Roma and Sinti (Gypsies) Prisoners

In concentration camps such as Auschwitz, Roma and Sinti
men wore brown or black triangular badges, the symbol for
"asocial," with a letter "Z", meaning Zigeuner, the German
word for Romani people. Roma and Sinti women wore only a
black triangle badge; they were stereotyped as petty
criminals, kidnappers and fortune tellers. They were
extensively used as human subjects in medical experiments
and Romani children were used as research subjects. 20,000
were murdered in Auschwitz-Birkenau camps, two-thirds
from starvation, disease, abuse failed medical experiments
and some of the remaining one-third were gassed between
1942-43.

The Roma and Sinti are Indo-Aryan ethnic groups believed to
have originated in northern India. For unknown reasons they
started to wander, dispersing throughout Europe. They
comprise different groups, of which the largest groups are:
Roma and Sinti.
In November 1935, Nazis defined the Roma and Sinti living in
Germany as enemies of the state because race and ethnicity.
They lost their political and civic rights, intermarriages
between them and Aryans were forbidden. They were
arrested, interned in concentration camps and sterilized
under the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased
Offspring in July 1933.

European Roma and Sinti, like the Jews, were registered,
sterilized, sent to ghettos, deported to concentration and
death camps by the Nazis during World War II. They were
housed in special compounds that were known as "Gypsy
family camps."
While Roma and Sinti were killed throughout Europe, Nazi
plans for their extermination were never completed, nor fully
implemented. Yad Vashem estimates that around 90,000
Romani were killed in Yugoslavia alone. Approximately
250,000 to 500,000 Roma and Sinti were murdered during the
war - an event remembered as the Porajmos (the
"Devouring"). West Germany recognized the genocide of the
Romani in 1982 and since then the Porajmos has been
increasingly recognized as a genocide.