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For the Roma and Sinti, alienation from society was hardly new. Whereas Czechoslovak legislation did not single out Jews prior to the Munich Pact, Law 117 of 1927 created the category of a “wandering [insert slur here]” (potulní cikáni). Paragraph 1 stated:

Wandering gipsies under this law shall be considered to be gipsies wandering from place to place and other wanderers shunning work who live in the gipsy manner, in either case even if they have a permanent residence for part of the year — especially in winter.¹⁸

This definition built on earlier xenophobic legislation from the Habsburg Monarchy, according to which gendarmes and other officials regularly compiled lists of local [Roma] and reported on their behavior. The lists were determined according to perceived racial aspects (especially skin color), as well as social factors.

Unlike Jews, whose definition under the [Third Reich] depended on current or ancestral religious affiliation, the interwar republic’s definition of so-called [insert slur here] was vague. It varied from the communal identity of the Roma or Sinti themselves, who judged their Romani-ness in relationship to a set of traditions called romipen and to dialects of the Romani language.

Due to a focus on “way of life,” Czechoslovak authorities included hundreds of non-Roma into the category of “[insert slur here].” In November 1930, for instance, the Central Gendarmerie Search Department in Prague reported to the Interior Ministry that 23,000 [Indo-Europeans] had been already fingerprinted. The registry also included 1,000 people of “[gadjo] origin” who lived the “Gypsy way of life,” namely as umbrella and belt makers and grinders.¹⁹

The 1927 law mandated that all people labeled as wandering [insert slur here] exchange their civic identity cards for [special] identification papers, which included their fingerprints. Contrary to the wording of the law, however, the authorities included many Roma who had permanent residence and legal income in the category of “wandering Gypsies.”²⁰ A number of Roma unsuccessfully tried to appeal against the assignment of the […] ID cards, often with help of lawyers. The authorities refused most complaints, sometimes with the justification that the applicant was “[insert slur here] by race.”²¹

Despite such wanton discrimination, until 1942 the Protectorate’s government did not automatically place Roma and Sinti in the pernicious category of “non-Aryan” to which all Jews during the occupation belonged.²²

Regardless of the actual state of popular attitudes towards Jews or Roma, during the occupation the [Third Reich] and the official Czech press repeatedly denounced what they believed to be pervasive and persistent philosemitism among the Czech public.²³

By contrast, there is no evidence that the occupiers and their lackies believed pro-Roma attitudes to be present among the occupied. The alleged difference in the majority’s attitudes towards Jews and Roma led an antisemite to call in December 1939 for Czechs to recognize the threat posed by Jews:

The Jews are a 1,000-times greater danger to our kin [rod] than Gipsies. Gipsies with their sojourns in the forests and their wanderings along the roads across the land come into only occasional contact with us, during which everyone immediately recognizes a Gipsy in his distinctiveness. Jews in their smooth adaptability impregnated [prosytili] with their criminal qualities everything that they took from us from our Aryan-Christian culture and created from it at once an opaque mask for everyone who overlooks and doesn’t know the persistent Jewish danger.²⁴

Moreover, whereas most Roma and Sinti had special IDs from the interwar period, for nearly the first year of the occupation Jews carried the same documents as non-Jews and were thus difficult for the authorities to identify. As Richard Glazar, one of the few survivors of Treblinka, reflected: “on my forehead, after all, I don’t have [Jew] clearly written.”²⁵

On 13 February 1940, however, the Protectorate Interior Ministry ordered that a red “J” (for Jude) be stamped on the first page of the identification booklet of anyone considered to be Jewish according to the Nuremberg Laws.²⁶

Beginning September 1941, the [Axis] made the Protectorate’s Jews immediately visible to all: in preparation for their mass deportation, they could no longer leave their homes without prominently displaying a yellow Star of David on their chests.

Segregation/Integration

Prior to the occupation, the Jews of Bohemia and Moravia lived largely integrated into the non-Jewish population. They spoke the vernaculars of Czech and German (often both), generally ate the same food as the majority, and frequented many of the same social and entertainment venues. Although street violence during the Second Republic had aimed to force Jews from the public sphere, they did not face legal restrictions until the onset of [Fascist] rule.

