Shortly after the Nazi rise to power in early 1933, the new regime began to reshape German society to fit Nazi ideas about race and national unity. The Nazis and their supporters targeted many groups they considered to be racial, social, or political outsiders and excluded them from the so-called "national community" ("Volksgemeinschaft"). Nazi authorities increasingly targeted and persecuted Roma and Sinti1 in Germany. Police in Germany began more strict enforcement of pre-Nazi laws against Romani people.2 Nazi ideas about race and biology soon added increasingly radical and deadly dimensions to the regime's anti-Romani policies.
During World War II, Nazi officials and German police deported groups of people that they wanted to exclude from the Nazis’ so-called “national community” to German-occupied territories in eastern Europe. Nazi authorities began making limited attempts to deport Jews and Roma shortly after the war began in 1939.4 The first large-scale deportations of Jewish and Romani people from Nazi Germany began in late 1941.5 Nazi authorities deported over 5,000 Roma from the eastern regions of Austria to the Lodz ghetto in German-occupied Poland.6 German authorities ordered the Lodz ghetto Jewish Council to clear Jewish inhabitants from several buildings in the ghetto and create a segregated section for the deported Roma.
The featured photograph shows a view of the Romani section of the Lodz ghetto. Nazi authorities often separated imprisoned people according to the racial classifications assigned to them by officials. The Romani part of the Lodz ghetto was little more than several buildings separated from the larger area of the Jewish ghetto by barbed wire. It was extremely overcrowded, and food was very scarce. German authorities had made no arrangements for hygienic facilities or medical treatment. The terrible conditions of the overcrowded Romani section of the Lodz ghetto made the inhabitants extremely vulnerable to diseases. This led to an outbreak of a deadly typhus epidemic shortly after the first transports arrived in November 1941. Jewish doctors volunteered to go into the Romani ghetto to treat the infected people, but German authorities did nothing to improve the conditions causing the epidemic.7
In January 1942—just two months after the first deported Roma arrived in Lodz—Nazi authorities emptied the Romani section of the ghetto. They sent all of the surviving inhabitants to be murdered at Chelmno8 in an attempt to prevent the epidemic from spreading to Germans living in the so-called “Aryan” part of the city.9 The featured photograph was taken shortly after German authorities sent the inhabitants to their deaths.