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For the Roma, It Was in Writing by 1938
The most infamous phrase of the twentieth century appeared in an ordinary German police decree — applied to the Roma — nearly three years before it was ever put in writing about the Jews. The paper trail behind it starts in 1905, with a book.
Ask when the Final Solution began and most people will reach for the meeting at Wannsee, January 1942, the villa by the lake. Or the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, when the Einsatzgruppen started mass shootings.
Some will say, correctly, that no signed order from Hitler for the extermination of the Jews has ever been found — that history reconstructs the decision from speeches, testimony, and documents written in euphemism. Even the Wannsee protocol never says murder, the language is subtle, calling it the “evacuation to the East.”
On December 8, 1938, Heinrich Himmler issued a decree titled “Combating the Gypsy Plague.” It was not secret. It was circulated openly to police authorities across the Reich, the way any administrative regulation is circulated. And it called for the regulation of the Gypsy question to proceed “from the essential character of that race” — toward what the decree itself named the endgültige Lösung der Zigeunerfrage.
The final solution of the Gypsy question was announced in writing, in a public document with specific language defining what that means, in 1938.
The decree titled “Combating the Gypsy Plague” was first issued by Wilhelm Frick, the Minister of the Interior, on June 6, 1936. Heinrich Himmler issued a separate, related decree with the same title on December 8, 1938.
Key distinctions between the two orders include:
June 6, 1936 (Frick): Directed authorities to enforce existing anti-Romani laws, deport non-German Roma and Sinti, conduct police raids, and provided the legal basis for opening confinement camps.
December 8, 1938 (Himmler): Ordered the creation of a nationwide database of all Roma living in the Third Reich, requiring registration and classification to facilitate future persecution, forced labor, and deportation to concentration camps.
Himmler established the Reich Central Office for Combating the Gypsy Nuisance in May 1938 to centralize these persecutory efforts.
The equivalent phrase was not applied to Jews in an official written document until July 31, 1941, when Göring authorized Heydrich to prepare the “final solution of the Jewish question.” For the Roma, the vocabulary of annihilation was already three years old — sitting in police files across Germany, unhidden, because no one thought it needed hiding.
It Started With a List
To understand how that sentence could be written so casually, you have to go back four decades before Hitler took power.
In 1899, the Munich police created a Central Office for Gypsy Affairs. Its director, Alfred Dillmann, built something Europe had not quite seen before: a surveillance system aimed at an entire people.
Local police were instructed to report on every Roma family they encountered — what identity papers they carried, how many horses they had, where they had come from, where they were going, and whether any measures had been taken against them. Prosecutors had to report any Roma lawbreaking to the Central Office. Copies of birth, marriage, and death records were forwarded to Munich.
In 1905, Dillmann published the results: the Zigeuner-Buch, the “Gypsy Book.” Three hundred forty-four pages of he names, birthdates, family trees, and photographs of 3,350 Roma and Sinti.
Seven thousand copies were printed, and police carried it on patrol. The book also promoted the criminalization of ordinary Roma life. Like setting up camp, building a fire, and grazing animals is a criminal act. Being Roma, in practice, became the offense. Other German states adopted the model. So did neighbors: Switzerland ordered copies, and so did Austria-Hungary.
The registry never stopped growing. By 1907 it held 6,031 names. By 1926, 14,000. By 1936, more than 19,000. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, they did not need to build the machinery of persecution. Bavaria had been maintaining it for thirty-four years. They inherited a list.
From the List to the Law
Watch how quickly that inheritance grew.
In 1935, the Nuremberg Laws stripped Jews of citizenship and criminalized marriage between Jews and “Aryans.” The official commentaries extended those laws to the Roma, declaring that in Europe only two peoples were of “alien blood”: Jews and Gypsies. One sentence, and an entire people stood inside the same legal architecture of destruction.
In March 1936, an Interior Ministry memorandum went further, speaking of the need for a “total solution of the Gypsy problem.” That same year, the Racial Hygiene Research Office was founded and began producing “racial expert opinions” on Roma families. These included genealogical rulings, built on exactly the kind of data Dillmann’s office had pioneered. By the war’s end, there would be roughly 24,000 of them. Those opinions decided who was deported.
Then December 8, 1938, and the sentence itself. In 1938, “final solution of the Gypsy question” meant total racial registration, separation from the German population, and the trajectory toward sterilization — not yet the gas chambers.
The escalation came in stages: mass deportations, then Himmler’s Auschwitz decree of December 1942, then the Gypsy Family Camp at Birkenau, then the night of August 2, 1944.
But the direction was set, and it was set on paper. What began as a book of names ended as a numbered tattoo. When Lina Jackson arrived at Auschwitz, they wrote Z574 on her arm. The Z stood for Zigeuner.
A Hatred Older Than the Regime
The pogroms against the Jews of Europe were centuries old before the Nazis industrialized them. The hatred of the Roma was just as old: the expulsions, the hunts, the five hundred years of slavery in the Romanian principalities.
What Germany added, beginning in 1899, was something new: the hatred written into administration. Not a mob. A filing system. Law upon law, list upon list, one government handing its records to the next, until a phrase like “final solution” could appear in a routine decree and raise no alarm at all.
I never saw this progression laid out in the Holocaust education I came up in. In a way, history buried it — and I did too, assuming that if it mattered, someone would have told me. No one told me. The Roma have been telling it all along, inside their families, in their own language.
Now we’re waking up. Dikh He Na Bister. Look and don’t forget.
Go Deeper
The Zigeuner-Buch: The Book That Counted Roma Before It Killed Them — The full story of the 1905 registry is the actual book (in German) used to track Sinti and Roma.
Timeline: The Roma and Sinti Holocaust — From centuries of persecution to recognition.
The Bavarian Precedent — National WWII Museum — Historian Jason Dawsey on pre-Nazi anti-Roma policing, drawing on Guenter Lewy’s research.
Special Legislation — Documentation and Cultural Centre of German Sinti and Roma — The Heidelberg Centre on the legal machinery of persecution.
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