As early as March 1939, the occupation authorities ordered Jews to be banned from specific establishments, for example, the Mánes Café along the riverfront in Prague, to limit their contact with [Wehrmacht] soldiers.²⁷ Haphazard prohibitions, however, satisfied neither local antisemites nor the [German anticommunists], who pressed for the introduction of more comprehensive sanctions.²⁸

In response, in early August 1939 Czech officials in the Protectorate Interior Ministry issued a directive that banned Jews from most drinking and eating establishments, public baths, swimming areas, and medical facilities throughout Bohemia and Moravia. Only locations that could provide fully separate facilities for “non-Aryans” could still accommodate them. Cynically justified as a means to ensure public order and protect Jews from violence, the order aimed to remove them from the public sphere.

Although the measure represented a radically repressive restriction of Jews’ lives, the decree’s Czech authors went to great lengths to ground it in the existing criminal code: the emphasis on “public order,” as well as the stipulated penalties for violators (fines up to 5,000 crowns or up to fourteen days in jail) were drawn from the 1927 Czechoslovak Law on Political Administration.²⁹

The use of this 1927 law brought Jews and Roma together in the eyes of the [bourgeois] state. Already during the First Republic, state officials had targeted Roma with a provision of the Political Administration Law that empowered local authorities to impose extrajudicial, administrative penalties to ensure the maintenance of public order and peace. In 1930, for example, the Uherský Brod district office wielded the law to ban “[insert slur here] and vagrants” from entering or loitering in the spa town of Luhačovice for the entire summer season.³⁰

In September 1939 the Uherský Brod district office cited the same 1927 Administration Law when it banned Jews from public gardens, cinemas, theaters, concerts, and sporting venues in the area.³¹ The following June, the city council of Luhačovice prohibited Jews from the spa, unless a doctor had expressly prescribed a stay there for reasons of health. Even then, Jewish patients were restricted to four specific hotels and two barbers, banned from enjoyment of the town’s parks and tennis courts, and not permitted to access the spa’s famed mineral waters after 8 am[.]³²

In the first years of the [Fascist] occupation, gendarmes and police in the Protectorate used the powers granted to them under the 1927 Law and the 1939 segregation order to punish Jews who failed to obey the bans on their presence in public spaces. The implementation and enforcement of the measures served to isolate Jews in a “ghetto without walls” and sever their ties with non-Jews.³³

One month after the Protectorate Interior Ministry moved to segregate Jews in the public sphere, it contradictorily enacted measures to force the integration of the territory’s Roma and Sinti into the majority population. The Fifth Department of the Protectorate Ministry of the Interior proposed: “As a result of today’s exceptional circumstances, it has also become relevant to regulate the issue of wandering [insert slur here] and persons living in the[ir] way.”³⁴

The instigator of the 19 and 21 September 1939 meetings to discuss “the new regulation of the issue of wandering [insert slur here],” Interior Minister Josef Ježek, had been one of the drafters of Act 117/1927 while he was commander of gendarmes.³⁵ Now, in the changed circumstances of the [Fascist] occupation, Ježek and his colleagues saw an opportunity to go one step further and completely ban so-called nomadism.

The desire of the central authorities to forcibly integrate “wanderers,” however, ran up against the problem that some Roma remained without the right of domicile (Heimatsrecht, domovské právo), which was a precondition for full civic rights.

As Tara Zahra has shown, the reluctance of Hungarian towns to grant domicile rights to Roma, which had been introduced in 1849 as part of the citizenship law, paradoxically led to the eviction of families that had been locally resident for a long time. Since other Hungarian municipalities had not granted them domicile either, the introduction of domicile forced many Roma to move from place to place, thereby leaving them in an illegal situation.³⁶

A similar situation prevailed in the Protectorate, particularly in Bohemia, where even some Roma who had been lived in the same community for years or who even owned homes still lacked the right of domicile.

Discussions within the Protectorate Interior Ministry and the gendarmerie in fall 1939 demonstrate that all parties to the conversation were aware of this issue. The Fifth Department proposed to order [insert slur here] and persons living in [their] manner to return to their home villages or towns within fourteen days. Thereafter, they could not leave that municipality except to go to work or to travel on the authorization of their employer.