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Ari Joskowicz, The Age of the Witness and the Age of Surveillance: Romani Holocaust Testimony and the Perils of Digital Scholarship, The American Historical Review, Volume 125, Issue 4, October 2020, Pages 1205–1231, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhaa379
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Abstract
For over half a century, historians have made ample use of witness testimonies. Efforts to preserve the accounts of marginalized people in particular have broadened the range of voices available to us and significantly expanded the field. Yet we have paid too little attention to the potentially disturbing consequences of the creation and distribution of such testimonies. Focusing on the experiences of Romani Holocaust survivors, this essay argues that new practices of surveillance and victim-witnessing developed in tandem, from the mid-twentieth century to the present. Beginning in the 1960s, prosecutors asked Romani survivors to testify about the crimes committed against them under Nazism even as state authorities continued to criminalize and surveil Romanies across Europe. These and related experiences have meant that different Romani witnesses—or potential witnesses—have often had to balance the desire to have their stories heard against the fear of being listened in on. As surveillance becomes increasingly pervasive and as personal information is increasingly monetized, the lessons that European Romanies learned as early victims of targeted policing remain salient for historians today. Despite its potential to empower, victim-witnessing also creates new vulnerabilities—both those we can currently anticipate and those we can’t yet fully imagine.
Since the 1970s, victim-witnesses have become a central focus of historical inquiry.1 The Era of the Witness, as Annette Wieviorka called our age, is characterized by increasing efforts to collect and make accessible the stories of those who have suffered systematic oppression.2 Personal accounts of injustice are part of historical databases as well as mass media today: they can be found both in centralized archives (the Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, StoryCorps) and in decentralized form through social media (Facebook, YouTube). Less frequently acknowledged is the fact that the very technologies used to record, store, and analyze individual victims’ narratives are the same as the technologies that have taken the corporate and government surveillance of individuals to unprecedented levels. Although some commentators embrace the underlying technologies in question, fears of the invasion of privacy through mass data collection dominate.3 Yet thus far, the debates and concerns that have surfaced in the context of surveillance studies have had little impact on scholarly discussions of witnessing and testimonies. This neglect has prevented us from asking a number of pressing questions: How does the age of witnessing intersect with the age of surveillance? How do current historical methods dovetail with new forms of state and corporate surveillance? What are the implications of this entanglement, which remains largely unacknowledged?
The history of Europe’s Romanies offers a fruitful starting point for such inquiries given their experience of continuous state surveillance throughout the modern era. Under the guise of containing what various administrators and governing bodies came to characterize as the “Gypsy threat,” state authorities created registries that singled out and policed Romanies across Europe. This treatment eventually allowed the Nazis and their allies to more easily identify and target these populations as “Gypsies.”4 After the war, many Romanies found that they remained under the suspicious eye of the criminal police even as government officials asked them to serve as witnesses to the atrocities they had suffered at the hands of the Nazis. This was the case in the postwar German Federal Republic (West Germany), where state representatives began to solicit the help of Sinti and Roma in convicting Nazi criminals in the 1960s. The tangible intersection of victim-witnessing and targeting by the police that has characterized the postwar experiences of so many Romanies has the potential to illuminate the situation of those who testify under surveillance more broadly.5 In contrast to the large literature on the testimony of Jewish Holocaust survivors, who generally did not have to contend with onerous policing after the war, careful study of Romani testimonies allows us to develop new conceptual tools to understand the complicated relationship between surveillance and victim-witnessing.6
One crucial dimension of such an analysis is to understand the burdens and potential hazards that surveillance generates. When policing becomes burdensome for its targets, it becomes a “condition of life,” as Clara Han has described it in her fieldwork on low-income neighborhoods in Chile.7 This observation, which recalls the effects of police brutality on Black communities in the U.S., equally applies to West German Romanies’ interactions with state authorities in the 1960s.8 Yet their case also illuminates what can happen when the threat of surveillance becomes less tangible. Although Romanies remain some of the most stigmatized people in Europe today, by the 1980s, the campaigns of the Romani civil rights movement and its allies, coupled with broader debates on data protection, lessened the grip of state authorities on Romani populations.9 Instead, the introduction of new technologies, starting with electronic police registries in the 1970s, allowed for intensified forms of surveillance to reach increasingly broad swaths of society. This shift from surveillance as a condition of life to somewhat less burdensome—and often less noticeable—forms of population management coincided with broader efforts to record the Romani genocide. These efforts included calls to allow Romanies a more significant voice in public debates and more agency in organizing when and how they would speak about their past.
Such appeals were hardly surprising, yet they point to a paradox: those historically targeted by state surveillance increasingly demanded to be heard even as they feared being listened in on.10 This paradox is not new. Deciding when organized information gathering is empowering and when it is invasive is a familiar problem for historians. Scholars of documentation practices have noted how identification can lead to both increased interference in individuals’ lives and emancipatory outcomes.11 Debates about the U.S. census similarly revolve around fears of its invasion of privacy, on the one hand, and accusations of underrepresentation—with significant, deleterious consequences for those not counted—on the other.12
Testimony collections are a part of this larger history and yet also stand apart. First, they are arguably more invasive because they offer rich accounts of people’s private lives, focusing on their most intimate experiences, including emotional and even traumatic memories. They also offer more information than most state-generated files.13 Second, whereas historians are the unintended users of past identification registries and census information, they are both the target audience and the producers of testimony archives. This presents us with a delicate balancing act: as we probe the experiences of marginalized people in the past, we must also contend with our role in disseminating and amplifying potentially sensitive information about the very same individuals, or their family members, in the present. Despite our best intentions, the more attuned historians are to the recorded voices of victims of historical events, the more thoroughly we also form part of broader endeavors to make our historical subjects legible to the powers that be.
These concerns become increasingly urgent as our ability to process ever more complex information grows. Digitization, datafication, the broad use of facial recognition tools, and the computing powers that make possible big data analysis transform humanistic endeavors into data sets.14 This is nowhere clearer than where sophisticated databases organize oral history collections. Users can now search over fifty thousand interviews of the Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive through a network of indexed short segments that are broadly searchable by personal names, location, and a long list of thematic word searches.15 Yet the term “data” rarely comes up in scholarship on witnessing and victimhood, where the focus has tended to center instead on questions of voice and agency.16 Still, the archives that house such testimonies have long contained sensitive and monetizable information. Indeed, as early as the 1980s, a large army of volunteers and institutional employees began asking Holocaust victims to register their names, their birthdates, the names and nicknames of relatives, and details about their personal histories in front of a camera. We all know this, but how often have we stopped to consider the fact that the answers witnesses regularly provide in interviews are the same as those that they might use for password retrieval or to identify themselves to a financial services provider?
What follows is both an analysis of instances of witnessing produced under surveillance and a broader reckoning with the practices of historians in light of the growing entanglement of testimony and surveillance technologies. It is an account of how people speak when they know they are being observed as well as the still-too-infrequent grappling with the unintended uses of the data so many of us voluntarily make public. At present, historians and their interlocutors alike rarely acknowledge the ways in which they are adding to a vast information landscape that continues to be built through the accumulation of seemingly irrelevant scraps of information.
Long before the major testimony archives interviewed Romani Holocaust survivors in the 1990s, prosecutors in West Germany began to pursue Romani accounts of their persecution during the war.17 The experience of Alfred L. in 1967 offers a telling example of what it meant to be a Romani victim-witness before Romani civil rights organizations gained prominence.18 Alfred L. was eleven years old when the Nazis deported him to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp on March 18, 1943.19 Unlike the vast majority of children living in Auschwitz’s subcamp BIIe—the so-called “Gypsy Camp”—he survived. Just hours before the camp SS murdered all remaining prisoners in BIIe on August 2, 1944, Alfred L.—who was only thirteen at the time—left Auschwitz for Buchenwald with the last train of Romani prisoners deemed capable of forced labor.20 Over twenty years after his time in BIIe, prosecutors from Frankfurt am Main were curious to know what he saw there. Their interest formed part of a larger investigation into members of the Auschwitz camp SS. The German prosecutors in question followed the usual procedure and sent Alfred L. a summons by mail demanding his appearance at the local police headquarters in Hannover. When Alfred L. did not show up, the state prosecutor responded by sending a patrol car to his address. Unlike several other Romani survivors who left town in advance of their scheduled interrogation, Alfred L. was home when the patrol car arrived. Officers then forced him to go with them to the precinct, a development that gave Alfred L. the chance to personally tell the prosecutor in charge of interrogating him that he could not recall the time he had spent in Auschwitz-Birkenau.21
While some of the reasons that Romanies remained hesitant to give interviews about their suffering at the hands of the Nazis were no doubt personal ones shared by other survivors—such as the inability to recall certain details or the desire to forget them—there were other ways in which Romani experiences of postwar witnessing were distinct from those of other victim groups. Indeed, Polish sociologist Sławomir Kapralski has persuasively argued that many Romanies found it difficult to convey their experiences publicly following the war due to the popular understanding of them as “people without history.”22 It did not help that many Europeans, including many non-Romani camp survivors, considered Roma unreliable witnesses.23 As a result, Romani survivors regularly faced humiliation even from the small minority of people who were generally prepared to listen to Nazi atrocity stories in the decades immediately following World War II.
In light of all they had gone through, it is perhaps not surprising that Romanies often balked at the prospect of sharing their stories following the collapse of the Nazi regime. Under Nazism, officials had questioned German Romanies in order to compile genealogical data that the state then used to racially classify and, subsequently, surveil, arrest, and deport Romanies. Those who came to question Romani families after the war and demanded their cooperation represented the same institution—the criminal police—that had sent Romanies to their death during the Holocaust. What is more, Romanies across postwar Europe continued to be criminalized even as different states also categorized them as victims of a genocidal regime. For many Romanies, this environment of discrimination made silence an appealing strategy rather than a position that was foisted on them. Legal proceedings demanding their testimonies may have challenged the broader erasure of Romani voices from society, but they also regularly forced Romanies to speak against their will.
Alfred L.’s file was part of a collection created by two Frankfurt prosecutors for a major second Frankfurt Auschwitz trial that prosecutors hoped to organize against SS guards. The files they produced in the process illustrate the continuities of surveillance and criminalization in Romani-state relations as well as the beginning of a new judicial attempt to involve Romanies in the state’s endeavor to prosecute past crimes. The Frankfurt Auschwitz trial that fascinated the West German public during its trial phase of 1963–1965 had relied on only a few Romani witnesses.24 In preparation, special investigators had interviewed approximately a dozen Romani survivors, though prosecutors called only six Romani survivors in the main proceedings, four of whom appeared in person for cross-examination.25 Neither these particular Romani witnesses nor the larger story of their experiences during the war played much of a role in the trial or its coverage. The prosecutors planning the next Frankfurt trial did their best to change this.26 According to their original plan, the second Frankfurt trial was slated to include as defendants SS men who had spent months in the “Gypsy Camp.” Under such circumstances, the court would have been poised to explore the entire set of crimes—or the Tatkomplex—committed against Romanies in Auschwitz under considerable public scrutiny. The 178 Sinti and Roma interviewed by State Attorneys Hans Klein and Jürgen Hess in 1966–1967 were part of this effort.
