ABSTRACT
In the years since the US Holocaust Memorial Council was established by an act of Congress in 1979, the debates about the definition and meaning of the Holocaust for various victim groups has been translated into intense political activity on the part of representatives of some of the groups. In the vast literature on Nazi brutality and genocide, the annihilation of a large part of the Gypsy population of Europe constitutes barely a footnote. Yet only two ethnic groups were targeted for total annihilation by National Socialist ideology and its state apparatus - Gypsies and Jews. Subsequent linguistic studies convinced most scholars of the Northwest Indian origins of Gypsies, though the precise place, the ethnic and social groups from which they derived, remained a matter of dispute. At the same time that Gypsies were being imprisoned, expelled and enslaved by the princes through whose territories they passed, they became an important part of the European cultural scene.
