Comment: Nazi quasi-scientific anthropological researches led to claiming the Gypsies, along the Jews, a threat to purity of a German race. According to racist theories this national group was by nature antisocial and criminogenic. In 1938-1939 persecutions of Romanies in the Third Reich became mores intensive. A registration duty was introduced, there were arrests and transports to concentration camps. During the Second World War, in the second half of 1941, displacement of Gypsies from Germany, Austria, and Bohemia to the east, also to camps and ghettos of occupied Poland, was begun.

Since the 4th to the 9th of November 1941 5 thousand Gypsies (Romanies and Sintis) of Burgenland - an Austrian-Hungarian borderland were deported to a separate Gypsy camp in Lodz ghetto. They were closed in 15 buildings located between nowadays streets: Westerplatte, Wojska Polskiego, Glowackiego and Sarosikawska. In each room 10 to 40 people were living. Lack of space, hunger and lack of sanitary-hygiene facilities led to outbreak and rapid spread of epidemic of typhus. In 7 weeks 719 Romanies and Sintis died. Epidemic could not be stopped by Jewish doctors from ghetto who were bringing help to the infected. For fear of further spread of the epidemic over the ghetto and particularly into Arian side, Nazi authorities decided to liquidate the camp. About 4300 prisoners who were staying alive were transported to a death camp in Chelm upon the Ner and there between the 5th and the 12th of January 1942 gased. (Piotr Strembski)

External description: Original, in German, typescript size 208 x 296 mm; seal of receipt at Statistics Department of City Board in Lodz with a date-stamp 8 I 1942.

Location: State Archive in Lodz, Records of city of Lodz, cat. no. 29040, p.27.