The new prosecutors who prepared the subsequent trial in the mid- and late 1960s were among the first to treat the individual Romani testimonies they assembled as part of a broader collective story. Never before had anyone sought out so many Romani survivors in order to reconstruct the unfolding of the Romani Holocaust.27 Yet due to a series of decisions, some of which had nothing to do with Romani victims themselves, these files had little effect on the legal proceedings that unfolded over the course of the next decade. Prosecutors ultimately decided to split up the proceedings into six separate trials and determined that the depositions they had collected from Sinti and Roma did not offer sufficient evidence to secure the conviction of the SS work service leader (Arbeitsdienstführer) Willi Sawatzki, who had been active in Auschwitz camp BIIe.28 Despite this dead end, the Romani testimonies that State Attorneys Klein and Hess produced in the 1960s did not remain lost forever. Prosecutors and defenders made ample use of these files during a trial conducted in the late 1980s against Auschwitz camp SS-man Ernst-August König.29 Having filed copies of the 178 Sinti and Roma depositions they took within a separate binder for their own use (the so-called Handakte), Hess and Klein also unknowingly determined the way these documents would later be presented to visitors of the Fritz Bauer Institute’s archive in Frankfurt am Main, which inherited their papers.30 In the process, they turned individual testimonies into a thematic collection of use to both administrators and historians.31
Much like other collections of state files—including police surveillance documentation—these protocols principally offer windows into the perspectives of the individuals who created them. They do not provide instances of direct speech. Rather, the prosecutors and typists who put the interviews to paper paraphrased what they understood to be their witnesses’ main points in a legally relevant form. The notes that resulted from these exchanges appear both in the first and third person. At times, they refer to apparently contradictory details in the deposition—such as conflicting deportation dates—and cite the testimonies of other witnesses or sources within a document originally intended to record the testimony of a single survivor.32
However mediated, these documents reveal a good deal about the ways in which different German Sinti and Roma experienced the act of witnessing after the war. They help us imagine what it might have meant for Sinti and Roma to face a prosecutor who summoned them to a criminal police office or sought them out with a criminal police officer at their side. They also make clear that victims’ obligations did not always end with their interviews: prosecutors regularly asked Romani witnesses to return to police headquarters to sign their deposition, which was originally recorded on a vinyl disc and only later transcribed.33
Prosecutors’ notes also demonstrate that they relied on police units that continued to profile Romani populations as potential criminals in order to locate witnesses who did not appear for their interviews when summoned.34 Alfred L. was not alone in this experience. In another instance, uniformed police from the city of Erlangen went in search of another witness, Xaver R., after he failed to appear at the police station following his summons. When they found he was not at home, they learned from his neighbors that he had been seen leaving his house precisely during the period when they expected him to show up for his interview. Not to be deterred, the state attorney drew on the expertise of the local criminal police, which informed him that—according to their records—Xaver R. continued to return to his home daily.35 Once again, the state expected the assistance of a victim of a heinous crime while also pursuing him with the kind of close surveillance that officials generally reserved for criminals or those they categorized as socially deviant.
The fact that several Romani survivors gave their statements in prison also reflects their continued criminalization in postwar West German society. In one case, a prosecutor interviewed a Romani man who had survived camps and prisons in Białystok, Brest-Litovsk, Birkenau, and Buchenwald only to be put behind bars for two months for the minor infraction of driving without a driver’s license.36 In this case, the protocol purports to record the lengthy explanations of a willing witness. Only the header makes clear that the prisoner was in jail when he offered his testimony.
In other instances, prosecutors’ irritation with Romani resistance to their efforts comes through in their official notes. One day in March 1967, State Prosecutor Klein drove with an officer of the criminal police to a “Gypsy camp” in Gelsenkirchen to seek out a witness who had skipped his summons. He found a camp full of former survivors of Auschwitz who supplied him with information about two important prisoner functionaries.37 Klein was nonetheless frustrated by the visit. In his notes, which became part of the trial record, he expressed his suspicion that the people he talked to were hiding the original witness who was awaiting trial for another matter. It is not hard to imagine the mixed reception these two state representatives must have experienced in the impoverished “Gypsy camp” they visited, where revealing the location of the man they sought to depose would have meant exposing him to agents of a legal system that was often hostile to Sinti and Roma. Here, too, the extent to which Klein’s informants gave their accounts willingly is difficult to ascertain. Yet the power imbalance and the legal implications of their exchange are hard to miss.
Klein’s record of his exchange with a prominent Romani activist during this period attests to the kind of frustration that many Romani survivors likely felt at being pawns rather than partners in the judicial process against their one-time Nazi persecutors. The encounter in question occurred just a few months after Klein’s trip to Gelsenkirchen, as he was interviewing a new Romani witness at the police headquarters in Mannheim. During Klein’s interrogation of his Romani witness, Vinzenz Rose (the founder of various associations of Sinti survivors after the war) made a surprise appearance.38 Rose was—by Klein’s account—somewhat agitated and started complaining that his attempts at redress against several crucial Nazi perpetrators had led nowhere. He had filed complaints with Frankfurt courts against three key perpetrators of the Romani Holocaust (Leo Karsten, Robert Ritter, and Eva Justin), he explained, but never received any information as to the outcomes of their proceedings.39 The prosecutor does not appear to have had an answer for Rose. He merely noted that Rose would not let himself be interrupted. Explaining that his experiences had eroded his trust in the West German justice system, Rose refused to cooperate further with prosecutors.40
It is unclear what prosecutors understood about the frustrations of the Romani witnesses they sought out. Was Klein aware that complaints against Ritter, Justin, and Karsten had been dismissed before they went to court, or that it was his own Frankfurt court that had ceased the investigations against Ritter and Justin? Ritter died in 1951 without facing consequences for his work as head of the Institute for Criminal Biology of the Security Police, while Justin, his assistant, continued her career as a municipal youth psychologist after the war and had her case closed in 1960.41 The investigation against Karsten, who had been responsible for Berlin Criminal Police dealings with “Gypsies” during the Nazi era, was also closed in the same year by another prosecutor’s office.42 Given this track record, it is hardly surprising that Romani survivors like Rose—who initially turned to the justice system in the hopes of having their erstwhile persecutors tried in court—eventually became disillusioned and resistant to cooperating any further with a system that had failed them.
Whereas Jewish survivors experienced similar frustrations with the ineffectiveness of West German courts after the war, Romani survivors were also suspicious of the prosecutors’ role as part of a state apparatus that continued to target them. Prosecutors remained in close contact with the criminal police, which still employed special “Gypsy experts” (Zigeunersachbearbeiter) even decades after the war.43 Prosecutors regularly relied on these officers to fill in the gaps in the information they collected directly from Romani informants. Although Romani survivors continued to provide the names of other Romani witnesses to the authorities—giving away the addresses and phone numbers of family members and even offering the civil names of people known to the police only by their Romani names in the process—prosecutors suspected that there were many more Romanies avoiding interrogation.44 Driven by this suspicion, they worked with the card files that criminal police units kept on all “Gypsies” passing through their jurisdiction and compared them to the deportation lists supplied by the International Tracing Service of the Red Cross.45 The surveillance state and the documentation provided by police officers about members of a vulnerable minority that faced continued criminalization were, thus, always active in the background of such postwar investigations into Nazi crimes.
However ominous, prosecutors’ continued reliance on the surveillance state did not necessarily put Romani witnesses in immediate danger. Yet once interviews began to touch on the potential crimes of witnesses’ family or community members, investigations against Nazi criminals more clearly posed a threat to Romani informants. Starting in the winter of 1967, prosecutors began asking Romani survivors not only for the names of the SS men who had persecuted them during the war but also for the names of Romanies who had been prisoner functionaries with positions of some (albeit limited) power in the camp. This went hand in hand with a greater effort to correlate prisoners’ “Gypsy names” with their legal names. Given that lists of names and aliases had been foundational for the creation of criminal police files on Romanies—from the German Empire to the Federal Republic—it is hard to imagine that survivors would not have had found it alarming when prosecutors arrived to their homes with criminal police escorts and asked for such information.46
In many cases, Romani witnesses were able to offer more concrete evidence against former fellow prisoners than they were about the crimes of the SS personnel whom they had seen less frequently in concentration camps. Prosecutors also profited from the anger some witnesses expressed toward those Romani prisoners who had personally hurt them or their families. The accusations former prisoners leveled against each other may have emerged from the prosecutors’ efforts to find new avenues in their case, but they also clearly demonstrate how unequal relations between inmates and kapos in the camps continued to weigh on survivors after the war. Although few witnesses officially registered such grievances, the exceptions are telling. One such account is that of a Romani survivor from Lower Saxony, who went on record with the following statement: “S. was block leader, to my knowledge. . . . The Gypsies themselves cannot get to him. Whenever they see him, he disappears right away. I want to add here that sometimes the kapos and block leader were worse than the SS.”47 The same survivor spoke of another block leader who mistreated pregnant women. He knew where he lived but he “always had his whole tribe [Sippe] of 50 men around him. Nobody can get to this man.”48 In another case, he reported that the father of a man drowned in a cesspit by a fellow Romani prisoner who had been a kapo was now “hunting” his son’s killer.49
Other documents reflected both these tensions and the reluctance of witnesses to accuse their kin. One Romani witness from Rheinland-Pfalz, Heinrich L., spoke openly of the brutality of kapos and block leaders, confirming reports about the crimes of one Romani prisoner who had died in the meantime. When questioned about his own brother, however, he invoked his right to remain silent.50 By his own account, the siblings had worked together in Birkenau’s disinfection block, with Heinrich’s brother Karl forcing prisoners to undress while Heinrich returned their disinfected clothes to them. According to Karl: “Sometimes we had to take drastic measures because the people had to undress.”51 Such sentences hinted at the violence that haunted this family. On the one hand, Heinrich L. refused to denounce his brother. On the other, he explained that he had severed all ties with Karl because of his actions at Auschwitz.
In other instances, witnesses worried more about the violence they might face for informing on others. When speaking of a former block leader at Auschwitz, another survivor asked prosecutors to treat any statements he had just made about the man confidentially, even though he had not said anything compromising about him.52 In the witness’s words, the block leader’s two sons, who had reportedly also served as block leaders in Auschwitz, were “bad boys” (üble Burschen). He feared they would exact revenge if they knew he had spoken to officials about their family.53
The desire for revenge among former prisoners was by no means particular to Romani survivors.54 Yet the openness with which some Romani witnesses were willing to discuss the topic with state representatives may well be unique in the risks it bore for the whole community. If much of the history of the memory politics surrounding the Romani genocide is one of missed opportunities, here Romani communities were lucky to have been passed over. Had prosecutors indicted Romani prisoner functionaries, it might have played into the hands of those who challenged the very idea of Romani victimhood. Although various survivors and prosecutors worked to prevent such trials, they nonetheless remained a distinct possibility, as the earlier convictions of multiple functionary prisoners make clear.55
It would have taken very little for things to have gone differently. Even small comments made in passing sometimes led to a criminal investigation.56 This was, in fact, how the first Frankfurt Auschwitz trial began—with a single letter from a convict who made accusations against a single SS guard. Other investigations involving Romani witnesses started with even less. While State Attorneys Klein and Hess were interviewing 178 Sinti and Roma about their experiences in Auschwitz, prosecutors from Munich had begun traveling across West Germany to interview Sinti and Roma about crimes committed in the labor camp Belzec in 1940.57 The trigger for this parallel endeavor was a clemency plea issued by a German Sinto who faced sentencing in a court in the northern city of Kiel.58 Although he mentioned incidents of lethal violence in an attempt to convince the presiding judge to treat his suffering in the labor camp as a mitigating circumstance, the judge felt obligated to inform local prosecutors, who in turn deemed the allegations credible enough to initiate a new investigation. The few steps that sometimes separated allegation from investigation could easily have led to a trial against various Romani block leaders as well—with serious consequences for Romani communities across West Germany.
