On this day: Himmler orders the deportation of the Roma - The Jewish Chronicle

There were five million non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust, including up to 500,000 members of the Roma community. At Auschwitz alone, it is estimated that 19,000 of the 23,000 Roma sent there during the war died.

The victims came from around Europe; citizens of France, Germany, Romania, the Ukraine and the Baltic States among the countries.

A nomadic group, the Roma of Europe had long been oppressed before the Holocaust. To the Nazis, the “gypsies” were, like Jews, racially inferior and as with the Jews, they were attacked by the SS, deported and murdered at concentration camps including Dachau, Mauthausen and Treblinka. Many Roma prisoners were subjected to so-called medical experiments by the notorious Dr Josef Mengele.

The persecution of the Roma by the Nazis began with the removal of their civil rights in the 1930s and the requiremnet that Roma people were brown cloth triangles on their clothes.