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ISBN 0-8078-2916-1

Published: Fall 2004

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Copyright (c) 2004 by the University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.




Excerpt from: The "Science of Race" by Benoit Massin, pp. 97-103

"Gypsy Research" (Eugenic and Anthropological Views of Crime)

Accused of being beggars and thieves, "Gypsies" (Sinti and Roma), from the beginning of the twentieth century, had been subjected to discriminatory police measures in several European countries, including Germany. Bavarian police kept a central register of Gypsies that, from 1911 on, contained their fingerprints and all police information on their deviant behavior. During the Weimar Republic, Gypsies could be sent to a compulsory workhouse if they could not prove regular paid employment in the prior two years. What was new in Nazi policy was both its "scientific" aspect and its radicality in solving the "Gypsy problem."

Since the turn of the century, German psychiatrists had developed theories that criminal behavior was the result of "antisocial personality" and "feeblemindedness," and that both characteristics were inherited.¹⁶ Eugenicists collected family pedigrees showing how "degenerate" lineage produced criminals, alcoholics, lunatics, retarded individuals, beggars, hobos, and other antisocials. Because prisons and asylums had to be maintained to house these individuals, they were regarded as a tremendous expense—a direct social cost of their antisocial behavior.¹⁷ Eugenics provided a solution to this social problem: Prevent them from reproducing, through sterilization, castration, lifelong isolation, or systematic "euthanasia." In Germany, this combination of psychiatric theories of crime and eugenic treatment was called "criminal biology." In the Weimar Republic, research foundations and institutions, such as the KWI for Psychiatry, in Munich, financially supported research in criminal biology.

In 1933, Nazi interest in criminal biology led to the establishment of new research institutes, including the Research Institute for Racial Hygiene and Population Biology of the Reich Health Office, headed by Dr. Robert Ritter, a specialist in medical genetics and psychiatry. For his second doctorate, he had conducted a genetic study on ten generations of descendents of "vagrants, swindlers, and thieves." Ritter was also appointed a member of a Hereditary Health Court and was an active member of the Society for the Biology of Crime.¹⁸ A member of the SS, Ritter, in 1942, also became director of the newly created Criminal Biological Institute of the Reich Criminal Police Office. The German police, too, wanted to be "modern" and "scientific."¹⁹

The first group studied by Ritter's research center was the Gypsies, estimated to be some 30,000 people in Germany and Austria. Helped by a team of medical doctors, sociologists, psychologists, human geneticists, and anthropologists, Ritter's aim was to register all Gypsies and Gypsy hybrids (Mischlinge) living in Germany, reconstruct their genealogies, and collect information on their social and medical condition. Genealogical registers were necessary to locate all Gypsies and their Mischlinge offspring, because a number of them were well integrated in German society, lived in apartments, had regular jobs, and were sometimes highly decorated soldiers. Gypsy research also included taking anthropometric measurements and photographs, analyzing such racial and family characteristics as nostril and ear shapes, collecting blood samples and fingerprints, and making plaster casts of Gypsy heads.

Ritter's research was intended to have direct application for the racial hygienic policy in the Nazi state. His numerous studies concluded that the antisocial and criminal behavior of Gypsies was the result of their genetic endowment and "primitive racial" character. To eradicate this "unwanted" behavior, the regime aimed to stop reproduction, through sterilization or the isolation of men from women in special camps, and to prevent miscegenation by forbidding contact with the German population. Ritter and his assistants produced thousands of certificates for sterilization of "antisocial Gypsy hybrids."²⁰ Other scientists, such as the blood-group specialist Werner Fischer, received permission from the SS to conduct studies in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Analysis of Gypsy blood was carried out at the prestigious Robert Koch Institute, in Berlin, in an attempt to find a serological diagnosis to identify Gypsies and Gypsy Mischlinge. Captive Gypsies were also used in other scientific research, including twin studies, and were subjected to deadly experimentation. The vast majority of the scientists involved in Gypsy research were never punished.