The same rules that made it difficult to charge Nazi criminals also averted this scenario, however. In no case did prosecutors find more than one witness for any given incident and, in nearly all cases, the survivors they interviewed did not report having observed any killings with their own eyes. Witnesses more often worked with hearsay or presented their conjectures. One Romani survivor claimed, for example, that the head of BIIe’s Block 19 had killed his parents by having them sent into a quarantine block from which they never returned.59 The accused was still alive and easy to locate, as the prosecutor in question knew all too well: he had already interviewed the man himself. But given the high bar courts required for a murder conviction—namely, proof of direct knowledge of lethal consequences and malicious intent—circumstances rendered it difficult for the prosecutor to pursue this claim further. The rigid interpretation of West German law, which tried crimes undertaken within the genocidal state machinery like any other murder charge, likely kept the accusations against individual Romani prisoner functionaries out of the courtroom.
The possibility of pursuing justice at the expense of group solidarity nonetheless turned witnessing into a perilous act. As is often the case for groups under surveillance, when silence is not merely imposed by the outside but also serves as a survival strategy, a thin line separates “snitching” from making oneself heard.
Underscoring such patterns need not imply that the individual state representatives in charge of these cases were purposefully pursing nefarious policies. The files of the Frankfurt prosecutors who spent a year interviewing Romanies throughout West Germany suggest that they were created by two conscientious civil servants. Unlike many non-Romani witnesses who questioned Romani testimony as unreliable, the prosecutors involved remained professional and sought to avoid prejudicial judgments. In some instances, they even went beyond their official duties to help witnesses. Frankfurt prosecutors gave free legal advice to a man in Erlangen who avoided his first summons, for example, and also convinced him to begin taking up his compensation claims again after he had let the process stall.60
State Attorneys Klein and Hess no doubt acted as many representatives of the state would have when they mined all available administrative records to get a conviction. Cooperating with the local criminal police was only one among multiple means they used to pursue this end: Prosecutor Hess also drove his own car to seek out witnesses who had not appeared and personally handed out summons in a pub in Delmenhorst.61 He and Klein even considered recruiting witnesses at a Catholic pilgrimage and asked a priest to include a call in his newsletter for Romani witnesses to come forward.62 When they spoke to the criminal police and used their surveillance files, they did so as part of an all-out effort to put Nazi criminals behind bars. They likely viewed surveillance as an incidental tool to reach a laudable end: to convict Nazi criminals and eventually give Romani survivors their day in court. Highlighting the general competence and the apparent goodwill of the prosecutors toward Romani victims is crucial in understanding the potentially complex relationship between surveillance and witnessing. It reminds us that the production of witness testimonies can have malign effects regardless of the intentions of those involved.
The police targeting of particular ethnic, national, religious, or political groups emerged out of perceived technological and financial limitations. From the eighteenth century onward, European state authorities concerned with maintaining public order were enthusiastic supporters of creating ever-expanding registries but reserved the most costly forms of surveillance for those populations whom they characterized as exceptionally suspect.63 Targeted surveillance built on the methods used for all inhabitants of the state, such as the creation of stable addresses and conscription numbers for buildings, police registration of addresses, and the proliferation of standardized identification papers.64 Yet it also deployed specialized methods that affected people identified as criminals, foreigners, or Gypsies in particular. In such cases, legislators and state administrators had little incentive to make their surveillance less burdensome on the surveilled.
The mechanisms that different government officials developed for tracking people classified as “Gypsies” during the twentieth century are typical in this regard. The carnet anthropométrique initiated by the French Third Republic in 1912 included biometric information—such as fingerprints—and had to be carried by anyone the state classified as a nomad.65 Often using the carnet as their model, other states produced similar specialized forms of identity papers for non-settled populations and continued this practice after World War II. In West Germany, the state of Bavaria initiated one version of such papers in 1953. The Landfahrerbuch (“Vagrant’s Book”) included the fingerprints of all individuals traveling as a group—or a Horde (horde) as the law put it—and had to be kept by the head of the traveling family.66 In France, the carnet anthropométrique existed in its original form until 1969. The Landfahrerbuch was preserved in Bavaria until 1970.67 These documents were merely one component of a host of procedures that principally encumbered the individuals being surveilled. Upon entering new jurisdictions within a given state, such individuals were required to present their papers to the police and other state institutions, a procedure that reduced the workload of the authorities but made everyday life an endless struggle full of humiliating bureaucratic hurdles for those identified as problematic mobile populations.
In postwar West Germany, as in many other European countries, surveillance of Romani populations continued with only minor interruptions. New institutions established after the war, such as the Central Criminal Office for the Federal Republic (Bundeskriminalamt or BKA), founded in 1951, sought to build up their own expertise in this area.68 The project was soon roiled by disagreements between those who wanted the federal BKA to keep a central card file of “Gypsies” and Bavarian representatives who wanted all activities centralized in Munich, where the police had the greatest collection of “Gypsy files.”69 Although the different representatives involved jealously defended their areas of authority, they were philosophically on the same page, having reached a consensus that comprehensive surveillance of all “Gypsies” was desirable.70 Their aim was not merely to register the ethnic background of convicted criminals but rather to track all Sinti and Roma for the purposes of “preventative policing.” While various criminological traditions facilitated these discussions, the statistics that the West German criminal police created based on their “Gypsy files” revealed that theirs was a case of expertise in search of a problem: in 1954 only 0.0016 percent of the individuals identified by the police as perpetrators were categorized as travelers or vagrants (Landfahrer)—the new nomenclature for people formerly known as Gypsies (Zigeuner).71
With time, various political and technological shifts came together to end these practices. Most noticeable to historians have been the efforts of those targeted by such practices to challenge them in the political arena. Rather than evade surveillance by finding loopholes or playing different agencies against each other, the Romani civil rights movement that emerged in the 1970s attacked the practice of police surveillance head on with protests.72 Much like human rights activists who learned to deploy police archives as tools for transitional politics in places such as Guatemala, Romani leaders used the archives of past persecution to make claims for compensation and representation, and to reshape their relationship with the state.73 The most famous case involved a large cache of so-called race-diagnostic opinions produced by Ritter’s Race-Hygienic and Population-Biological Research Institute (Rassenhygienische und Bevölkerungsbiologische Forschungsstelle), which had prepared the deportation of German Sinti and Roma. In 1981, Romani activists seized these documents in the archives of the University of Tübingen and brought them in a convoy to the federal archives after they had been inaccessible for decades.74 Such efforts contributed to a growing public understanding that Sinti and Roma had been victims of Nazism’s genocidal policies.75
The end of the onerous surveillance of German Romanies also had other causes. Alongside evolving public recognition of the plight of Roma and Sinti during the Holocaust, technology—and public and official attitudes toward technology—mattered as well. Even before the efforts of the Romani civil rights movement produced any results, a turn to electronic surveillance transformed the way West German police registered Romani populations. Criminal police headquarters in the large states of Bavaria and Rhineland-Palatinate reported having abandoned their “Gypsy card files” in 1970–1972 and 1975 respectively.76 Computer-based systems took over. In 1972, the West German BKA started its information system INPOL, at first with only limited connections to various state police offices.77 By 1973, however, INPOL’s central feature had become the control of movement across state borders. Romani files thus transformed from traditional lists of targeted individuals to attributes of records in much larger databases that would eventually include all state citizens.
While it did not free Romanies from state suspicion or police surveillance, this shift changed the stakes.78 Unlike the earlier separate lists of suspicious populations, which had largely affected marginalized groups, new electronic population management systems raised global concerns of infringements on privacy.79 Discussions of discriminatory practices, thus, increasingly came to rely on public disquiet about the power of databases. This lent Romani concerns a much broader resonance. The January 1983 protests in front of the BKA’s headquarters involving over 130 Sinti and Roma who sought to remove the entry for “Gypsy names” from West Germany’s central police database were consequently able to tap into discussions happening both among experts and the broader public about the potential perils of databases writ large.80
Attention to the stories of individual survivors of genocide gained new salience and meaning in this context. While a critique of instrumental thought, bureaucratic procedure, and detachment has been foundational to scholarship on the Holocaust (from the Frankfurt School to historians’ early emphasis on the centrality of desk murderers), the 1980s and 1990s marked a high point of such arguments.81 These were also the years in which victim-witnessing started to take center stage in scholarship. Starting with Götz Aly and Karl Heinz Roth’s 1984 book Die restlose Erfassung (or The Nazi Census in the English translation), a slew of publications began to point to the ways in which massive state-based registration practices had made the Holocaust possible.82 Interviewing individual survivors and emphasizing their personal acts of resistance appeared to many to be the antidote to “seeing like a state.”83 Even as scholars such as Lawrence Langer emphasized the anguish of recollection as well as survivors’ inability to communicate their experiences as coherent narratives, they upheld oral histories as a form of testimony that stood in radical opposition to the reduction of humans to numbers and lists.84
The first large set of video testimonies with Romani survivors, produced in 1991 by the Canadian ethnographer Gabrielle Tyrnauer, illustrates how scholars sought to distance their work from some of the more insidious mechanisms of state surveillance. In the interviews she conducted with twenty-four Romani Holocaust survivors at two campsites in Germany, Tyrnauer frequently asked about the role of “race scientists” in the creation of state registries that led to the deportation of German Romanies. At the same time, she consciously distanced herself from their practices: viewers can hear Tyrnauer’s videographer, Bill Kerrigan, remind her multiple times to ask people’s names. Although she did not articulate a policy on the matter, Tyrnauer appears to have purposefully left out crucial information that would have been necessary to properly identify her interlocutors.85 With her unorthodox approach, Tyrnauer signaled to those she interviewed that she understood that their exchanges were laden with the baggage of a longer history of heavy-handed questioning practices. Those Romani survivors who were willing to speak to her in front of a camera generally seemed eager to share their experiences but became suspicious if her questions resembled those that state authorities might have asked. The history of surveillance was, thus, always in the background as a set of practices that the interviewer sought to avoid.
Although Tyrnauer’s efforts to create a noncoercive environment were generally successful, they did not always erase her Romani informants’ lingering suspicions about being interviewed. Tyrnauer invested years of dedicated work to earn the trust of key community members and had forged ties with a revivalist preacher who helped her gain access to Romani informants. She also regularly invoked her Jewish background to remind those she interviewed that she too hailed from a group that had fallen victim to the Nazis.86 Some skepticism remained, however. In one instance, as she began asking for the name of a woman she was preparing to interview, the woman interjected with a question of her own: “Will this be on TV?” she asked those present that day.87 Tyrnauer explained in response that the tape “will go to America, to an archive, a university, a Holocaust archive.”88 The answer appears to have satisfied her interlocutor as it successfully conveyed that these interviews were not meant for public consumption in the survivor’s immediate environment. Both this woman and Tyrnauer’s other Romani informants could, thus, rest assured that neither local neo-Nazis nor other hostile neighbors would be able to see the testimonies.89 In this sense, the interviews built on a double promise: Romani survivors’ suppressed stories would finally be heard, but the individuals in question would also remain comfortably out of the spotlight. In a faraway place (America), in an institution that kept interviews for specialists (Holocaust archives), their fate would be recorded for posterity, yet only a select few would have access.
