Difficult new beginnings

The first few years after the liberation were marked by the desperate and often long drawn-out search for those family members who had survived. The vast majority of Sinti and Roma had lost all their possessions during the Nazi persecution and had to go about rebuilding their lives. And they were not able to rely on support from official authorities. On the contrary: the cities and municipalities treated the concentration camp survivors as foreigners in their own country and engaged in a policy of exclusion.

Many Sinti and Roma in the newly founded Federal Republic of Germany continued to be denied the German citizenship previously revoked under the Nazis. And since the survivors had been forced to give up their personal papers under the persecution, they and their descendants were declared ‘stateless’, even though their families had been firmly rooted in Germany for generations.