Otto Rosenberg was born into a German Sinti1 family in 1927. The Nazi project to reshape German society to fit Nazi ideas about race and national unity excluded different groups of people from the Nazis' so-called "national community" ("Volksgemeinschaft"). Roma and Sinti were excluded as racial and social outsiders. Growing up in Berlin in the 1930s, Rosenberg experienced firsthand how the Nazi regime’s persecution of Roma and Sinti grew increasingly radical and deadly over the 1930s and early 1940s.
In his autobiography, Rosenberg recalls how German police forced his family to move to a camp for Roma and Sinti at Marzahn2 on the outskirts of Berlin shortly before the 1936 Berlin Olympics.3 The camp was one of several so-called “Zigeunerlager” (“Gypsy camps”)4 established in Nazi Germany in the mid-1930s.5 Roma and Sinti were forced to move to these camps where they were monitored by police but generally were allowed to leave in order to work. Rosenberg began working as a forced laborer in a German armaments factory when he was just thirteen years old. He was accused of sabotage and arrested in 1942.
After serving his sentence, Rosenberg was sent to Auschwitz.6 In December 1942, Nazi SS leader Heinrich Himmler ordered that the vast majority of Roma and Sinti in Nazi Germany be deported to Auschwitz. The Rosenberg family was forced to stay in a separate subsection of Auschwitz-Birkenau with other deported Roma and Sinti. Conditions at the so-called “Zigeunerfamilienlager” (“Gypsy Family Camp”) at Auschwitz-Birkenau were terrible, and thousands of people died from malnutrition, disease, or abuse. Thousands of other Roma and Sinti were murdered by gassing. In August 1944, camp authorities emptied the subcamp and murdered thousands of surviving Roma and Sinti prisoners. In his autobiography, Rosenberg describes how he was sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp shortly before these mass murders took place.7 None of Rosenberg’s ten siblings survived Auschwitz-Birkenau, and many of his other family members were also killed. Rosenberg managed to survive many more months of imprisonment in several different camps before he was liberated at Bergen-Belsen by British forces in spring 1945.
The featured letter was written by Rosenberg in 1954. It provides a list of all the camps in which he had been imprisoned. He wrote it to establish his imprisonment as he tried to get compensation for his persecution under Nazi rule. But Rosenberg’s autobiography describes how officials in West Germany challenged his application because he was Sinti. Roma and Sinti have continued to face discrimination throughout Europe since the defeat of Nazi Germany. Rosenberg says that officials told him that he would not qualify for compensation because he was “not a true German and had no ties to the city of Berlin.”8 According to Rosenberg, he became so frustrated with the obstacles and insults that he renounced his claims for compensation out of disgust with the process.9
After the war, Rosenberg tried to move forward from his traumatic experiences. He covered his Auschwitz prisoner number tattoo with a new tattoo in Hamburg: “Now there is an angel covering this disgrace,” he explains. “The angel is there, it protects me from all the terrible things that happened then, ever happening again.”10 Rosenberg married and had seven children, and he often spoke about his experiences with German schoolchildren.11 He also led the Union of Sinti and Roma in Berlin and Brandenburg until his death in 2001.