Tyrnauer’s assurances were realistic at the time. As they were recorded in an analogue medium (usually Betamax or VHS video), housed in one physical location, and registered in local catalogues or on printed lists, the interviews created in the 1980s and 1990s long remained accessible only to a small group of researchers. Collections, such as the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies that had funded Tyrnauer’s trip, even went beyond the legal requirements to protect their subjects’ privacy by listing only the first initial of witnesses’ last names in their catalogue. All of this made the interviewing that took place in the final decade of the twentieth century a relatively unthreatening activity, even to Sinti and Roma, who were keenly aware that personal information had been used against them in the past.90
Tyrnauer’s hesitancy to ask for names also echoes a strategy that scholars more broadly have devised to protect subjects’ privacy: removing identifying information in different instances. A standard procedure for human subject research, this approach continues to be favored by various oral history archives for particularly sensitive interviews. The USC Shoah Foundation, which now includes accounts of various cases of genocide and mass violence from around the world, has chosen to refrain from showing the images of certain survivors of the South Sudan civil war, for example.91 While interviewees’ voices are not distorted, their faces are obscured. The archive also edits the interviews to remove full names.92 Of course, such protections do not necessarily protect individuals if they face criminal charges, as the prominent case of Boston College’s interviews with people involved in the Northern Ireland “Troubles” reminds us. (These records were successfully subpoenaed in 2011.)93 They do, however, offer reasonable safety from coincidental tracking, retaliation by hostile private individuals, and extralegal state surveillance.
This approach has its downsides, however. Whether the interviewer purposefully collects only incomplete information or the archive removes information before making interviews public, such omissions may render testimonies of limited use to historians. Like the Frankfurt prosecutors of 1967–1968, historians, too, will inevitably seek out all available information to confirm the accounts they use. Doing so not only safeguards the integrity of their work but also protects vulnerable witnesses from challenges to their credibility. Lacking as they are in basic information that helps historians unambiguously identify individuals, such as witnesses’ birthdates or camp registration numbers, Tyrnauer’s otherwise rich interviews do not allow for this.94 In one case, Tyrnauer recorded only the Romani (rather than the legal) name of a survivor, which makes it difficult to identify the person in question and, thus, to confirm her statements against other sources. In another instance, the person interviewed is so effectively anonymized that later archives resorted to listing her only as an “unidentified” woman.95 As a result of these limitations—and the fact that, until 2014, the files were only available to those who traveled to New Haven, Connecticut, to consult them—historians have rarely used Tyrnauer’s interviews.
More commonly, archives collect all relevant information and leave it to the historian to anonymize individuals according to legal requirements and ethical considerations. In most cases, however, when scholars choose to anonymize individuals, anyone who cares to invest the resources into locating and reading the referenced documents would be able to see the anonymized individuals’ full names.96 In such cases, privacy is protected only insofar as it may be inconvenient to retrieve the complete information. (Anyone who is able to travel to the Fritz Bauer Institute in Frankfurt am Main could, for example, de-anonymize the Romani witnesses mentioned in this article.) It is also for this reason that this method of protecting individuals’ identities is no longer viable once the archive becomes available online. The example of Alfred L. offers a case in point. For a long time, it was reasonable to presume that his identity would remain relatively protected even when one cited his file in the ITS (International Tracing Service) archive. As of 2019, when the archive began to make its holdings available on the World Wide Web, however, any reference to his file now potentially reveals his last name to the wider public.
The balance between respecting the desire of witnesses to be heard and respecting their fear of revealing too much—particularly to the wrong people—clearly changes once institutions digitize testimonies and make them available online. Tyrnauer’s interviews, like so many others, no longer exist “in America” or “in an archive.” They are on the internet. While the copies deposited with the Fortunoff Archive are available only at certain dedicated institutions of higher learning, another set, donated in 2014 by Tyrnauer’s estate to the USHMM (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum), can be accessed from anywhere in the world without any restrictions. The interviews she so carefully worked to keep free of too many identifying details are now tagged with interviewee’s full names and can be found through general search engines—a means of processing them that was not prohibited by the original release forms.97 What is more, whether or not interviews have been tagged, the increasing use of artificial intelligence–powered voice recognition will soon allow for the cheap creation of transcripts that are full-text searchable, requiring new levels of intervention for those interested in hiding people’s identities. Indeed, many of the interviews in the collections of the USHMM already exist with full transcripts.
Shifting economic and cultural circumstances also change the original calculus that once existed between giving voice to victims and endangering their privacy. Some of the largest corporations in the world have turned the prediction and manipulation of human behavior into their business model—a reality that has prompted Shoshana Zuboff to call our age one of “surveillance capitalism.”98 All available information can contribute to a larger picture in this context. Unlike the targeted surveillance that Romanies experienced during the mid-twentieth century—a form of targeting that went hand in hand with visible forms of policing—this new form of surveillance may not perceptibly encroach upon the lives of the surveilled. On the contrary, the devices that inhabit our lives constantly invite us to volunteer our information in exchange for minor rewards.99 While Tyrnauer felt obliged to differentiate herself from the heavy-handed questioning of the state prosecutors who had come before her, the new methods of tracking individuals rarely induce such precautions since they either remain hidden, seem innocuous, or appear so omnipresent as to be inescapable. They are also largely unregulated, particularly in the United States.100
There is little question that today’s surveillance regimes are fundamentally different from the old ones. The damage inflicted by traditional surveillance on individuals who experience policing as a condition of life was self-evident. When prosecutors appeared at the doorsteps of Romani survivors with criminal police inspectors in tow, the Romanies in question would have suspected that the state could use anything they said against them. They could then weigh the opportunities that seeking justice offered against the dangers of becoming a police informer. As long as the state was the primary actor collecting information, such a calculus was easy to understand, even if it may have been complicated to manage in practice. The trade-offs are no longer as clear. It is time that we begin to think about new protections for subjects that go beyond the familiar (if still necessary) prescriptions of seeking individuals’ consent to record them or of securing the copyright for a recording.
Data extracted from oral history interviews can develop a life of its own beyond the original intentions of the interviewees, interviewers, and institutional backers. Once these interviews have been processed in modern repositories, testimonies can become minable data that can be cross-referenced and, potentially, independently sold.101 The dangers of new forms of tracking now go beyond the original fears of vulnerable populations vis-à-vis a hostile state, yet there are few safeguards against them. Standard release forms—including those used by the USHMM, the Shoah Foundation, and the Fortunoff Archive—do not mention ownership over metadata, for example.102 While they sometimes suggest that further use is restricted to educational purposes, such release forms rarely prohibit the commercial exploitation of data derived from testimonies. Even if the archives themselves limit their activities, what would stop a travel agency from marketing heritage trips to relatives of people interned in a particular camp? Or from targeting political advertisements at voters whose parents or grandparents mention membership in a Zionist organization?
Scholars themselves are also already participating in the invention of recoding tools with nonacademic applications that raise new ethical issues. The Shoah Foundation’s attempts to create holographic avatars out of in-depth interviews with Holocaust survivors has, for example, led to a corporate spinoff that promises users that they will be able to create storytelling representations of themselves who will interact with relatives even after their death. Such technologies that allow us to “speak with the dead” raise questions about protection from identity theft and “deep fakes,” among other things.103
Romani experiences in postwar Europe not only illustrate the entanglement of surveillance and testimonial practices; they also show us the value of learning from the sensibilities and tactics developed by those who have been singled out as targets of the state’s gaze. While particular groups continue to live under the shadow of police and state surveillance, with fewer and fewer exceptions, our lives are all collectively surveilled now. In this context, it is our responsibility to think critically about situations in which individuals willingly participate in their own surveillance by revealing seemingly innocuous facts about themselves and others even to well-intentioned interviewers. We would do well to adopt some of the skepticism that different Romani survivors evinced as various actors sought to interview them following the war. They knew too well that the work of well-meaning investigators bore an uncomfortable resemblance to that of their one-time persecutors. Both asked them to give over all kinds of personal information. Their shared medium was the interview.
For better or worse, historians are part of a broader information ecosystem both as users and as producers of data on past and present populations. Even those who do not consciously engage with the digital humanities are almost invariably still consumers of new surveillance products. When researchers sit at one of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s research computer terminals and review survivor testimony from a video archive, they can cross-check information against various traditional sources, such as Nazi camp files, postwar refugee files, testimonies of the same person in other video and audio testimony databases, and prosecutors’ files from various countries. Researchers also have at their disposal internet searches, social media profiles, and corporate databases, such as Ancestry.com, that help them locate relatives of survivors. Anyone who has read the tedious correspondence between prosecutors and criminal police or registry offices that was necessary to locate individuals before the rise of digitized registries will be readily aware that historians today have more effective access to the files of surveillance institutions than many state authorities once did. While biometric tracking systems, social media, and other technologies make it ever harder for individuals to hide their paths through life, historians profit from the same digital revolution in their efforts to trace people’s lives. Scholars may be unable to summon witnesses or send patrol cars to their houses, but with ever greater ease they participate in the digitized and indexed documentation of people with information gathered from institutional and peer-to-peer sources.104
While historians have long relied on past surveillance for their research, our status as producers of fine-grained personal information is new. We now participate in the production of digital ego-documents at a scale and with a level of accessibility that raises questions previous generations of historians did not need to ask. Furthermore, all of these activities are on track to increase both with the development of new technologies designed to help us record, store, and analyze testimonies and with pressures from universities and funding agencies to demonstrate public engagement. At issue is not simply the state’s use of private individuals’ information—often against their will or to their detriment—as in the past, but also historians’ contribution to the production of testimonies that seamlessly connect to other data sets, each of which appear innocuous enough on their own. As with videos uploaded as part of civic activism or the consumer devices that track our health, neither the willingness of subjects to submit their information nor the humanistic or subject-oriented intentions of those collecting the information absolve us from reflecting on the implications of mass data collections.105
Assessing the risks of new technological and economic developments to our craft has been complicated by the fact that data mining often takes place as barely perceptible background noise in our daily lives. Unlike the prosecutors of the 1960s, whose work alongside criminal police officers made their participation in state surveillance apparent to their subjects, the role today’s historians have played in mass-monitoring efforts is less palpable. Individual data points may not appear relevant on their own. Yet, much like secret police officers who gather all of the scraps of information they can—often benefiting from people’s belief that they are merely giving away what is irrelevant or already known—today’s data systems rely on “every flake of data dandruff we cannot help but leave behind in nearly everything we do.”106 Once upon a time, states created surveillance files that historians then mined. Historians are now increasingly in the position of producing sensitive and exploitable information, potentially for future governmental or corporate use.
