Archive/File: camps/marzahn/marzahn-established
Last-Modified: 1997/06/04

"The police were not passive while racial laws barring
marriage and sexual intercourse between Gypsies and Germans
were being promulgated ... The Sinti and Roma had
traditionally been subjected to harassment, mainly in
Bavaria; after 1933, however, direct harassment became
systematic, with the expulsion from the country of foreign
Gypsies, and with others incarcerated as vagrants, habitual
criminals, and various other kinds of asocials. Taking the
Olympic Games as a pretext, the Berlin police in May 1936
arrested hundreds of Gypsies and transferred whole families,
with their wagons, horses, and other belongings to the so-
called Marzahn `rest place,' next to a garbage dump on one
side and a cemetery on the other. Soon the rest place was
enclosed with barbed wire. A de facto Gypsy concentration
camp had been established in a suburb of Berlin. It was from
Marzahn, and from other similar rest places soon set up near
other German cities, that a few years later thousands of
Sinti and Roma would be sent to the extermination sites in
the East.  " (Friedlaender, 205)

                         Work Cited
                              
Friedlaender, Saul. Nazi Germany and the Jews: (Volume One)
The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939. New York:
HarperCollins, 1997

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