Скачать или смотреть Dealing with the Genocide after 1945 – Perpetrators, Compensation, and Memory (Lecture 2)

This lecture examines how the Federal Republic of Germany addressed — or failed to adequately address — the genocide of German Sinti and Roma after 1945.

The focus lies on the continuity of personnel and structures from the Nazi period within police, judiciary, and administration; on discriminatory compensation procedures; on the near-complete absence of legal consequences for perpetrators; and on the late emergence of a public memory culture. The lecture shows how former Nazi police officers served as “experts” in compensation cases, producing assessments that criminalized survivors once again; how courts dismissed testimonies of Sinti and Roma as unreliable; and why many survivors waited decades for compensation they were legally entitled to—or never received it at all.

It also discusses the rise of the Sinti and Roma civil rights movement in the 1970s, the hunger strikes and memorial protests in Dachau and Bergen-Belsen, the landmark recognition of the genocide in 1982 by Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, and the gradual development of local memorials beginning in the 1990s. The lecture demonstrates that the “second persecution” after 1945 consisted not only of overt injustice but also of silence, bureaucratic obstruction, denial, and political resistance. Memory culture, therefore, is not mere commemoration—it is a mandate to confront structural antigypsyism and to counter it.

Keywords:

genocide of Sinti and Roma, post-1945 Germany, second persecution, compensation procedures, antigypsyism, police and judicial continuity, Federal Republic of Germany, memory culture, civil rights movement, Helmut Schmidt recognition

Hashtags:

#Sinti #Roma #Antigypsyism #Genocide #NSCrimes #Compensation #MemoryCulture #ContemporaryHistory #HumanRights #Germany