The primary result of data mining thus far has been the ability to target advertising more precisely. Such practices might initially seem relatively harmless, slightly bothersome, or in bad taste, such as the possibility of focusing fundraising campaigns on descendants of Holocaust survivors based on metadata derived from testimony archives.107 Depending on who is using the information, however, such mining exercises can quickly become more troubling: actuarial practices, honed by our ever-increasing ability to process statistical information, can influence insurance premiums and mortgage rates, the central vectors of discrimination in the twentieth-century United States.108 In the political field, electoral processes can be manipulated by those who find increasingly sophisticated ways to target particular populations. Victims of atrocities who seek asylum are particularly vulnerable to having their information used against them.109
Who is to say that different forms of historical witnessing might not become part of actuarial policing or actuarial justice, where risk factors decided with algorithms determine how much scrutiny the police give a person or whether someone will receive parole, for example?110 Indeed, based on their own proprietary algorithms, some big data–driven computerized policing systems appear to operate on the assumption that certain forms of victimhood make a person more likely to be the perpetrator of a violent crime.111 This is not to say that Holocaust survivors or their descendants will become targets of discriminatory policing as a result. That is not the point. The problem is rather that we are not in a position to fully grasp the potential unintended uses of personal data in an age when corporations and social networks are as keen on highly detailed information as are states. If the emphasis on humanistic engagement with the weak was an inadequate response to traditional surveillance (because it came closer to the state’s activities than its practitioners ever conceded), it is even less of an antidote to broader “societies of control”—in Gilles Deleuze’s formulation—or to forms of “liquid surveillance”—in Zygmunt Bauman’s terms—where surveillance seems ever less tangible precisely as it becomes more widespread.112
Surveillance need not be problematic by definition. The same is true of the use and creation of surveillance information. Under certain conditions, such data sets can be necessary for the containment of diseases or can have democratic outcomes. Indeed, identification, a crucial element of surveillance, is foundational for the organization of participatory democratic systems. Yet whether the outcomes are democratic or not, scholars must come to terms with the fact that some of the central aspects of their work over the past decades—including histories from below, the focus on victim-witnesses, and the rise of the digital humanities—have been closely entwined with the emergence of new surveillance regimes.
What, then, are we to do? One response to the new challenges of the present moment, albeit one that might find few supporters among those who have a professional investment in making the past ever more accessible, would be to take a cue from the concept of “the right to be forgotten,” codified in European Union regulations in 2016.113 Forgetting in this context would not mean the destruction of the record but a delinking of the information involved. Might this also be an option for historical subjects?114 Should individuals have a right to be delinked from their grandmother’s testimony if she shows their image in a video possessed by the Shoah Foundation, for example? Stringent data security and privacy laws in various jurisdictions, particularly those that have been strengthened in the European Union with the General Data Protection Regulation that took effect in May 2018, offer some guidance. More than the costs of such rules, perhaps the most formidable challenge to such an approach is the fact that regulatory barriers can hardly keep up with the mass of new data or the novel tools that allow for its exploitation.115
A related path forward involves rethinking our policies regarding access more broadly. While acknowledging the many benefits of reducing barriers to information—including its leveling of economic and social inequalities—we must also be cognizant of the fact that we are presently rendering our historical subjects hyper-visible in ways that were once unthinkable. Even in the face of the growing push for historians to produce public-facing and digitally engaged scholarship, we can strive to retain more control over the dissemination of people’s personal information. Our most important means of providing such protections at the moment is, arguably, to avoid making interviews and other sensitive material available to general search engines, since doing so allows for too many unexpected opportunities for data mining.
We must also be willing to rethink the centrality of the consent form in dictating our handling of private information. Holistic efforts to safeguard people’s privacy will necessarily require us not only to continue to adapt consent forms to our changing realities but also to recognize that any document produced at a particular moment in time will inevitably be unable to fully anticipate potential future uses—or damages. Certainly, consent forms must and will remain indispensable. They are legally binding documents after all. Equally important, they reflect signatories’ expectations and priorities at the time of their interview. Yet, rather than allow them to dictate our approach, we can instead treat consent forms as a form of baseline protection in need of regularly updated scaffolding. The most radical version of this might be to ask people for repeated consent—irrespective of any legal obligation to do so—as circumstances change. A more practical solution would be to leave consent forms as they are but to consider declining to offer unrestricted access to historical material when the situation appears to warrant such a decision. While archivists and historians who add to digital and oral history collections have an obligation to respect different individuals’ choice to register their stories for posterity, we must also continue to exercise our best judgment and be willing to limit access when the nature of the original calculus shifts. As custodians of people’s personal information, we have a duty to reflect on what makes individuals vulnerable at any given moment and to keep revisiting the potential consequences of our policies as our information environment continues to change. Just because we have the legal right and technological capacity to use particular forms of processing does not mean that we should.
Ari Joskowicz is Associate Professor of Jewish Studies, European Studies, and History at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of The Modernity of Others: Jewish Anti-Catholicism in Germany and France (Stanford University Press, 2014) and coeditor with Ethan Katz of Secularism in Question: Jews and Judaism in Modern Times (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). He is currently writing a book on relations between Romanies and Jews during and since the Holocaust.
Acknowledgement
I am grateful for the valuable feedback I received on this paper from participants in the Vanderbilt History Seminar, Vanderbilt’s Central European History Colloquium, and conferences organized by the Prague Forum for Romani Histories, the Research Network “Legacies of Roma Genocide in Europe since 1945,” the Wiener Library, and the American University of Paris. I would also like to thank Julia Phillips Cohen, Emily Greble, Sarah Igo, Daniel Sharfstein, and the AHR’s anonymous reviewers and its editor for helping me improve this piece with their careful readings. Finally, Werner Renz, who was in charge of the archives at the Fritz Bauer Institute until 2016, generously offered his time and helped me both access and make sense of crucial sources.
Notes
See, for example, Alyson Manda Cole, The Cult of True Victimhood: From the War on Welfare to the War on Terror (Stanford, Calif., 2007); Fatima Naqvi, The Literary and Cultural Rhetoric of Victimhood: Western Europe, 1970–2005 (New York, 2007); Carolyn J. Dean, Aversion and Erasure: The Fate of the Victim after the Holocaust (Ithaca, N.Y., 2010); Svenja Goltermann, Opfer: Die Wahrnehmung von Krieg und Gewalt in der Moderne (Frankfurt am Main, 2017).
Annette Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness (Ithaca, N.Y., 2006). On the consequences of this focus for welfare politics, see Didier Fassin, Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present Times (Berkeley, Calif., 2012).
See, for example, David Lyon, Surveillance Studies: An Overview (Cambridge, 2007); Kirstie Ball, Kevin D. Haggerty, and David Lyon, eds., Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies (Oxon, UK, 2014); David. Lyon, The Electronic Eye: The Rise of Surveillance Society: Computers and Social Control in Context (Hoboken, N.J., 2013); Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York, 2019). Arguing for the role of specific targeting as motors of new surveillance over the role of capitalism, see James Renton, “The Global Order of Muslim Surveillance and Its Thought Architecture,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 41, no. 12 (September 26, 2018): 2125–2143. Many of the concerns raised in this literature have gained further urgency in light of current measures being used and contemplated to manage the COVID-19 pandemic.
I use the noun “Romanies” as well as the adjective “Romani” to speak of various ethnically defined groups who were sometimes called “Gypsies” by the authorities and their neighbors. Sinti were historically the largest Romani group living in Germany and often seek to distinguish themselves from Roma, the self-description of Eastern European groups. I, thus, refer to “Sinti and Roma,” as is customary in German debates, when speaking about Romani groups in the country, or simply “Sinti” (singular: Sinto/Sintezza) when I am confident that all individuals concerned would have referred to themselves in this manner. On the surveillance of Romanies, see Ilsen About, “La construction d’un système national d’identification policière en France (1893–1914): Anthropométrie, signalements et fichiers,” Gèneses, no. 54 (2004): 28–52; Tara Zahra, “‘Condemned to Rootlessness and Unable to Budge’: Roma, Migration Panics, and Internment in the Habsburg Empire,” American Historical Review 122, no. 3 (2017): 702–726; Jennifer Illuzzi, Gypsies in Germany and Italy, 1861–1914 (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK, 2014); Celia Donert, The Rights of the Roma: The Struggle for Citizenship in Postwar Czechoslovakia (Cambridge, 2017); Huub van Baar, Ana Ivasiuc, and Regina Kreide, eds., The Securitization of the Roma in Europe (Cham, 2018); Marion Bonillo, “Zigeunerpolitik” im deutschen Kaiserreich, 1871–1918 (Frankfurt am Main, 2001); Rainer Hehemann, Die “Bekämpfung des Zigeunerunwesens” im Wilhelminischen Deutschland und in der Weimarer Republik, 1871–1933 (Frankfurt am Main, 1987); Mark Münzel and Bernard Streck, eds., Kumpania und Kontrolle: Moderne Behinderungen zigeunerischen Lebens (Giessen, 1981). On the role of registration categories in Romani history, see Mihai Surdu, Those Who Count: Expert Practices of Roma Classification (Budapest, 2016); Leo Lucassen, Zigeuner: Die Geschichte eines polizeilichen Ordnungsbegriffes in Deutschland, 1700–1945 (Weimar, 1996).
A wide range of groups can be said to fall into this category, including colonial subjects, indigenous groups, and various national and ethnic minorities. For just a few examples: Daniel Brückenhaus, “‘Every Stranger Must Be Suspected’: Trust Relationships and the Surveillance of Anti-Colonialists in Early Twentieth-Century Western Europe,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 36, no. 4 (2010): 523–566; Keith D. Smith, Liberalism, Surveillance, and Resistance: Indigenous Communities in Western Canada, 1877–1927 (Edmonton, AB, 2009); Ahmad H. Saʾdi, Thorough Surveillance: The Genesis of Israeli Policies of Population Management, Surveillance and Political Control towards the Palestinian Minority (Manchester, 2014).
On the problematic asymmetries involved in the insistence that we read Romani history in light of Jewish history, see Ari Joskowicz, “Separate Suffering, Shared Archives: Jewish and Romani Histories of Nazi Persecution,” History and Memory 28, no. 1 (2016): 110–140.
Clara Han, “Experience: Being Policed as a Condition of Life (Chile),” in Didier Fassin, ed., Writing the World of Policing: The Difference Ethnography Makes (Chicago, 2017), 162–183.
See, for example, Victor M. Rios, Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys (New York, 2011); Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow (New York, 2012); Alice Goffman, On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City, Fieldwork Encounters and Discoveries (Chicago, 2014); Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham, N.C., 2015); Angela J. Davis, ed., Policing the Black Man: Arrest, Prosecution, and Imprisonment (New York, 2017).
On European Romanies’ ongoing experiences of discrimination, see Fundamental Rights Agency, Second European Union Minorities and Discrimination Survey: Roma—Selected Findings (Vienna, 2016), http://fra.europa.eu/sites/default/files/fra_uploads/fra–2016-eu-minorities-survey-roma-selected-findings_en.pdf.
Romani survivors often used testimonies—in conjunction with documentary material gained from past surveillance—to seek redress for past and continuing forms of persecution. For such a sentiment among a Romani survivor, see, for example, the film Das falsche Wort: Wiedergutmachung an Zigeunern (Sinti) in Deutschland?, directed by Katrin Seybold and written by Melanie Spitta (Seybold Film, 1987). On Sinti autobiographical writings in Italy, see Paola Trevisan, “Écrire pour qui? Auteurs, public et registres linguistiques dans les autobiographies des Sinti italiens,” Etudes Tsiganes 37, no. 1 (2009): 90–109.
