Wave of Deportation from Lodz(Gypsy Camp), Ghetto, Poland to Chelmno, Extermination Camp, Poland on 04/12/1941

The Roma ghetto (“Gypsy camp”)^[1] was planned and designed as a place for inmates doomed to swift death.^[2] Several Jewish witnesses from the surrounding streets testified that German guards regularly abused and tortured the Roma^[3] and that they were prey to sadistic acts by visiting SS personnel.^[4] Roma were hanged or shot for trivial reasons on a daily basis.^[5] The hangings took place in a former forge on Sulzfelderstrasse under the supervision of the KRIPO, who often ordered Roma to hang their own people and even executed children.^[6]

The Austrian Nazis, wishing  to get rid of the “unproductive Gypsy elements,” deported  mainly children and adults unfit for hard labor – the elderly and the frail, the sick and the disabled.^[7] The German administration of the Łódź ghetto (Gettoverwaltung - GV) estimated that only 38 percent of the Roma were able to work at all.^[8] Initially, the intention was to set up a bag-making shop and a straw-shoe factory, but this plan never materialized. Two small groups of Roma men were sent to work outside the camp. The first group was requested by the Landesarbeitsamt Posen (provincial labor exchange) on November 22, 1941, for employment in the munitions factory Deutsche Waffen- und Munitionsfabrik Posen.^[9] The GV subsequently sent a total of 150 Roma to Poznań (Posen) on November 25.^[10] The second group, of unknown number, was probably sent around the same time to Bojanowo (Schmückert), 234 kilometers west of Łódź.^[11] We have no knowledge of additional transports from the Roma ghetto in Łódź to forced labor camps.

Dr. Karl Berger, appointed by the Germans as Zigeunerältester (Eldest of the Gypsies), was in charge of the residents’ list and carried out orders of the German authorities.^[12] In this capacity, he was most likely involved in the deportation procedure; however, no further details are known....