Guenter Lewy’s Damaging Legacy Cannot Be Ignored

The scholar Guenter Lewy died on March 24, at the age of 102. But despite the adage that one should not speak ill of the dead, the damage he did to the historiography of the Romani genocide cannot be ignored.

In 2000, Lewy published a book, The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies, which made extensive use of archival sources to support his central thesis that the mass killing of the Roma was not actually a genocide because there was – at least according to him – no central plan of extermination as there was with the Jews. But although the book got positive reviews from media outlets like The Wall Street Journal, and respected scholars have continued citing from it, my own research using some of the same documents Lewy used shows that there are crucial sections of them missing from his analysis.

In a section of Chapter 11 about the Nazis’ “extermination through labor” policy, Lewy excerpted an Oct. 13, 1942, letter from Otto Thierack, the minister of justice, to the head of the Party Chancellery, Martin Bormann, in which Thierack suggested handing Roma, along with Jews, Poles and Russians, over to Heinrich Himmler in order to aid their extermination. But Lewy did not include the last few paragraphs of the letter, wherein Thierack told Bormann that Himmler agreed with his proposal and requested he inform him of “whether the Führer approves of this view.” Also missing from Lewy’s analysis was Bormann’s reply five days later: “I presented your letter of 13 October of this year to the Führer today; he entirely shares your opinion.”

While it is possible Lewy simply did not see Bormann’s reply, the fact that he left out the latter portion of Thierack’s letter is critical because it would have undermined his thesis by showing genocidal intent toward Roma at the highest levels of the Nazi leadership, particularly Himmler, one of the chief architects of the Holocaust. Bormann’s response is even more damning, as it shows Adolf Hitler himself approved of the extermination of the Roma.

Also detrimental to Lewy’s thesis were the recollections of Pery Broad, an SS officer who worked in the political department of Auschwitz. Broad wrote that “Berlin wanted to exterminate the Gypsies,” with Himmler ordering forced labor for those considered fit and death by gassing for the rest. Broad added that “[The Reich Central Office for Combating the Gypsy Menace] was well aware of the determination of [Himmler] to make all Gypsies disappear from the face of the earth, if only they could be captured.”

But these passages are nowhere to be found in Lewy’s book, which only referred to Broad’s recollections in passing.

Others, particularly Romani scholars like University of Texas at Austin professor emeritus of linguistics Ian Hancock, have criticized the book as well. Hancock pointed out Lewy’s insistence on calling Roma “Gypsies” and that he “accepts negative stereotypes without comment,” such as those characterizing Roma as dishonest, thieving and dirty and engaged in victim-blaming when he wrote, “prejudice alone, I submit, is not sufficient explanation for the hostility directed at the Gypsies . . . certain characteristics of Gypsy life tend to reinforce or even create hostility.”

Despite these problems, even some of the world’s top scholars of Nazi Germany have continued to give serious consideration to Lewy’s book. In The Third Reich At War, the third installment of his landmark The Third Reich trilogy, British historian Richard J. Evans uncritically cited it in claiming the mass murder of Roma was not “a genocide in the same way as the mass murder of German and European Jews was.”

This is a striking statement from a historian known not only for his scholarship, but also for being an expert witness for the defense in Holocaust denier David Irving’s libel suit against the Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt. But Evans is not alone.

In a Dec. 3, 2025, paper published in the Journal of Ethics, “Gradated Racism. Moving Between ‘Ends in Themselves’ and ‘Mere Means,’” author Reza Mosayebi cited Lewy’s book in stating that under orders from Himmler, “racially pure Gypsies” were “granted some claims and liberties, however precarious and minimal.”

According to Nazi ideology, 90 percent or more of Romani people in Germany, especially those who belonged to the Sinti and Lalleri subgroups, were considered to be “half-breeds” (Mischlinge) i.e. having a mix of Romani as well as lower-class German ancestry, and were seen as therefore genetically prone to being criminal or “asocial.” Himmler had a morbid fascination with the remaining minority he saw as “racially pure Gypsies” and had proposed leaving them alone because he regarded them as less likely to become criminals or to intermarry with their white neighbors. When his Auschwitz Decree ordering the deportation of Roma to the so-called “Gypsy Family Camp” was sent out to police departments on Jan. 29, 1943, it contained a provision exempting those “racially pure” Sinti and Lalleri.