See, for example, the contributions to Jane Caplan and John Torpey, eds., Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices in the Modern World (Princeton, N.J., 2001); Susan J. Pearson, “‘Age Ought to Be a Fact’: The Campaign against Child Labor and the Rise of the Birth Certificate,” Journal of American History 101, no. 4 (2015): 1144–1165.
See, for example, Margo J. Anderson, The American Census: A Social History, 2nd ed. (New Haven, Conn., 2015), 235–261. David I. Kertzer and Dominique Arel, eds., Census and Identity: The Politics of Race, Ethnicity, and Language in National Censuses (Cambridge, 2002); Melissa Nobles, Shades of Citizenship: Race and the Census in Modern Politics (Stanford, Calif., 2000). For similar debates among current activists seeking to collect statistical and census data on Romani and Traveler communities in the UK, see Jonathan Lee, “Why I Want the Government to Collect Data about My Ethnicity,” The Norwich Radical (blog), January 26, 2018, https://thenorwichradical.com/2018/01/26/why-i-want-the-government-to-collect-data-about-my-ethnicity/; Ciara Nugent, “‘It’s Like We Don’t Exist’: London’s Gypsies Stand Up to Be Counted,” The Guardian, January 18, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/jan/18/london-gypsies-counted-travellers-map-prejudice. Even as early as the 1960s, some Romani rights organizations demanded the collection of statistical information on Roma so as to create a basis for discussions about persistent inequalities. Rudolf Karway, Internationale Zigeunerrechtsmission to Bundesministerium des Inneren, Hamburg, March 27, 1969, Bundesarchiv B189/374, 11–15.
In the case of state files, in-depth secret police surveillance files are the exception and, in this sense, are arguably more similar to victim testimonies, with the important difference that the latter are generally more accessible to broader publics. On such files, see Timothy Garton Ash, The File: A Personal History (New York, 2010), 139; Katherine Verdery, Secrets and Truths: Ethnography in the Archive of Romania’s Secret Police (Budapest, 2014); Katherine Verdery, My Life as a Spy: Investigations in a Secret Police File (Durham, N.C., 2018).
On the effect of digitization—and the “digitized turn”—for historians, see Lara Putnam, “The Transnational and the Text-Searchable: Digitized Sources and the Shadows They Cast,” American Historical Review 121, no. 2 (2016): 377–402; on datafication, see Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think (Boston, 2013), 73–97.
See Jeffrey Shandler, Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age: Survivors’ Stories and New Media Practices (Stanford, Calif., 2017), 12–15, on indexing in the Shoah Foundation. On the possibilities such practices open up for public participation in knowledge production, see Michael Frisch, “Thought Piece: From A Shared Authority to the Digital Kitchen, and Back,” in Bill Adair, Benjamin Filene, and Laura Koloski, eds., Letting Go? Sharing Historical Authority in a User-Generated World (Philadelphia, Pa., 2011), 126–137.
A notable exception is Todd Samuel Presner, “The Ethics of the Algorithm: Close and Distant Listening to the Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive,” in Claudio Fogu, Wulf Kansteiner, and Todd Samuel Presner, eds., Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture (Cambridge, Mass., 2016), 175–202.
On Romani testimonies in archives of the Jewish Holocaust, see Joskowicz, “Separate Suffering, Shared Archives: Jewish and Romani Histories of Nazi Persecution.”
There were some organizations that supported Romani survivors earlier, but their efforts met limited success until the 1970s. See Yaron Matras, “The Development of the Romani Civil Rights Movement in Germany, 1945–1996,” in Susan Tebbutt, ed., Sinti and Roma: Gypsies in German-Speaking Society and Literature (New York, 1998), 49–63. On the beginnings of Romani political self-organization, see Ilona Klímová-Alexander’s multi-part essay, “The Development and Institutionalization of Romani Representation and Administration,” pts. 1–5, Nationalities Papers 32, no. 3 (September 2004): 599–629; 33, no. 2 (June 2005): 155–210; 34, no. 5 (November 2006): 599–621; 35, no. 4 (September 2007): 627–661; 38, no. 1 (January 2010): 105–122.
See “Holocaust Survivors and Victims Database,” U.S. Holocaust and Memorial Museum (hereafter USHMM), https://www.ushmm.org/online/hsv/person_view.php?PersonId=4855626.
International Tracing Service (ITS), 1.1.5.3 Individual Prisoners Buchenwald, 6448880–6448889, USHMM. According to Alfred’s older brother, the SS man in charge of the final selection for the arriving train had insisted that Alfred’s eight-year-old brother could not join the rest of his family on the train. Refusing to abandon her son, his mother stayed behind with his younger brother. They were both murdered after the father and the other brothers departed for Buchenwald. Fritz Bauer Institut (FBI), Frankfurt Auschwitz Prozess 2 (FAP2), Abt. Dokumentation – 4 Ks 2/63, 4 Ks 3/63, Vernehmungsprotolle, Sinti und Roma (Vernehmungsprotokolle Sinti), Siegmund Laubinger, Braunschweig, November 17, 1966, 52–55.
Vernehmungsprotokolle Sinti, Vermerk Staatsanwalt (StA) Klein, March 23, 1967, 261.
Sławomir Kapralski, “The Aftermath of the Roma Genocide from Implicit Memories to Commemoration,” in Anton Weiss-Wendt, ed., The Nazi Genocide of the Roma: Reassessment and Commemoration (New York, 2013), 229–251. Kapralski also mentions Romanies’ disadvantaged social and economic standing as reasons for their silencing.
The prejudice against Romani witnesses is well documented for German compensation claims, where administrators often remarked that they believed Roma to be culturally prone to flights of imagination. See Julia von dem Knesebeck, The Roma Struggle for Compensation in Post-War Germany (Hatfield, Hertfordshire, UK, 2011). Among non-Romani Auschwitz survivors, this opinion appeared, for example, in the testimony of one of the most important witnesses on events in the “Gypsy camp,” Hermann Diamanski, the former prisoner head of the camp. Diamanski warned prosecutors in Frankfurt am Main not to take Romani testimonies seriously. Testimony Hermann Diamanski, June 2, 1967, Fritz Bauer Institut, FAP2 HA 114–115 (Prozess Frey/Sawatzki), Bl. 21307–21310, 213111–21316.
On the trial, see Devin O. Pendas, The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, 1963–1965: Genocide, History, and the Limits of the Law (Cambridge, 2006); Rebecca Wittmann, Beyond Justice: The Auschwitz Trial (Cambridge, Mass., 2005).
Karola Fings, “Auschwitz and the Testimony of Sinti and Roma,” RomArchive—the Digital Archive of the Roma (blog), accessed February 17, 2017, https://blog.romarchive.eu/?p=7336.
See Werner Renz, “Die Frankfurter Auschwitz-Prozesse (1963–1981),” Hefte von Auschwitz, no. 24 (2009): 191–299, on the history of the trials.
The collective documentation on Romani claims assembled by West German restitution courts were larger, but these were created under multiple jurisdictions and belong to different archives.
Most of the Sinti and Roma survivors interviewed were unable to recognize Sawatzki, and only eight of their testimonies included any concrete information about criminal acts attributable to him.
Hess advised the team working to convict König to work through the testimonies he and Klein had collected in 1967–1968. See Vermerk, n.d., Gerichte Rep. 118 Nr. 2486, 130–131, Landesarchiv Nordrhein-Westfalen. König’s defense counsel, Georg Bürger, had defended Sawatzki and thus also knew of these testimonies. On his knowledge of these trials, see RA Georg Bürger to Landgericht Siegen, Frankfurt am Main, July 9, 1986, Gerichte Rep. 118, Nr. 2493, 1754–1755, Landesarchiv Nordrhein-Westfalen.
It is not possible to know how the documents’ original compilers labeled them; however, some later archivist or scholar clearly replaced the original label, as the files are now grouped together under the title “Sinti and Roma”—the ethnonym for German Romanies that has only become common usage since the 1980s.
Historians have, however, generally ignored these files. One exception is Heiko Haumann, Die Akte Zilli Reichmann: Zur Geschichte der Sinti im 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main, 2016), who uses individual files from the collection to reconstruct the biography of a Romani woman who testified at the first Frankfurt Auschwitz trial.
See, for example, Testimony Heinrich W., April 19, 1967, Vernehmungsprotokolle Sinti, 310–313.
Unfortunately, the recordings of the pretrial interrogations—unlike the reel-to-reel magnetic tapes of the main trial—have been lost. This means that we cannot compare the statements that were eventually transcribed by an administrative assistant of the court (Justizangestellte) with the spoken deposition of the witnesses.
On their targeting, see Wolfgang Feuerhelm, Polizei und “Zigeuner”: Strategien, Handlungsmuster und Alltagstheorien im polizeilichen Umgang mit Sinti und Roma (Stuttgart, 1987).
Vermerk, Erlangen, March 16, 1967, StA Klein, Vernehmungsprotokolle Sinti, 267.
Testimony Bruno K., March 21, 1967, Vernehmungsprotokolle Sinti, 251–252.
Vermerk, StA Klein, Gelsenkirchen, March 21, 1967, Vernehmungsprotokolle Sinti, 268. Another prosecutor interviewed the witness a month later: Testimony Ludwig H., April 12, 1967, Vernehmungsprotokolle Sinti, 288–291.
On Vinzenz Rose, see Romani Rose, Bürgerrechte für Sinti und Roma: Das Buch zum Rassismus in Deutschland (Heidelberg, 1987), 89–92.
The prosecutor misspelled Karsten as Carstens. Vermerk, StA Klein, Mannheim, July 4, 1967, Vernehmungsprotokolle Sinti, 454–455.
Vermerk, StA Klein, Mannheim, July 4, 1967, Vernehmungsprotokolle Sinti, 454–455.
Gilad Margalit, Germany and Its Gypsies: A Post-Auschwitz Ordeal (Madison, Wis., 2002), 129–134; Rainer Gilsenbach, “Wie Lolitschai zur Doktorwürde kam,” in Wolfgang Ayass, ed., Feinderklärung und Prävention: Kriminalbiologie, Zigeunerforschung und Asozialenpolitik (Berlin, 1988), 101–134. Ritter’s investigation was discontinued on August 28, 1950; two investigations on Eva Justin were closed on April 27, 1961, and December 12, 1960, respectively. See Sybil Milton, “Holocaust: The Gypsies,” in Samuel Totten, William S. Parsons, and Israel W. Charny, eds., Century of Genocide: Critical Essays and Eyewitness Accounts (New York, 2004), 161–205, here 201 n. 70.
StA Frankenthal, Verfahren gg. Leo Karsten, 9 Js 686/57 abd 9 Js 153/59 was discontinued on July 30, 1960. See Milton, “Holocaust: The Gypsies,” 201 n. 73. On Karsten, see also Patricia Pientka, Das Zwangslager für Sinti und Roma in Berlin-Marzahn: Alltag, Verfolgung und Deportation (Berlin, 2013).
The prosecutors in these trials still lived in a world in which local police stations could inform them matter-of-factly, and with some regret, that their Zigeunersachbearbeiter was currently unavailable because he was seeking advanced training elsewhere. Vermerk, StA Hess, Frankfurt am Main, May 11, 1967, Vernehmungsprotokolle Sinti, 341–343.
