt (1927–1945), a Sinto who swam across the Rhine on 25 August 1944 to reach the Swiss side, is one of the best documented cases. The young man was deported to Alsace on 8 September 1944, although guidelines issued on 12 July 19444Ibid., 123. prohibited the deportation of people whose ‘life and limb’ were threatened. Reinhardt was sent to the Schirmeck-Vorbruck security camp and transferred from there to a satellite camp of the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp. After he managed to escape from there, he was seized by a unit of the German Volkssturm on 30 March 1945 and shot the following day.
The example of the Minster family shows how families were shunted back and forth between different countries for years without legally secure status, causing them great hardship during the Nazi era.5Huonker and Ludi. Roma, Sinti und Jenische, 37–41, 51–57. Carlo Minster (1896–1974), the father, was born in Chur but had already lived in Italy before World War I. Italy expelled the family in the mid-1920s, and it took some years for them to achieve a level of tolerated security in Switzerland. But the cantons expelled them again. In 1937, a son-in-law and a daughter-in-law, both of French nationality, were expelled, followed a year later by the Minsters themselves. Shortly after the start of the war, Carlo Minster managed to return to Switzerland, where he finally received a residence permit from a municipality in Valais. However, from then on he was treated as a refugee and interned. Not all family members were able to return to Switzerland; the whereabouts of the French daughter-in-law and her children are unknown. Nevertheless, most of the family members were lucky. Other Sinti were deported and it is not known what happened to many of them. There are often only vague references, as in the report by the Swiss nurse Friedel Bohny-Reiter (1912–2001) about Swiss German-speaking Sinti in the French camp Rivesaltes.6Bohny-Reiter, Vorhof der Vernichtung, 53 and 125.
Refusal to Help despite Knowledge of the Genocide
It must be assumed that Swiss authorities were well informed about the National Socialist persecution of Sinti and Roma. For example, the German consul in Cologne, Franz Rudolph von Weiss (1885–1960), reported the deportation of ‘Gypsies’ to occupied Poland just a few days after the May Deportation, on 27 May 1940.7Huonker and Ludi, Roma, Sinti und Jenische, 68. Other reports from private individuals or the Swiss military doctors and nurses who marched into the Soviet Union with the Wehrmacht in 1941 were also known to the authorities.8Cf. Busch et al., Schweizer Ärztemissionen, 2002. Gerhart M. Riegner (1911–2001), a German lawyer who had fled to Switzerland and become secretary for legal affairs at the World Jewish Congress in Geneva, wrote reports on the Holocaust as early as October 1941.9Breitman, Official Secrets, 100. Swiss authorities repeatedly tried to suppress the publication of such reports out of political consideration for Germany.10Ibid., 100, 174. In 1942, the Swiss Consulate General in Hamburg was informed by a Swiss private citizen that Sinti and Roma were also victims of the shootings in German-occupied Eastern Europe. It is not known whether and where this report was forwarded or whether it met with a response.11Huonker and Ludi. Roma, Sinti und Jenische, 68.
During the war, Switzerland did little, if anything, for Swiss Sinti and Roma who were arrested in areas under Nazi rule. This is demonstrated by the example of the Sinti and Roma born in Switzerland who were deported from the Westerbork camp in the German-occupied Netherlands to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp on 19 May 1944. These were Elisabeth Berger-Weiss, born in 1894 in Opfikon, and Josephine Georg-Reinhard, born in 1902 in the Frauenthal convent in Hagedorn, who both died in Auschwitz;12Ibid., 113. Joseph Freiwald, born in 1912 in Chalais, who was deported to Auschwitz and liberated in Bergen-Belsen; Berttis Winterstein, born in 1915 in Chalais, who was deported to Auschwitz and survived; Hanny Winterstein, born in Martigny near Naters, who was deported to Auschwitz and survived; Heinrich Weiss, born in Carouge in 1890, who was deported to Bergen-Belsen and died there after his liberation; Katharina Winterstein-Freiwald, born on 1896 in Riedeschingen, who was deported to Auschwitz and died in Ravensbrück concentration camp.13ETH Zurich, AfZ Online Archives, FD KZ-Häftlinge, Forschungsdokumentation Balz Spörri, René Staubli, Benno Tuchschmid, Schweizer KZ-Häftlinge, ca. 1933–2021. Only Franz Basili, born in Lugano in 1911, who was also interned in Westerbork, was not deported.14Huonker, Roma, Sinti, Jenische, 106–118. Thanks to the efforts of the Italian consul, he was able to leave the camp with his relatives, some of whom were in possession of Italian passports.
