"No reputable historian can to-day deny that the Nazis intended to exterminate all Roma and Jews completely" claimed Simon Wiesenthal during the III Roma Conference, held in Göttingen in May 1981. This plan of annihilation, interrupted only by the very collapse of the Third Reich, was concentrated mostly in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, home then as now to ¾ of Europe's Roma. Several sources from the Nazi era give a clear description of the National Socialists' intentions towards Eastern Europe's Roma. Fritz Ruhland wrote in 1942 for Austria's Volkspolzeilich Monatlich (a "race related" publication) about the "solution" to the "Gypsy question in the south-east" : "Removing this impediment is an absolute must... To start thinking racially, to start seeing Jews as well as Gypsies not only as a parasite on the living tree of the practical-minded, native race, but more as a foreign body in their own blood". Ruhland maintained that the "racial mind-set" must take priority over every other consideration.

In 1942, Ctibor Pokorny, a Nazi supporter in Slovakia, described the rounding up of Slovak Roma into labour camps - this is long after the Nazi state had started on the "final solution to the Jewish question". In a Slovak paper he claimed that " the Gypsy question must, like the Jewish question, have a final, definitive solution". Ritter's best-known employee, Eva Justin, claimed, after having studied Eastern European Roma

immigrants to Germany that "the impression some make is obviously Jewish, due not only to their Middle-Eastern-to -Oriental appearance but also due to their gesticulation and their shameless merchant ways".

The number of Roma victims of the Nazi regime in this area is still difficult to ascertain and thus cause for continuing debate. Kenrick is certain that official 238,000 Roma were murdered in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. He nonetheless points out the fact that no-one has yet considered the number of people murdered by Einsatzgruppen, mobile units, or during torture in the Balkan area and so the number of victims is probably higher. Almost all Roma in Estonia and Lithuania are thought to have died. Roma in eastern Latvia starved in their hundreds after being barricaded into the synagogue at Ludza. In 1942, one third of Latvian Roma (1,500-2,000) were massacred by Nazi forces. It is thought that only half of Latvia's Roma population survived.

After the occupation of at first the Sudetenland and then of Czech-speaking Bohemia and Moravia, numerous Roma fled to Slovakia. Those remaining in their homeland were send to one of two camps, set up in August 1942: 6,000 were registered, of whom hardly any survived. 3,500 were murdered in Auschwitz. Neighbouring Fascist-ruled Slovakia initiated a brutal repression, expelling Roma from their villages and herding them into labour camps, but without systematically killing them. Pogroms initiated by Slovak and Czech fascists did however lead to the deaths of 3,000. In Hungary, the murder of Roma began, as did that of Jews, only after German forces took control of power in May 1944: Hungarian and German units deported 31,000 Roma, of whom only 3,000 were to return. One year previously, in 1943, the Nazi Roma specialist, Arthur Kornhuber, claimed that Jewish business people were in part responsible for spreading Roma throughout Hungary and "Jewish money makers" had encouraged "the gypsy ideal to be encouraged".

Romania's fascist government under Antonescu restricted its anti-Roma activities to expelling them from areas of east Ukrainian Bessarabia occupied by Romanian troops. Fascist papers like Eroica maintained that the "Gypsy question" was of the "same importance as the Jewish question". After the war, a commission estimated that 36,000 Roma died as a result of Romanian actions in Bessarabia.

The severest persecution of Roma occurred in Croatia under the Fascist Ustascha. One of the most notorious concentration camps was Jasenovac, where upto 24,000 Serb, Jewish and Roma children were interned. Of Croatia's 28,000-strong Roma population before the war, few were to survive the Ustascha's massacres. After the occupation of Serbia, the military ordered that all Serb Roma were to register themselves and wear yellow armbands to show who they were. On streets and in businesses there were signs "Jews and Gypsies prohibited". On May 30th 1941 the German commander Bohme released an order, paragraph 18 of which read that "Gypsies are to be handled like Jews". Often, as reprisals for attacks by the "resistance", Jewish and Roma internees were shot. Kenrick quotes one German commander by the name of Walther, responsible for executions: "Shooting Jews is a lot easier than shooting Gypsies. One has to admit that Jews face death calmly - they stand very quietly - while Gypsies cry and shriek and are constantly writhing about when brought for shooting. Some even jumped into the pit in front of the place of execution before the shots were fired, and they tried to pass themselves off for dead". Mobile gas chambers, brought specially from Germany to the Serbian concentration camp of Zemun, were used to gas Roma women and children. In Macedonia and Kosovo, inhabited by Albanians, the policy of extermination was not implemented against the mostly Muslim Roma thanks to the intervention of Muslim worthies.

Macedonia was occupied by Bulgarian troops allied with the Third Reich, but as in Bulgaria itself there was no interest in Nazi-inspired extermination. Roma and Jews alike remained untouched. It appears that the persecution of Roma in occupied Greece was also avoided even though the entire Jewish population of Thessalonika was deported.

Poland had been the destination of 3,000 deported and Sinti as early as 1940. In areas such as Warsaw and Ostro-Masowiecki, Roma were ordered into ghettos from 1942 onwards. Many Roma communities fell victim to massacres perpetuated by Polish and Ukrainian fascists: 3,000 to 4,000 Roma were shot in Volhynia alone. Scores of others were transported to Auschwitz, Belsen, Chelmno, Maidanek and Treblinka.

The annihilation of Polish Roma, concentrated mostly in ghettos, began in September 1944. Kenrick estimates the number of victims in Poland to be around 35,000; in the USSR 30,000. Most of the death in the Soviet Union were the work of mobile Einsatzgruppen, roving squads specially used for the liquidation of Jews, Roma and "politically undesirable elements". During the Nuremberg trials the leader of Einsatzgruppe D, one Otto Ohlendorf, justified the murder of Roma with reference to their spying, quoting from Ricarda Huch and Friedrich Schiller's descriptions of the Thirty Years' War. An as-yet unknown number of Ukrainian Roma were murdered along with Jewish detainees in Babi Jar: "Roma were the victims of the same massive, concentrated annihilation as Jews... People with dark hair and eyes and long noses didn't show themselves in the street if at all possible. Gypsies were brought to Babi Jar in whole convoys, obviously oblivious to their fate until the very end".