Many Sinti and Roma use a Romani name to identify themselves within their community and another name for interactions with authorities or for other official purposes. Eve Rosenhaft, “At Large in the ‘Gray Zone’: Narrating the Romani Holocaust,” in Sebastian Jobs and Alf Lüdke, eds., Unsettling History: Archiving and Narrating in Historiography (Frankfurt am Main, 2010), 149–179, here 154–155, details the complicated decisions involved in scholarly naming practices in light of this split between communal and official names. By using only “Gypsy names,” one might preserve individuals’ anonymity, yet doing so simultaneously obscures the different identities people assumed when under surveillance.
Vermerk, StA Hess, Frankfurt am Main, April 17, 1967, Vernehmungsprotokolle Sinti, 307–309; Vermerk, StA Hess, Frankfurt am Main, May 11, 1967, 341–343; Vermerk, StA Klein, Oldenburg, May 18, 1967, Vernehmungsprotokolle Sinti, 406–408. The German police information system INPOL contained the addition “Z” for “Zigeuner,” until 1984. See Markus End, Kathrin Herold, and Yvonne Robel, “Antiziganistische Zustände—eine Einleitung: Virulenzen des Antiziganismus und Defizite in der Kritik,” in Markus End, Kathrin Herold, and Yvonne Robel, eds., Antiziganistische Zustände: Zur Kritik eines allgegenwärtigen Ressentiments (Münster, 2009), 9–22, here 9.
The most famous compendium of names is Alfred Dillmann, Zigeuner-Buch (Munich, 1905). On police files, see Stephan Bauer, Von Dillmanns Zigeunerbuch zum BKA: 100 Jahre Erfassung und Verfolgung der Sinti und Roma in Deutschland (Heidenheim, 2006).
Testimony August S., April 14, 1967, Vernehmungsprotokolle Sinti, 318.
Ibid.
Ibid., 318–319.
Vermerk, StA Hess, Frankfurt am Main, April 20, 1967, Vernehmungsprotokolle Sinti, 325–326; “von seinem Aussageverweigerungsrecht Gebrauch machen.” The police used a standard form for witness interrogations, which usually did not enter the court’s record but remained part of the police’s diary of daily activities (Tagebuch). On it witnesses confirmed that the police had read the relevant sections of the criminal code to them about the right to refuse making incriminating statements about relatives (§52 Abs 1 and §55 Abs 1 StPO).
Testimony Karl L., April 20, 1967, Vernehmungsprotokolle Sinti, 327–330, here 328.
Testimony Eduard D., April 27, 1967, Vernehmungsprotokolle Sinti, 344–348.
Vermerk, StA Hess, Haßfurt, April 27, 1967, Vernehmungsprotokolle Sinti, 349.
On Jewish survivors, see Gabriel Finder and Laura Jockusch, eds., Jewish Honor Courts: Revenge, Retribution, and Reconciliation in Europe and Israel after the Holocaust (Detroit, Mich., 2015).
The indictment for the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, which included one former kapo among the accused, had a historical section on the crimes of prisoner functionaries. Wittmann, Beyond Justice, 116–117. In Czechoslovakia, the only conviction for crimes against Romanies on the state’s territory concerned a Romani man who had performed guard duties in the camp Hodonín and served as a room orderly in Auschwitz-Birkenau. On the trial of 1946–1947, see Donert, The Rights of the Roma, 44–45; and Michal Schuster, “Process s Blažejem Dydym na základě materiálů Mimorádného lidového soudu v Brně roku 1947,” Romano džaniben 20, no. 1 (2013): 73–101.
There were also instances of victims purposefully triggering investigations: As part of a family feud, one Romani man in 1962 accused his brother-in-law of having killed Russian POWs by throwing them into a latrine, where they suffocated. The case led to an extended investigation that included interrogations of thirty Buchenwald survivors, which prosecutors abandoned only when members of the association of Buchenwald survivors, the Lagergemeinschaft Buchenwald, claimed that such a murder was physically impossible with the latrines used after 1939. See Staatsarchiv München, Generalstaatsanwaltschaft beim OLG München 2100, 7 Js 407/61; see especially Einstellungsverfügung, Staatsanwaltschaft bei dem Landgericht Augsburg, November 22, 1962.
Einzeltötungen von Sinti und Roma in dem vom Selbstschutz im Jahre 1940 eingerichteten Arbeitslager Belzec/Distrikt Lublin, Bundesarchiv B 162/3231.
Abschrift, Brief des Untersuchungsgefangenen Arnold W. an Untersuchungsrichter beim Landgericht Kiel, February 11, 1966, Bundesarchiv B 162/3231, 2–3.
Testimony Stefan R., Vermerk, StA Klein, Frankfurt am Main, October 25, 1967, Vernehmungsprotokolle Sinti, n.p.
Xaver R. to International Tracing Service, March 20, 1967, ITS, 6.3.3.2, TD File 631951, 103492332, USHMM.
Vermerk, StA Hess, Frankfurt am Main, April 17, 1967, Vernehmungsprotokolle Sinti, 307–309.
Vermerk, StA Klein, Frankfurt am Main, May 12, 1967, Vernehmungsprotokolle Sinti, 382.
Clifford D. Rosenberg, Policing Paris: The Origins of Modern Immigration Control between the Wars (Ithaca, N.Y., 2006). The larger history of registration is both older and starts outside of Europe; see Keith Breckenridge and Simon Szreter, Registration and Recognition: Documenting the Person in World History (Oxford, 2012); for a focus on modern Europe, see Ilsen About, James Brown, and Gayle Lonergan, eds., Identification and Registration Practices in Transnational Perspective: People, Papers and Practices (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK, 2013); see also Edward Higgs, Identifying the English: A History of Personal Identification, 1500 to the Present (London, 2011), who emphasizes the role of the Industrial Revolution.
Anton Tantner, House Numbers: Pictures of a Forgotten History, trans. Anthony Mathews (London, 2015); on the history of identification papers, see Caplan and Torpey, Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices in the Modern World; John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship, and the State (Cambridge, 2000); Craig Robertson, The Passport in America: The History of a Document (New York, 2010). On the connection between biometric technologies and modern state building, see in particular the literature on colonial and postcolonial settings: Keith Breckenridge, Biometric State: The Global Politics of Identification and Surveillance in South Africa, 1850 to the Present (Cambridge, 2014); Ferenc David Markó, “‘We Are Not a Failed State, We Make the Best Passports’: South Sudan and Biometric Modernity,” African Studies Review 59, no. 2 (2016): 113–132.
Emmanuel Filhol, “Le carnet anthropométrique des nomades,” in Pierre Piazza, ed., Aux origines de la police scientifique: Alphonse Bertillon, précurseur de la science du crime (Paris, 2011), 252–273.
Landfahrergesetz 1953, Art. 6, Bayerisches Gesetz- und Verordnungsblatt Nr 27/1953, https://www.verkuendung-bayern.de/files/gvbl/1953/27/gvbl–1953–27.pdf.
The carnet was replaced by another identification document in France, the livret de circulation, which was only abolished in 2015. On the Landfahrerbuch, see von dem Knesebeck, The Roma Struggle for Compensation in Post-War Germany, 47–48.
The BKA negotiated its role with individual states in a permanent conference called AG Kripo, Andrej Stephan, “‘Kein Mensch sagt HWAO-Schnitzel,’ BKA-Kriminalpolitik zwischen beständigen Konzepten, politischer Reform und ‘Sprachregelungen,’” in Imanuel Baumann, Herbert Reinke, Andrej Stephan, and Patrick Wagner, eds., Schatten der Vergangenheit: Das BKA und seine Gründergeneration in der frühen Bundesrepublik (Cologne, 2011), 247–285, here 254–255.
Ibid., 260–261.
Ibid., 259.
Ibid., 261. On the switch from the term “Zigeuner” to “Landfahrer,” see ibid., 255–256.
On earlier strategies of evasion, see Illuzzi, Gypsies in Germany and Italy, 1861–1914.
Kirsten Weld, Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala (Durham, N.C., 2014).
Josef Henke, “Quellenschicksale und Bewertungsfragen: Archivische Probleme bei der Überlieferungsbildung zur Verfolgung der Sinti und Roma im Dritten Reich,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 41, no. 1 (1993): 61–77.
Margalit, Germany and Its Gypsies, 180–214.
Romani Rose, “Die Aufarbeitung der Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus als Chance für die rechtsstaatliche Behandlung von Minderheiten,” in Sonja Kock and Deutschland Bundeskriminalamt, eds., Das Bundeskriminalamt stellt sich seiner Geschichte: Dokumentation einer Kolloquienreihe (Cologne, 2008), 140.
Rüdiger Bergien, “‘Big Data’ als Vision: Computereinführung und Organisationswandel in BKA und Staatssicherheit (1967–1989),” Zeithistorische Forschungen 14, no. 2 (2017): 258–285. On the role of computers and computer expertise in transforming other state administrations, see, for example, Jon Agar, The Government Machine: A Revolutionary History of the Computer (Cambridge, Mass., 2003).
On the continuities in German policing of Sinti and Roma until today, see Markus End, “The ‘Gypsy Threat’: Modes of Racialization and Visual Representation Underlying German Police Practices,” in Huub van Baar, Ana Ivasiuc, and Regina Kreide, eds., The Securitization of the Roma in Europe (Cham, 2019), 261–283.
Sarah Elizabeth Igo, The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America (Cambridge, Mass., 2018), 221–263; Horst Feistel, “Cryptography and Computer Privacy,” Scientific American, no. 228 (1973): 15–23. For many intellectuals at the time, the critique of state surveillance was also inspired by Michel Foucault’s 1975 Surveiller et punir [Discipline and Punish]. Allan Megill, “The Reception of Foucault by Historians,” Journal of the History of Ideas 48, no. 1 (1987): 117–141, here 103–131. On the German reception among young intellectuals in the 1980s, see Uta Liebmann Schaub, “Foucault, Alternative Presses, and Alternative Ideology in West Germany: A Report,” German Studies Review 12, no. 1 (1989): 139–153. Some of these concerns overlapped with the rise of debates on research ethics in the behavioral sciences and the expansion of Institutional Review Boards in the social sciences. See Alexandra Rutherford, “The Social Control of Behavior Control: Behavior Modification, Individual Rights, and Research Ethics in America, 1971–1979,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 42, no. 3 (2006): 203–220; Zachary M. Schrag, “How Talking Became Human Subjects Research: The Federal Regulation of the Social Sciences, 1965–1991,” Journal of Policy History 21, no. 1 (2009): 3–37; Zachary M. Schrag, Ethical Imperialism: Institutional Review Boards and the Social Sciences, 1965–2009 (Baltimore, Md., 2010).
Imanuel Baumann, Andrej Stephan, and Patrick Wagner, “(Um-)Wege in den Rechtsstaat,” Zeithistorische Forschungen 9, no. 1 (2012): 33–53.
For earlier iterations of these ideas, see Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York, 1997), first published in German 1947; Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 3rd ed. (New Haven, Conn., 2003), first published 1961. Later work in this vein includes Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, N.Y., 1989); Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge, 1984); Götz Aly and Susanne Heim, Architects of Annihilation: Auschwitz and the Logic of Destruction (Princeton, N.J., 2002), first published in German 1991.
