It was probably Ritter's "race-biological research" that SS chief Heinrich Himmler invoked in his circular on "Combating the Gypsy Nuisance" of December 8, 1938, recommending "the resolution of the Gypsy question based on its essentially racial nature." He ordered the registration of all Gypsies in the Reich above the age of six and their classification into three racial groups: Gypsies, Gypsy Mischlinge [part-Gypsies], and nomadic persons behaving as Gypsies. Himmler, who oversaw the vast security empire that included the Criminal Police, stated that the "aim of measures taken by the State to defend the homogeneity of the German nation" included the "physical separation of Gypsydom from the German nation."

The children of Sinti and Roma were also victims, interned with their families in the municipal camps and studied and classified by racial scientists. Between 1933 and 1939, authorities took many Sinti and Roma children from their families and brought them to special homes for children as wards of the State. Gypsy schoolchildren who were truant were deemed delinquent and sent to special juvenile schools; those unable to speak German were deemed feeble-minded and sent to "special schools" for the mentally handicapped. Like Jewish children, Gypsy boys and girls also commonly endured the taunts and insults of their classmates, until March 1941 when the regime excluded Gypsies from the public schools.

As was the case for Jews, the outbreak of war in September 1939 radicalized the Nazi regime's policies towards Gypsies. On September 21, 1939, a conference on racial policy chaired by Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Security Main Office in Berlin, discussed the removal of 30,000 German and Austrian Gypsies to occupied Poland, along with the deportation of Jews. The "resettlement to the East" followed by the mass murder of Sinti and Roma in reality closely paralleled the systematic deportations and killings of Jews. The deportations of German Gypsies, including men, women, and children, began in May 1940 when 2,800 Gypsies were transported to the Lódz ghetto and from there to Chelmno, where they were among the first to be killed by gassing in mobile vans beginning in late December 1941 and January 1942. Similarly, in the summer of 1942, German and Polish Gypsies imprisoned in the Warsaw ghetto were deported to Treblinka, where they were gassed. German Gypsies were also deported to ghettos in Bialystok, Cracow, and Radom. During the war, some minor differences of opinion arose at the highest levels of government regarding the "final solution to the Gypsy question." Himmler toyed with the idea of keeping a small group of "pure" Gypsies alive on a reservation for the ethnic study of these racial "enemies of the state," but the regime rejected this idea. In a decree dated December 16, 1942, Himmler ordered the deportation of Gypsies and part-Gypsies to Auschwitz-Birkenau. At least 23,000 Gypsies were brought there, the first group arriving from Germany in February 1943. Most of the Gypsies at Auschwitz-Birkenau came from Germany or territories annexed to Reich including Bohemia and Moravia. Police also deported small numbers of Gypsies from Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Norway.

Dr. Robert Ritter:

Racial Science and "Gypsies"

The research of racial scientist Dr. Robert Ritter and his associates served both as instrument and justification for the Nazi regime to isolate and eventually destroy the German Gypsy population.

By studying Gypsies, Ritter, who was a psychiatrist, hoped to determine the links between heredity and criminality. With funding from the German Association for Scientific Research and access to police records, Ritter began in 1937 to systematically interview all the Gypsies residing in Germany. To do so, he traveled to Gypsy encampments and, after the deportation and interment of Gypsies began, to the concentration camps.

Ritter developed detailed genealogies--family histories--to distinguish "pure" Gypsies from those of "mixed blood" and to root out assimilated Gypsies from the general German population. The state police aided Ritter in this by requiring genealogical registration of all Gypsies forcibly moved into special municipal camps after 1935. Believing anyone with Gypsy blood to be a danger to society, Ritter classified a "part-Gypsy" as someone with one or two Gypsy grandparents or two or more part-Gypsy grandparents, that is, someone with as little as one-eighth gypsy blood.

Ritter's associates included the anthropologist Dr. Adolf Wurth and, until 1942, the zoologist and anthropologist Dr. Sophie Ehrhardt. Ritter's closest associate was Eva Justin, a nurse who received her doctorate in anthropology in 1944 based on her research with Gypsy children raised apart from their families. At the conclusion of her study, these children were deported to Auschwitz, where all but a few were killed.

In a report of his research findings in 1940, Ritter concluded that 90 percent of the Gypsies native to Germany were "of mixed blood." He described such Gypsies as "the products of matings with the German criminal asocial subproletariat." He further characterized Gypsies as "primitive" people "incapable of real social adaptation."

From late 1944 through 1946, Ritter taught criminal biology at the University of Turbingen; in 1947 he joined the Frankfurt Health Office as a Children's physician. While there, he employed Eva Justin as a psychologist. His collaborator Dr. Sophie Ehrhardt joined the anthropology faculty at the University of Tubingen in 1942 and continued to use Ritter's data in her postwar research. Dr. Adolph Wurth served in the Baden-Wurttemberg Bureau of Statistics until 1970.

Efforts to bring charges against Ritter and his associates as accessories in the deaths of the German Gypsies were discontinued. The trial of Dr. Robert Ritter ended with his suicide in 1950.