Although all of the people listed here named a Swiss birthplace when they were sent to Westerbork, current research shows that only Freiwald and Basili were officially documented as Swiss citizens. The other people are either registered as non-Swiss at the civil registry office or not registered at all. In addition to the effects of the ‘Stateless Persons Act’ noted above, this reflects the fact that Swiss women lost their citizenship when they married a foreigner. Children were also often not included in Swiss registers, especially if they were born abroad. In addition, Sinti and Roma couples often did not conclude civil marriages.
Nevertheless, it would have been possible for the Swiss consul in the Netherlands to issue the detainees with Swiss passports and thus secure their release. In the Westerbork camp, around 60 detainees claimed Swiss, Guatemalan or Italian citizenship. As a result, both the Italian and Guatemalan consuls issued corresponding passports, sparing the detainees from further persecution. No action was taken on the Swiss side—on the contrary. Josef Freiwald, whose Swiss citizenship is documented, had already tried in vain to renew his Swiss passport before his arrest in the Netherlands.15Venanz Nobel, message to the author, 27 January 2023. According to current research, there is nothing to suggest that the Swiss consul responsible in the Netherlands in 1944 took any initiative to rescue the detainees.
Continuities after 1945 and Late Reappraisal
Entry and residence bans for people perceived as ‘Gypsies’ continued to apply unchanged until 1972. Because ‘Gypsies’ were still only understood to be ‘travellers’, many Roma nevertheless entered Switzerland as refugees before and after the war and from 1950 onwards as contract workers (‘guest workers’). Following press revelations and the public outcry over the practices of the Hilfswerk der Kinder der Landstrasse, the practice of removing children was stopped and the entry ban for foreign ‘Gypsies’ was lifted. It was not until the beginning of the 21st century that a distinction was made between Yenish People and Sinti and Roma in public perception and policy. In 2017, Switzerland recognised Yenish People, Sinti and Manouches as minorities, but not Roma. The reason given was that they were ‘foreigners’ and had no connection to Switzerland.
It took another scandal for Switzerland’s role during World War II and, in this context, the persecution of Swiss Sinti and Roma to be addressed and the first steps taken to come to terms with it. Swiss banks came under international pressure when it became known that they had appropriated the assets of Holocaust victims on a large scale or had not handed them over to their rightful heirs. The Independent Commission of Experts Switzerland – Second World War (ICE) was founded by parliament and the government in 1996 to investigate this injustice. International pressure increased after a guard at the Swiss bank UBS saved documents from accounts without owners from being destroyed. This forced Switzerland to establish a fund for the compensation of Holocaust victims in 1998. Lump sums of 1,000 Swiss francs were paid out, including to surviving Sinti and Roma.
In 2001, the ICE published a study on ‘Roma, Sinti, and Jenisch. Swiss Policy Regarding Gypsies in the Nazi Period’. One of the conclusions of the authors Thomas Huonker (born 1954) and Regula Ludi (born 1965) was that far more research was needed to understand and document Switzerland’s role. A number of private archives, such as those of banks and lawyers, are not accessible or have not yet been consulted, but the police and cantonal archives also need to be further analysed in this regard. The Archives of Contemporary History at ETH Zurich is planning a central database in which the victims of the Nazi regime for whom there are records in Switzerland will be documented. At the beginning of 2023, the Swiss Federal Council decided to create a central place of remembrance for the victims of the Holocaust in Bern. In 2024, the first two stumbling stones for Sinti and Roma were being planned.
In March 2024, following criticism by the Union des Associations et des Représentants des Nomades Suisses (UARNS) [Union of Swiss Travellers’ Associations and Representatives]and the Radgenossenschaft der Landstrasse of the official handling of the child abductions, the Federal Department of Home Affairs commissioned Prof Dr Oliver Diggelmann (born 1967) (from the Department of International Law, European Law, Public Law and Political Philosophy at the University of Zurich) to prepare a legal opinion. On 19 February 2025, the Federal Council took note of the legal opinion presented in September 2024 on the persecution of the Yenish People and Sinti in Switzerland and acknowledged that ‘the persecution of the Yenish People and Sinti that took place in the context of the “Hilfswerk für die Kinder der Landstrasse” is to be designated as a “crime against humanity” under current international law’.16Cf. https://www.admin.ch/gov/de/start/dokumentation/medienmitteilungen.msg-id-104226.html [accessed: 24/02/2025].
