On 15 September 2022, the Jewish Museum in Berlin will host the commemorative event marking the 70th anniversary of the Luxembourg Agreement – the Reparations Agreement between Israel and the Federal Republic of Germany – that had set the fundamental course for compensation for National Socialist persecution. The agreement was signed on 10 September 1952 between the Federal Republic of Germany, the State of Israel and the Jewish Claims Conference and, together with the conclusion of the London Agreement on German External Debts, was considered a precondition for the state sovereignty of the Federal Republic of Germany.
“While the Luxembourg Agreement rightly began the “reparations” for the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, on the occasion of this 70th anniversary we must at the same time remember that the Sinti and Roma were cheated out of their compensation – to this day, it remains a stain on the post-war history of the Federal Republic of Germany,” said Romani Rose on the occasion of this anniversary.
After the end of the Third Reich, social and especially racist discrimination by state institutions against the minority continued unabated in the Federal Republic of Germany. In contrast to the persecution of the Jews, the Holocaust against the Sinti and Roma was systematically denied; racial reasons in accordance with the Federal Compensation Act were – according to the official account since 1965 – at best, only occasionally “a contributing factor”.
At the core of the systematic fraud by the authorities against the Sinti and Roma was the state order dictating that for cases of claims of compensation by Sinti and Roma, the relevant federal compensation authorities were to regularly contact the Bavarian “Traveller Central Office” in the State Office of Criminal Investigations (LKA). Until 1951, the official Nazi designation of this “Traveller Central Office” was still in use: “Gypsy Police Station of the Bavarian Central Office for Criminal Identification, Police Statistics and Police Communications”. The compensation authorities were required to inquire about the reasons for which the compensation applicants had been persecuted – a scandal that has not been comprehensively and adequately accounted for to this day.
After the war, the same perpetrators from the “Gypsy Centre” of Himmler’s Reich Security Main Office that had been responsible for the deportation and extermination of the Sinti and Roma before 1945 continued to work in the “Traveller Central Office” in the Bavarian LKA – in positions equivalent to that of Adolf Eichmann in the case of the deportation of the Jews: Josef Eichberger had, according to witnesses, even accompanied some deportations of Sinti and Roma to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp as a senior official. In post-war Federal Republic of Germany, he and other Nazi perpetrators were thus able to justify their past crimes by criminalising the victims and denying the Holocaust against the Sinti and Roma.
For decades, the perpetrators retained the power of interpretation over their victims – their statements and expert opinions were accepted and recognised by all state and public institutions and especially by the compensation offices, thus allowing them to further criminalise their victims and rehabilitated themselves. It would have been unimaginable and an international scandal if, for example, Adolf Eichmann had been able to take on a leading position in a state criminal investigation office after the war and had prepared expert reports for the compensation authorities on the reasons for the deportation of Jews. For Sinti and Roma, on the other hand, this was bitter reality in the democratic constitutional state of the Federal Republic of Germany.
This monstrous bureaucratic system was legitimised by the shameful judgement of the Federal Court of Justice (BHG) in 1956. In this post-war judgement, Sinti and Roma were described as “primitive primeval people” and the racial persecution they had suffered during the Third Reich was denied. Rather, the deportations to the extermination camps were justified as “crime prevention”. In 2015, when visiting the Central Council in Heidelberg, BGH President Jutta Limperg described this judgement as one “for which one can only be ashamed” and as “indefensible jurisprudence”.
The exclusion of Sinti and Roma from compensation and their continued criminalisation also meant massive social stigmatisation and the loss of their social position in society. Only the civil rights work of the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma, founded in 1982, led after long disputes to a fundamental change in the compensation practice, which had been massively discriminatory until then. As late as 1986, the Federal Government fully justified the compensation practice practised until then against Sinti and Roma in its published “Report on Compensation for Victims of National Socialist Violence”. Thereupon, the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma documented 525 compensation case examples, proving the systematic discrimination of the surviving Sinti and Roma due to the cooperation between compensation authorities and the Nazi perpetrators during the compensation proceedings. Only through labour-intensive secondary proceedings of the Federal Compensation Act, which were initiated by the Central Council, could compensation pensions be enforced for the few survivors still alive.
Criticism by the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma at the end of the 1980s led to the individual Länder Compensation Offices also giving positive rulings on the compensation cases – the previous practices could no longer be sustained, and a new generation of civil servants had assumed responsibility for the examination of compensation cases.
Nevertheless, the fact remains that a very large number of Sinti and Roma who were entitled to compensation died as a result of persecution, especially during the first post-war years, without their fate ever being adequately acknowledged.
Even today, persecuted Sinti and Roma who do not have German citizenship, unlike Jewish persecutees, do not receive any ongoing aid. The Federal Government’s guidelines for the allocation of funds to non-Jewish persecutees in the version of 7 March 1988 should therefore be amended accordingly, in order to achieve equal treatment with Jewish persecutees in this point as well.
What is needed now is the much-demanded “catch-up” rectification justice. An accounting for the scandalous post-war history of the denied compensation of Sinti and Roma is called for in order for our democracy to actually fulfil this historical obligation.
The Independent Commission on Antigypsyism (UKA), which was appointed by the Federal Government and presented its final report last year, called on the Federal Government to comprehensively deal with the post-war injustice against Sinti and Roma and, especially in the area of compensation, to enable the few surviving Sinti and Roma in Germany and Europe to live in dignity.
On the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the Luxembourg Agreement, the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma now expects the Federal Government to take specific steps to account for these unimaginable and scandalous post-war practices.
Romani Rose will attend the commemorative event “70 Years of the Luxembourg Agreement” on 15 September 2022 at the invitation of the Federal Ministry of Finance.