Far-right Hitler apologetics make it crucial to tell the truth of his atrocities

On Sept. 3, The Atlantic‘s Yair Rosenberg published a disturbing article about figures on the MAGA right trying to rehabilitate Hitler in order to make Americans unlearn the lessons of World War II. As others in the movement have tried to redeem so-called “race science” and denied or even defended the Holocaust, and living memory of it fades with every survivor who ages and passes away, it’s more important than ever for people to know where such poisonous ideas lead.

An often overlooked part of the Nazis’ campaign of mass murder is their genocide of the Romani people, which rarely garners more than brief mentions in books, documentaries and other media about the World War II era. But it is critical to preserve the memory and stories of what is often called the Samudaripen or Porrajmos because, like the Shoah, it illustrates the dangers of scientific racism and fascism. That is particularly important at a time when surveys show growing numbers of young people lack basic knowledge and question key facts about the Holocaust, creating the risk that lies and bigotry from unscrupulous peddlers of disinformation will fill the void.

A seldom heard story is that of 37 children whom state welfare authorities took from their families and placed at the St. Josefspflege children’s home in the southern German town of Mulfingen and who were later deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where all but four of them were murdered. The children, some as young as 6, had done nothing wrong; the Nazis murdered them because they belonged to the Sinti, a subgroup of the Romani people native mostly to Germany and surrounding countries. Under Heinrich Himmler’s Auschwitz Decree, issued on Jan. 29, 1943, the children would have been deported much earlier. But Eva Justin, a nurse working for the Racial Hygiene and Population Biology Research Center, the Nazi German agency tasked with tracking down and documenting all Sinti and Roma in the Reich in order to enable their removal, needed them as subjects for her doctoral research, and so the agency arranged to delay their deportation.

Arriving at St. Josefspflege in the latter half of 1943, Justin plied the children with wartime rarities like chocolates and other sweets and spoke to them in the Romani language in order to manipulate them into cooperating in scientifically baseless experiments like observing them running around in the woods and having them harvest potatoes. Her interest was not in science, but in rationalizing the Nazis’ belief that Sinti and Roma were an inferior race genetically prone to being criminal and “antisocial.” Her dissertation, little more than racist bile in thesis format, concluded that they should be sterilized.

When the teachers at St. Josefspflege protested against Justin’s methods, she told them the children “were being prepared for a possible stay in a camp in Poland.” After Justin’s work was complete, her boss, Dr. Robert Ritter, came and picked her up, and the school never heard from either of them again.

The teachers already sensed that something was wrong as the children’s parents had gone from regularly visiting them to sending infrequent letters to no contact at all; unbeknownst to the children or the staff, the parents had been sent to Buchenwald and Ravensbrück concentration camps. “Even then, I had the feeling that the children were being prepared by their parents for an uncertain future,” one of the teachers told an investigator in 1973.

A hint of that future came in January 1944, when police showed up to take the children’s fingerprints for detention documents that would form the basis of their deportation. In March, the school received notice that they would be sent to a “Gypsy camp.” The staff had no choice but to accept it, but they couldn’t bear to tell the children.

Finally, in May 1944, a bus arrived at St. Josefspflege to take the children to the train station. The younger ones thought they would get to see their parents, but the older ones knew better: A 16-year-old girl threw herself on her bed and cried, “Why do I have to die? I’m still so young.” Two staff members asked and were allowed to accompany the children for the first leg of the journey, but the guards made them turn back as the children and additional Romani detainees boarded a second train that would take them to Auschwitz. One of the teachers later described the situation as one “in which you had to grit your teeth to keep from crying.”

When 15-year-old Amalie Reinhardt asked the guards where the train was going, they told her it was to a place where they would be well looked after. A few days later, they were put on a truck that took them to Auschwitz, where their possessions were taken, their hair was cut off and they were given prison clothes and sent to the so-called “Gypsy Family Camp” of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

While at the camp, they witnessed numerous atrocities, including the SS murdering Romani and Jewish children by shooting, gassing and burning alive.

As the SS began transferring Romani prisoners considered fit for forced labor in preparation for the liquidation of the Gypsy Family Camp, Amalie asked Dr. Josef Mengele if she could stay with her siblings, but he replied she was too old and would be put to work. She and three other children from St. Josefspflege were transferred to other camps before the Allies liberated them in 1945. But the other 33 – including Amalie’s younger siblings – were among the 2,897 Romani inmates mostly taken to Crematorium V and gassed on Aug. 2, 1944. Among the victims was also 9-year-old Settela Steinbach, the girl in the headscarf whose face became one of the most enduring images of the Holocaust; long presumed to be Jewish, she was in fact Sinti.

Of the approximately 23,000 Romani men, women and children deported to Auschwitz, about 21,000 perished. Overall, the Nazis and their allies murdered as many as 500,000 Roma, a figure equal to one-third to half of all European Roma at the time, in many of the same death camps and killing fields where they murdered approximately 6 million Jews. In multiple countries, such as Estonia, Czechia and Croatia, prewar Romani populations were almost completely annihilated.

Romani survivors struggled for decades after the war to obtain compensation or even recognition for what they had endured, but Eva Justin and most of the scientists and bureaucrats who helped cause their plight lived comfortable lives. With her blood-soaked doctorate, Justin got a job as a youth psychologist for the municipal health department in Frankfurt, and though scandal from the revelation of her involvement in the Nazi regime forced her out of her position, she avoided prison. It was only years after her 1966 death from cancer that details emerged of her complicity in the children’s deportation and murder.

It’s horrors like these that irresponsible demagogues like Tucker Carlson, Myron Gaines, Candace Owens, Jake Shields, Jordan Lasker and others want us to shrug at, forget, deny or even celebrate, which means it behooves those of us who still cling to at least some regard for truth and decency to preserve the memory of what terrible ends fascism and hate have led the world to and will continue to lead to as long as they are allowed to flourish.