Published in English as Götz Aly and Karl Heinz Roth, The Nazi Census: Identification and Control in the Third Reich (Philadelphia, Pa., 2004). See also William Seltzer and Margo Anderson, “The Dark Side of Numbers: The Role of Population Data Systems in Human Rights Abuses,” Social Research 68, no. 2 (2001): 481–513; William Seltzer, “Population Statistics, the Holocaust, and the Nuremberg Trials,” Population and Development Review 24, no. 3 (1998): 511–552; Henry Friedlander, “Registering the Handicapped in Nazi Germany: A Case Study,” Jewish History 11, no. 2 (1997): 89–98; Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation (New York, 2001).
James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, Conn., 1998). Although Scott came late to these debates, his phrase came to dominate scholarly conversations on the topic. See also James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven, Conn., 2009), which also alludes to the resistance to state building by “Gypsies.”
See Lawrence L. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven, Conn., 1991).
In her recollections of the interview process, Tyrnauer notes that her main contact in the community would sometimes call her Lolitschai, the Romani nickname of a female race scientist who had famously misrepresented herself to create lists of Romani families, which were later used to mark them for deportation. Gabrielle Tyrnauer, “Recording the Testimonies of Sinti Holocaust Survivors,” in Wolfgang Mieder and David Scrase, eds., Reflections on the Holocaust: Festschrift for Raul Hilberg on His Seventy-Fifth Birthday (Burlington, Vt., 2001), 223–237, here 235.
Information on the events happening offscreen are based on Tyrnauer, “Recording the Testimonies of Sinti Holocaust Survivors,” and my interview with Bill Kerrigan, September 18, 2018. Tyrnauer fled Nazi-occupied Austria as child, but she did not touch on her personal experiences on camera.
The original is more colloquial: “Was kommen wir in Bild?” USHMM RG-50.719.0012, tape 1, min 28:20, https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn86050.
Ibid.
Many Romani interviewees feared neo-Nazis at a time of increasing racist violence following German unification. The interviews took place a few months before the xenophobic Hoyerswerda riots of September 1991. On post-unification anti-foreigner violence, see, for example, Roger Karapin, “Antiminority Riots in Unified Germany: Cultural Conflicts and Mischanneled Political Participation,” Comparative Politics 34, no. 2 (2002): 147–167; Panikos Panayi, “Racial Violence in the New Germany 1990–93,” Contemporary European History 3, no. 3 (1994): 265–287.
On Romanies’ ongoing reluctance to be interviewed well into the twenty-first century, see Artur Podgórski, “Interviews mit polnischen Roma,” in Alexander von Plato, Almut Leh, and Christoph Thonfeld, eds., Hitlers Sklaven: Lebensgeschichtliche Analysen zur Zwangsarbeit im internationalen Vergleich (Vienna, 2008), 91–102.
I thank Wolf Gruner, the director of the University of Southern California’s Center for Advanced Genocide Research, for explaining these procedures to me.
The interviewers also explain some of the precautions during the interview. See, for example, USC Shoah Foundation VHA, anonymous, Interview 55513, August 24, 2015. Another project that take steps to protect sources currently and is based on expertise coming out of World War II documentation is the Syrian Oral History Project at the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation (NIOD). The various archives with private footage of events create a whole different set of privacy issues. For some reflections on such archives, see Jeff Deutch and Hadi Habal, “The Syrian Archive: A Methodological Case Study of Open-Source Investigation of State Crime Using Video Evidence from Social Media Platforms,” State Crime Journal 7, no. 1 (2018): 46–76. For such archives see, for example, Washington University’s Ferguson Project, http://digital.wustl.edu/ferguson/index.html; and the non-affiliated Syrian Archive found at https://syrianarchive.org/en.
On the need to clarify such limitations to interviewees, see “Oral History Society Statement on the Boston College Belfast Project, May 2014,” Oral History 42, no. 2 (2014): 27; Ted Palys and John Lowman, “Defending Research Confidentiality ‘to the Extent the Law Allows’: Lessons From the Boston College Subpoenas,” Journal of Academic Ethics 10, no. 4 (2012): 271–297. For documentation of those fighting the subpoena, see Boston College Subpoena News, https://bostoncollegesubpoena.wordpress.com/.
From the earliest testimonies to the present, camp registration numbers have served as the crucial reference numbers for compensation claims courts, prosecutors, survivor organizations, and historians to confirm the stories of those interned at Auschwitz and other SS camps. For most—but not all—Auschwitz prisoners, these numbers were tattooed on their arm. On the act of showing the tattoo in video testimonies, see Noah Shenker, Reframing Holocaust Testimony (Bloomington, Ind., 2015), 87–88.
Oral history interview with Tinschla, USHMM RG-50.719.0009; oral history interview with unidentified interviewee, USHMM RG-50.719.0010.
It is rare to see scholars take the radical step of omitting references. See, for example, Verdery, My Life as a Spy: Investigations in a Secret Police File. Verdery is particularly careful to protect individuals’ privacy, even anonymizing her mother (p. 56), yet she also concedes that “qualified researchers can discover” the names of the individuals (p. xiv).
The original release agreement with the Fortunoff Archive determined that the archive could use interviews “in any other way” and “in any form.” I thank Stephen Naron, the director of the Fortunoff Archive, for sharing an anonymized sample release form. I say “not prohibited” rather than “permitted” because the ability to find a video in internet search engines was beyond all involved parties’ experiences in 1991. Release forms from major testimony archives still do not touch on this point.
Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Other authors have also sought to link capitalism and digitization in their analysis. See, for example, Robert Waterman McChesney, Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet against Democracy (New York, 2013).
Surveillance itself can even become part of the pleasure of using devices rather than a side effect of convenience. See John McGrath, Loving Big Brother: Surveillance Culture and Performance Space (Hoboken, N.J., 2013).
Zuboff, Age of Surveillance Capitalism.
There are technical limitations to such arrangements, which is not to say that they cannot be overcome. Interviews collected by the Shoah Foundation are currently registered in a proprietary format rather than the interoperable MARC standard for library catalogues recommended for oral history interviews since the 1980s. Furthermore, at the moment, the archive does not permit users to embed interviews without special permission from the interviewee. Most interviews remain part of a dedicated Internet2 network. On this, see Shenker, Reframing Holocaust Testimony, 132–133. Shenker notes that other archives and funding agencies are critical of some of these limitations. On early recommendations to use MARC standards, see Frederick J. Stielow, The Management of Oral History Sound Archives (New York, 1986), 70–73.
For release forms of the USC Shoah Foundation (version of October 2012), see Interviewee Release Agreement, https://sfi.usc.edu/sites/default/files/docfiles/USC%20SF%20RelAgree_Oct%202012.pdf. For sample release forms, see Donald A. Ritchie, Doing Oral History, 3rd ed. (New York, 2015), 277–279; for a release form from the Library of Congress, which retains copyright with the interviewee, see Interview Release Form, www.loc.gov/folklife/edresources/edcenter_files/samplereleaseforms.pdf.
See StoryFile, https://storyfile.com/; see also Adam Balkin, “New Technology Lets You ‘Speak’ with Holocaust Survivors, Even after They’re Gone,” Digital Trends, June 3, 2017, https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/virtual-conversation-with-holocaust-survivors/.
Indeed, at this point, many threats to privacy come neither from government nor corporate surveillance but rather, as the legal scholar Jonathan Zittrain has argued, from the way that any individual can now participate in generative peer-to-peer information gathering through digital linkages. See Jonathan L. Zittrain, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It (New Haven, Conn., 2008), 200–234.
Pramod K. Nayar, Citizenship and Identity in the Age of Surveillance (Cambridge, 2014); Minna Ruckenstein and Natasha Dow Schüll, “The Datafication of Health,” Annual Review of Anthropology, no. 46 (2017): 261–278; Natasha Dow Schüll, “Data for Life: Wearable Technology and the Design of Self-Care,” BioSocieties 11, no. 3 (2016): 317–333, https://doi.org/10.1057/biosoc.2015.47.
Colin Koopman, How We Became Our Data: A Genealogy of the Informational Person (Chicago, 2019), viii. For a description of the mistaken understanding of data collection as it relates to those subject to police interrogations and our current inability to understand future vectors of inquiry, see Verdery, Secrets and Truths: Ethnography in the Archive of Romania’s Secret Police, 183–184, esp. 217.
Fundraising is also within the purview of many of the institutions collecting the material. Permission to use the interview and the name of witnesses for “all nonprofit purposes, including fundraising” are part of the standard “Oral History Interview Consent and Assignment” form of the USHMM (used since the early 2000s). I thank James Gilmore, the Oral History Archives Specialist at the USHMM, for making available release forms to me and to Ina Navazelskis, Program Coordinator at the USHMM, for explaining how staff drafted and used such forms.
Daniel B. Bouk, How Our Days Became Numbered: Risk and the Rise of the Statistical Individual (Chicago, 2015); Manuel Aalbers, Place, Exclusion, and Mortgage Markets (Malden, Mass., 2011); Stephen L. Ross, The Color of Credit: Mortgage Discrimination, Research Methodology, and Fair-Lending Enforcement (Cambridge, Mass., 2002). Challenges to discriminatory lending have similarly been based on statistics. On the “informatics of race,” see Koopman, How We Became Our Data, 108–150.
Individuals working for refugee aid organizations have recently begun discussions of the ways that big data can threaten their mission. Ben Hayes, “Migration and Data Protection: Doing No Harm in an Age of Mass Displacement, Mass Surveillance and ‘Big Data,’” International Review of the Red Cross 99, no. 904 (2017): 179–209.
Bernard E. Harcourt, Against Prediction: Profiling, Policing, and Punishing in an Actuarial Age (Chicago, 2007).
Andrew G. Ferguson, The Rise of Big Data Policing: Surveillance, Race, and the Future of Law Enforcement (New York, 2017), 38.
Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October, no. 59 (1992): 3–7; Zygmunt Bauman and David Lyon, Liquid Surveillance: A Conversation (Cambridge, 2016).
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Regulation (EU) 2016/679 on the Protection of Natural Persons with Regard to the Processing of Personal Data and on the Free Movement of Such Data, Art. 17, “Right to Erasure,” https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2016/679/oj.
Whether such rights derive from protections due to the living (as most would agree) or from the rights of the dead (a more controversial proposition) is a much larger debate. On the interests and rights of the dead, see, for example, T. M. Wilkinson, “Last Rights: The Ethics of Research on the Dead,” Journal of Applied Philosophy 19, no. 1 (2002): 31–41; Antoon de Baets, “A Declaration of the Responsibilities of Present Generations toward Past Generations,” History and Theory 43, no. 4 (2004): 130–164; Kirsten Rabe Smolensky, “Rights of the Dead,” Hofstra Law Review 37, no. 3 (2009): 763–803; Adam Rosenblatt, “International Forensic Investigations and the Human Rights of the Dead,” Human Rights Quarterly 32, no. 4 (2010): 921–950. For an argument from within the historical profession against any attempts to attribute rights to the dead, see Susan C. Lawrence, Privacy and the Past: Research, Law, Archives, Ethics (New Brunswick, N.J., 2016).
When historians discuss U.S. data protection laws (such as FERPA and HIPPA), they tend to emphasize (rightly) that these were created without much thought to historical research and are detrimental to the practice of history; see Lawrence, Privacy and the Past. Others are mostly concerned with understanding regulations and protecting scholars from legal risk; see John A. Neuenschwander, A Guide to Oral History and the Law, 2nd ed. (New York, 2014), 20.