June 9, 1999
Holocaust targeted Gypsies
and Jews, scholar says
___By Bob Allen
___Associated Baptist Press
___JACKSON, Tenn. (ABP)--A Baptist scholar contends that Nazis sought total annihilation of Europe's Gypsy population in the Holocaust, challenging the widely accepted theme that Jews alone were targeted for extinction.
___Historians agree that in addition to 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust during World War II, another 5 million non-Jewish civilians--including Gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, political prisoners, Poles, Ukranians, the handicapped and mentally ill--also were murdered for a variety of reasons.
___The conventional view is that only Jews, however, were singled out for total extermination. David Gushee, a professor at Union University in Jackson, Tenn., disputesthat view in a paper co-written with student Sheri Lovett.
GYPSY prisoners at Dachau
___Gushee and Lovett call for "a revised definition of Nazi genocide" describing the Holocaust as an attempt to destroy two groups deemed most dangerous and "unhealthy"--the Jews and the Gypsies. They say both groups were destroyed in roughly the same percentage of their European population before the war and would have suffered even greater losses had the Nazis not been defeated.
___"Evidence supports the claim that the Gypsies of Europe-- like the Jews but unlike any other people group--were also targeted by the Nazis for total annihilation," Gushee and Lovett contend.
___While that recognition "could have a significant impact on the shape of Holocaust definition," they say it "need not and must not in any way diminish our understanding of the depth and breadth of Jewish victimization."
___Gushee and Lovett acknowledge the debate over how to define the Holocaust has divided scholars.
___Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal has described the Holocaust as the systematic murder of 11 million people, 6 million of whom were killed because they were Jews. Author and 1986 Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel, however, argues that a broad definition of the Holocaust could lead to weakening the memory of Jewish victims. He accuses Wiesenthal and others of "diminishing" the tragedy against Jewish people.
___But Gushee and Lovett contend that current discussion of the Holocaust "obscures the experience of victims other than the Jewish people," particularly Gypsies.
___"The sparse recognition of the Gypsies' fate in the Holocaust has had profound consequences in their post-Holocaust history," they write. While Jews received a homeland with the establishment of Israel in 1948, Gypsies were returned to hostile lands and continue to face persecution to this day.
___"Our thesis ... is that the definition of the Holocaust, as well as the standard narrative by which the Holocaust is conveyed, needs revision in order that a more accurate and adequate account can be made of the Gypsy experience under Nazism," they argue.
___Gushee and Lovett estimate the Nazis killed 500,000 Gypsies, or around 60 percent of the entire pre-war Gypsy population in Europe. That percentage approaches the two-thirds of the pre-war European Jewish population represented by 6 million Jewish victims.
___"Whatever the numbers, in the killing fields and at Auschwitz, Jews and Gypsies shared a fate similar to each other and different in important ways from that of any other group--though, of course, in moral perspective every victim matters equally and immeasurably."
___Hitler's "hatred was much more focused on the Jews than on the Gypsies," Gushee and Lovett admit, but his racist policies "came to have deadly consequences for Gypsies and others."
___"Remembrance of the Holocaust must not be seen as a zero-sum game, in which recognition of one group's suffering invariably diminishes that of others," they say. "The goal should be a truthful accounting of what actually happened, in all its horrific fullness, and what it means for humanity today."
___The tendency to emphasize the Jewish experiences under the Nazis has caused Christians to relate to the Holocaust "almost exclusively on such matters as the tortured history of Jewish-Christian relations," Gushee and Lovett contend.
___While Christian anti-Semitism should continue to be an important emphasis, they suggest, there is a similar history of "European anti-Gypsyism" that is not as well recognized.
___Gushee, who previously wrote a book on Christians' behavior toward Jews during the Holocaust, offered an indictment concerning churches' response to the plight of Gypsies.
___"The history of the Gypsies is a story of a people who have been and continue to be marginalized, even when it comes to how their Holocaust narrative is told," Gushee and Lovett argue. "Christians are not free to look away from anyone who is voiceless or victimized."
___Though historical sources documenting anti-Gypsy efforts are spotty, Gushee and Lovett contend Gypsies were classified and targeted for elimination as early as 1938.
___Of 23,000 Gypsies assigned to Auschwitz, more than 21,000 were killed during 17 months. Jewish survivors share poignant accounts of the sound of Gypsies playing their violins, in an effort to maintain some semblance of community and identity, while waiting to die in gas chambers.
___"The fuller integration of the Gypsies (and other victims) into the defining and narrating of the Holocaust is a matter of extreme sensitivity for the Jewish people and others ... who are deeply committed to full recognition of the evils visited upon Jews," Gushee and Lovett concede.
___"However, it must be possible--and to us it seems morally obligatory--to break open the settled narrative structure of Holocaust discourse to include more fully those who played the violins at Auschwitz and whose ashes were mixed with their Jewish compatriots in suffering."
___
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