Abstrakt
Since 1893, when Austrian lawyer Hans Groβ published his famous book Handbuch für Untersuchungsrichter als System der Kriminalistik, "Gypsies" as a brand for a specific group of criminals were presented as a legitimate criminological topic bound to the police practices of control and surveillance. In the period of the First Czechoslovak Republic representations of "Gypsies" on the pages of Czechoslovak police, gendarmerie and penal law journals and andbooks not only significantly grew in numbers but changed its form.
During 1920s and at the beginning of 1930s the images of "Gypsies" were still mainly shaped by Hans Groβ s framing, in which they had been characterized by reversed system of civic values and morals and represented a specific bodily, mental and social type of human beings situated on the very edge of humankind, closer to the animal world and nature rather than to civilization and culture. However, in 1930s Czechoslovak gendarmerie and police officers promoted different type of perspective stemming from existing centralized policed records of "wandering gypsies and similar vagrants" collected on the legal basis of the Act No. 117/1927. "Gypsies" in their eyes became a specific population, different race, which should be governed differently according to their specific needs than decent Czechoslovak citizens.
The main aim of this paper is to outline the role which criminology as a modern scientific tool of the Czechoslovak nation state played in defining and identifying individual and collective "Gypsy body" in contrast to decent Czechoslovak citizens.