Material relating to the persecution of the Gypsies under the Nazis

“Around 1968 Grattan Puxon (Secretary of the Gypsy Council) was asked by Vanko Rouda (Secretary of the Comité International Tsigane) to collect material which might help Gypsies in their reparations claims. At about the same time the Institute for Contemporary History was advertising grants for research into modern history.

The two strands came together and after a meeting at Reading University it was agreed that Grattan Puxon and I would work jointly on collecting material on the Gypsy genocide during the Nazi period.

As a result we prepared a volume of material which is the green-bound volume known as Gypsies Under the Nazis (611/16). One copy of this is in the Wiener Library and the other in Paris with the CIT (now known as the Comite International Rom).

Our work came to the attention of Professor Cohen of the University of Sussex who was editing a series on the Holocaust. It was agreed that we would turn the material we had gathered into a book for the series. This was Destiny of Europe’s Gypsies.

The book had 3 parts:

1) Before the Nazi period. To show that the anti- Gypsy policy did not just suddenly emerge

2) The Nazi period

3) After 1945. This was to show how in many places discrimination continued.

The first draft of the book was completed in 1969 (and there are no bibliographical entries after that year) but not published until 1972. Destiny of Europe’s Gypsies came out simultaneously in the US with a different cover and was translated along with the other books in the series into French and Italian. The German, Japanese and Romani translations contain some new material. A paperback edition of the French translation came out many years later. A revised Romani translation with illustrations also appeared some years afterwards.

Gypsies Under the Swastika is a revised edition of Destiny of Europe’s Gypsies intended for the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II and published in 1995. The first part of Destiny was shortened and the third part dropped completely. The notes and references were also dropped but some illustrations were added. It has been translated into French, Spanish, Portuguese, Bulgarian and Czech (with some new material).”