ABSTRACT
Assumptions are made, and repeated with confidence, by individuals who have no special expertise in holocaust history, and unqualified statements are reiterated that automatically assume a lesser status for Gypsies in the ranking of human abuse. Reinhard Heydrich, who was head of the Reich Main Security Office and the leading organizational architect of the Final Solution, ordered the Einsatzkommandos "to kill all Jews, Gypsies and mental patients." Resistance to the Gypsy case must be due at least in part to the lateness of its arrival on the academic scene; scholarship on the Porrajmos is comparatively new, so much so that it has brought charges of "bandwagoning" from some quarters. National Public Radio in Washington, D.C., covered extensively the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau on January 26, 1995, but Gypsies were never once mentioned, despite being well represented at the commemoration.
