Getting Rid of the "Gypsy Scourge": A Shift Towards the Repressive Assimilation of the "Gypsies" in the Czech Lands, 1938-1942
Abstrakt
On December 1, 1938, in an official letter, the District Office in Poděbrady called upon the Provincial Office in Prague to set up "concentration camps" for the "Gypsies". Although at that time many of the Czech local authorities were influenced by the Nazi social and crime prevention policies, their notion of a "concentration camp" was certainly not identical with the institutions the Nazis had been creating in the 1940s.
The demand for establishing special camps for "Gypsies" and "vagrants", however, was neither new nor exceptional. Local authorities in the Czech lands made similar demands during the debates on the "Gypsy question" before the First World War, also shortly after the Czechoslovak Republic was founded, and in the process of formulating the Law on Wandering Gypsies in 1927.
In the second half of the 1930s, these long-demanded appeals for "eradicating" the "Gypsy scourge" intensified again in relation to the migration panic provoked by an allegedly rapidly growing number of "wandering Gypsies" captured by the local authorities in the Czech-German borderland. These requests naturally continued to be made during the period of the Second Czechoslovak Republic and also in the first years of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.
The main objective of this presentation is to set these demands in the wider context of a shift in the anti-Gypsy measures, from the regulation of movement of the "wandering Gypsies" to the repressive assimilation policy adopted at the time the Protectorate was formed. I will show how this transformation was related both to the changing political regimes and ideological frameworks that aimed towards the "protection of the nation", and to the inner dynamics of the assertion of anti-Gypsy measures by various state authorities, especially on the local level.
Thus, I will focus on the period before the so-called Gypsy camps in Lety and Hodonín u Kunštátu were established in the summer of 1942.