That exemption was in fact meaningless, and my own research has repeatedly shown that many of the “pure” Sinti and Lalleri were deported, along with others who were officially supposed to stay behind, such as those who were considered socially well-adjusted and had full-time jobs.

But one would have to dig deep into primary sources in order to know the specifics of how the supposed exemptions were ignored. And because most people have not done that kind of research – but Lewy did – perhaps it is far easier to simply take his word for it, as Evans and Mosayebi appear to have done.

Subsequent scholarship has further debunked Lewy’s thesis.

A Dec. 2, 2013, paper by Karola Fings published in Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust, highlighted a Jan. 15, 1943, meeting the Reich Central Office for Combating the Gypsy Menace – a division of the Reich Criminal Police Office – as well as the Center for Research on Racial Hygiene and Demographic Biology and the Race and Settlement Main Office, in which it was explicitly stated that the majority of Romani people would be deported to a concentration camps, with exemptions given “only in special cases.” Fings compared the meeting to the Jan. 20, 1942, Wannsee Conference, at which top Nazi officials decided on practical plans to implement the Jewish Holocaust.

Even if one could dismiss the Jan. 15, 1943, conference as somehow inconsequential, international law has determined that dolus specialis, i.e. genocidal intent, can be inferred based on the totality of evidence given that indications of genocidal intent are rarely overt. In the 2012 case of Prosecutor v. Zdravko Tolimir, part of the UN international tribunal for war crimes in the former Yugoslavia, the judges wrote: “[It] is permissible to infer the existence of genocidal intent based on ‘all of the evidence, taken together’, as long as this inference is ‘the only reasonable [one] available on the evidence’. Factors relevant to this analysis may include the general context, the perpetration of other culpable acts systematically directed against the same group, the scale of atrocities, the systematic targeting of victims on account of their membership in a particular group, or the repetition of destructive and discriminatory acts.”

While there are varying figures for the number of Roma who were killed, with the most widely accepted one being 250,000-500,000, in multiple European countries, half to two-third or more of prewar Romani populations were exterminated by being shot by Einsatzgruppen death squads or deported to camps to die through gassing, disease or being worked to death – a scale and systematic effort that, taken together with other evidence, show undeniable genocidal intent.

Although Fings’ paper and the Tolimir decision came more than a decade after the publication of Lewy’s book, they show why his arguments lacked credibility, to say nothing of the fact that Raphael Lemkin specifically had both Jews and Roma in mind when he coined the word “genocide.” But in 2005, Lewy published The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide, which caused a much bigger uproar.

The Armenian Massacres applied essentially the same methodology to the 1915-1916 Armenian genocide and had the same goals. But this time around, Lewy’s work was much more poorly received. Experts on the Armenian genocide denounced it, notably University of California, Davis professor Keith David Watenpaugh, who called the book “[The] product of a series of ethical lapses, most particularly, genocide denial—the purposeful misrepresentation through manipulation or misuse of the historical record of an episode of genocidal violence to lessen the perception of its severity, to put causal responsibility for genocide upon its victims or survivors, or to reject altogether that genocide took place.”

The response to The Armenian Massacres should have prompted renewed scrutiny of The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies, which would have turned up similarly problematic aspects of his research.

Denial and distortion of the Holocaust is already flourishing again thanks to social media and growing ignorance among the public about the Nazis’ murder of 6 million Jews. But historical memory of the concomitant genocide of the Roma has barely even managed to take root in the popular mind. To the extent they acknowledge the genocide at all, books, documentaries and other media about the World War II era continue to treat it as a footnote while shunting Roma murdered under National Socialism into a broad category of “other victims,” usually with no mention of the fact that, like Jews, they were targeted for extermination on racial grounds.

Not all of that is Lewy’s fault, of course. But Lewy did a lot to contribute to the consistent downplaying and minimization of the Romani genocide, and he should be remembered for the damage he did.