Kenrick and Puxon are the only authors who have so far written in full about the persecution of Sinti and Roma under the Nazis, and the assume that virtually all of the Third Reich's camps had Roma internees. They were transported to Auschwitz from every corner of Germany and Europe. The authors place the number of inmates in the "Gypsy camp" at about 20,570, but overlook the thousands of others held at other camps in the Auschwitz complex as well as, for example, those 1,700 murdered instantly upon their arrival at Auschwitz in March 1943. Almost 11,700 of the prisoners at the "Gypsy camp" dies of exhaustion and illness; 1,000 were gassed on May 25th 1943, as were a further 4,000 in August 1944.

Several thousand were interned at Bergen-Belsen: only a few survived, those dying between 1943 and 1945 were first and foremost children. 1,000 men and boys were transported to Buchenwald as early as June 1938; in Autumn 1939, 1,400 Roma from Burgenland arrived from Dachau and were later moved to Bergen-Belsen. Chelmno in Poland is thought to have seen the death of 5,000 Polish Roma, most of whom came from the ghetto of Lódz. An unknown number of Roma starved to death in Maidanek. One of the few lists of names to have appeared from Mauthausen contains the names of 157 Roma. The deaths of at least 1,000 is known at the extermination camp of Treblinka.

There has so far been no systematic study made of the fate of Roma in the camps, partly due to the lack of interest on the part of the academics and partly due to the lack of financial support for such an undertaking. This means that even to-day our understanding of what happened is still patchy and inadequate.

The consequence of this is that the number of victims is still unknown, though Kenrick is certain of at least 277,000 deaths without seeing the usually-quoted figure of 500,000 as unrealistic. Between 40 and 75% of German Roma and Sinti, and more than half of Austria's Roma and Sinti, died in the camps. It is a typical ploy of far-right groups, as well as others, to hold up the huge discrepancies in various calculations of the number of Roma living in eastern and south-eastern Europe as proof of how impossible it is to guess how many died during the war, a "fact" compounded by the inadequate population estimates of the pre-war period. Such sophistry need not be taken seriously.

Medical experiments also claimed a substantial number of Roma victims. Mengele experimented on Roma twins in Auschwitz; men and women were sterilised in Ravensbrück, 120 - 140 girls being sterilised by the SS doctor Clauberg in 1945; Horst Schumann sterilised Roma in Auschwitz with x-rays and undertook the sterilisation of Sinti in Pomeranian Stettin (Sczcezín) as well as elsewhere. Roma and Jewish inmates of the camp at Natweiler were infected with typhus; inmates in Dachau were injected with saline solutions and forced to drink sea-water. In Sachsenwld there were experiments with mustard gas; internees in Buchenwald were again infected with typhus and subjected to shocks via extreme temperatures. Mengele also injected Roma prisoners at Auschwitz with phenolin. Countless victims of these experiments died or suffered life-long damage

for which they have generally never received compensation of any sort; it happened often enough that old-age pensions were denied them. The sterilisations recommended by Ritter, Justin and others started at various locations; this programme never reached its logical conclusion sue on one hand to the war itself and on the other hand due to the overriding importance attached to the eventual "final solution" for all Roma.

That planned genocide of Europe's Roma was a very real part of the Nazi intentions is something which is to-day never questioned. Only the work emanating from Gießen has been made public with incorrect assumptions, errors often used by the far-right media to support their own arguments. According to Bernhard Streck, involved in the Gießen studies, there had been no plan for the elimination of all Roma in the years 1933 - 1945. The thesis "of the so-called "second genocide" was, claimed Streck, the work of the "newly-founded union of German Sinti". Furthermore, this so-called "second genocide" is meant to have been used by the mass-media to "relativise the sheer uniqueness of the murder of Jews", albeit "less an act of conscious manipulation" as a "way to possibly lighten the burden". Again, "Gypsies" were killed for "hygiene" reasons, due to "sheer statistical needs in the camps", for being "work shy", for "sociopolitical reasons". After a stormy debate in the quarterly Tribüne, in which Joachim Hohmann took part as one of those who had studied the persecution of Roma, Streck did not re-expound his uncomprehending thesis in the subsequent publication from Gießen and wrote only about the genocide ended by the collapse of the Third Reich.

The dominant academic views on the Nazi's extermination of Roma also comes up against examples of Germans' solidarity with German Roma. An example is the Dambrowski family in East Prussia. Like many Sinti in the province they were well-integrated as smallholders and horse-dealers, and they were rescued from Bialystok camp by farmers from their village. After they fled in 1945 they settled in Ostfriesland and still live there to-day.