With regards their fate, Jews and Roma are related: they are the two peoples who have lived in Europe for centuries without a country of their own, scattered, discriminated against because of their otherness, continually expelled and in search of geographical and economic niches in which to survive.

Modern society offers legal equality only to those ready to conform, leading many to experience problems with an integration that costs them their own identity and traditions. Both peoples were "relieved" of this problem by the Nazis, who claimed otherness was determined by race, by means of the final solution, physical annihilation.

The murder of several thousand Roma during the Nazi era - the extermination of Europe's Roma being the second largest Nazi genocide - remained a political taboo until 1979, 34 years after the collapse of the Third Reich. This silence not only enabled discrimination to continue in Germany after 1945, but it also hindered the distribution of material compensation to the Nazis' surviving victims.

German philosopher Ernst Tugendhat has asked the question about why discussion of the past in Germany concentrated so much on the fate of Jews in the Third Reich, allowing the fate of Roma to be easily overlooked: after all, the racist theories of Nazi anthropologists were hardly less noticeable than their 500,000 victims. Adolph Würth, a Nazi anthropologist living in Stuttgart, wrote in 1938: "the Gypsy question is to-day a racial question above all else. The Roma question if to be handled basically the way in which the national socialist state has solved the Jewish question. A start has already been made. According to the Nuremberg Laws, Jews and Romanis are on the same level with regards proscription of marriage. They are thus held to be neither of German blood nor related to German blood".

Although hundreds of book have been written since 1945 about the Third Reich and its crimes, the genocide of Roma has until to-day remained a research blind spot. German legal and social sciences have obviously failed us here. It is with justice that Tugenthal maintained that this decades-long denial, this deliberate forgetfulness by the media, the sciences and by politics comes as a result of the "international pressure exerted on the Federal Republic on behalf of Jews, but not on behalf of Roma". Roma lack both an international and a national lobby: organised into large extended families and with a largely unwritten culture, it was not until the late Seventies that they managed to establish a civil rights movement, letting their interests be publicly known and generating awareness of the Nazis' genocide.