Assignment 5: Nature vs. Nurture and Eugenics: The Roma Holocaust

In the discussion of the nature vs. nurture debate in our textbook, the author suggests that a reason that the balance seemed to shift in favor of nurture during the decades immediately following World War II was in part a reaction to the Nazis’ use of eugenics to justify its medical experimentation and death camps targeting populations they deemed inferior.  Newman suggests that because Nazi eugenics made Americans want to distance themselves as much as possible from such an extreme use of  “nature,”  “nurture” became the favored primary influence on the development of a person’s “self.”

The idea behind the Nazi’s development of eugenics was to “purify” the gene pool from groups the Nazis considered undesirable.  Although the primary target of Nazi  eugenics was the Jews, a slide show entitled “Non-Jewish Victims of the Holocaust:  Enemies of the State” put together by Timothy Hensley, Research Librarian of the Virginia Holocaust Museum,  provides a good overview of the use of eugenics by the Nazi regime beyond the 6 million Jewish victims that have been well documented.  It also explains how the “junk science” of eugenics, or “race science” was used to justify genocide of several groups.

You can see this informative slide show by clicking here: http://www.slideshare.net/timothyhensley/enemies-of-the-state

The horrible toll that the Holocaust took on over 6 million European  Jews  is well-known.  It is important to remember, however, that the Holocaust targeted other populations too.  One was my ethnic group:  the Roma.  The Roma are commonly called Gypsy, but to many, that term is considered pejorative.  Like the Jews, the Gypsies were rounded up by the Nazis and sent to the death camps.  The Gypsies were especially targeted during periodic events called “Gypsy Clean-up Weeks.” 

There was an element of “nurture” in the Nazi rationale for rounding up the Gypsies and sending them to their death: Nazi propaganda of the time described the Gypsies to be work-shy,  nationless,  and a drain on Germany’s national resources.  But the Nazis’ primary justification for the Gypsy genocide was pure “nature.” The slogan the Nazis used to promote these events was, “Bad genes enter a village.” The Nazis’ unmistakable  message was that Gypsies are genetically inferior and undesirable, and they must be eliminated, or at least sterilized, before their genes pollute the general population. 

To determine who was a Gypsy and who was not, the Nazis used pocket-sized hair sample swatches and facial measuring devices.  If your hair matched one of the swatches, or if your head/face measurements fit certain dimensions, you met the definition of “Gypsy” and were sent to the concentration camp.  Slide #13 from the “Enemies of the State” link provided above includes a picture of the hair samples and facial measurement devices used for Gypsy Round-up Weeks.  I saw examples of both of these devices in the permanent Holocaust Exhibit at the Imperial War Museum in London a few years ago.  I found myself bending over the museum case to compare my own hair to the swatches bound together like a sort of decorator’s paint chip fan.  My blood ran cold as I realized that my hair was a perfect match, so I would have been rounded up!

It is not known, except from records kept by the perpetrators of these awful crimes themselves, exactly how many Roma from Germany and other countries occupied by the Nazis met their end in the death camps.   Unlike the Jewish victims, the Roma were (and remain today) largely uneducated.  Most are illiterate.  Although they care deeply about their families, family records then and now are more a matter of word of mouth in many Roma villages and traveling groups than a matter of written records.  By one estimate, 250,000 Roma and Sinti (another Gypsy group), died in Nazi death camps. That number is probably too low.  By another estimate, about 25% of the European Roma and Sinti population died in the Holocaust.

You can watch a moving video of pictures of the Roma Holocaust here:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1d1t2lh-Hk&noredirect=1

While many Roma Holocaust victims were from Germany, many were from other European countries including my birth country of Romania.  It is likely that I lost biological relatives in this awful way, but I will never know for sure.

            Since the end of WWII, the European Gypsies continue to be a persecuted ethnic group.  The Nazi’s used of eugenics to justify genocide of the Gypsies. Today, however, the reasons for discrimination against this group are related more to environmental factors. In 2010, the French government deported over 8,000 Roma who had come to France from Romania to seek work.  The French government said it was sending these people back to Romania because their camps were sources of illegal trafficking and exploitation of children for begging, of prostitution and crime. An account of this incident can be found here:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-11020429   Human rights groups, the United Nations, and the European Union all condemned France’s actions as reminiscent of the racism not seen in Europe since WWI.  But this time, the justification was nurture. 

              Is this progress?  Prejudice is prejudice, no matter what social construction is used to rationalize it or what government tries to do so.