The Nazi regime attempted to reshape German society to fit Nazi ideas about race and national unity after the Nazi Party rose to power in early 1933. The Nazis and their supporters targeted many groups they considered to be racial, social, or political outsiders. Roma and Sinti (“Gypsies”)1 faced escalating forms of discrimination and persecution under Nazi rule.2 Nazi ideas about race and biology added radical and deadly new dimensions to discriminatory anti-Romani policies that had existed in Germany before the Nazi Party rose to power.3
In December 1942, Nazi SS leader Heinrich Himmler had ordered that nearly all Roma and Sinti living in Nazi Germany be deported to Auschwitz. Over the next several months, Nazi officials and German police arrested and deported thousands of Roma and Sinti. A German Sinti man named Oskar Rose living in Darmstadt, Germany only managed to avoid arrest by going into hiding with a false identity. His relatives were confined with other deported Romani people in a segregated subcamp of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Camp authorities confined the Romani prisoners together with their family members, and conditions at the so-called “Zigeunerfamilienlager” (“Gypsy Family Camp”) at Auschwitz-Birkenau were horrible.4 Thousands of people died from malnutrition, disease, or abuse. Thousands of other Roma and Sinti were murdered by gassing.5
The featured letter from Rose shows how he not only resisted Nazi persecution by avoiding deportation—Rose also tried to expose the Nazi regime’s plans to deport, sterilize, and murder Roma and Sinti. Like most Sinti people, Rose was Catholic, so he focused on convincing leaders in the Catholic Church to condemn the Nazi regime’s genocidal practices. In April 1943, he visited the Munich residence of Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber to ask for help.6 The cardinal refused to speak with him, but Rose did not give up his struggle to get Catholic officials to condemn the anti-Romani policies of the Nazi regime.
Rose likely wrote this letter in spring 1943 shortly after he failed to get a meeting with Cardinal von Faulhaber in Munich. The letter was received on May 6, 1943 by Cardinal Adolf Bertram, the archbishop of Breslau, Germany (present-day Wrocław, Poland). Appealing to Catholic leaders, Rose framed the letter as a desperate plea from thousands of Roman Catholic families for the protection of the Catholic Church. Rose calls attention to the Nazi regime’s policies of forced sterilizations—medical procedures designed to make it biologically impossible to reproduce. He did not receive a response, and Catholic officials never publicly condemned the Nazi genocide of Roma and Sinti as he had hoped.7
Thirteen of Rose’s family members were killed in the Nazi camp system. After the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945, Oskar and his younger brother Vinzenz fought against anti-Romani discrimination in the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany). Oskar died in 1968, but his family continued working for equality and justice for Roma and Sinti. In 1974, Vinzenz funded a memorial on the site of the “Zigeunerfamilienlager” at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Oskar’s son Romani Rose became the leader of the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma.8
In February 2023, Romani Rose met with Cardinal Reinhard Marx—the successor to Cardinal von Faulhaber, the man who had refused to meet with Romani’s father Oskar in 1943. Cardinal Marx expressed his support for a memorial plaque on the Archbishop’s Palace in Munich to commemorate Oskar Rose’s resistance. The two men agreed on the importance of acknowledging the Catholic Church’s silence on the Nazi genocide of Roma and Sinti.