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Subject: Long pursuit of racial purity (second correction)
Le Monde diplomatique
-----------------------------------------------------
October 1999
GYPSY HUNT IN SWITZERLAND
Long pursuit of racial purity
___________________________________________________________________
In May this year the Swedish parliament decided to compensate the
victims of Sweden's forced sterilisation policy, which was introduced
in
1934 and only abandoned in 1975. During the inter-war period, in the
prevailing climate of feverish nationalism, policies were introduced
throughout Europe to eliminate or control social deviants and
foreigners. Under pressure from the new science of eugenics, they
reached frenzied heights in Nazi Germany. But they were also pursued in
other forms by the Swiss government, which applied them to the Gypsies.
by LAURENCE JOURDAN *
___________________________________________________________________
"I was taken from my mother at birth. I was put in a home for mentally
retarded children, where I first underwent the psychiatric torture
inflicted on the children of the Yenish community (1). I was entrusted
to the care of Dr Siegfried. The first time I asked him who my parents
were, he said 'Your mother's a whore and your father's an antisocial
good-for-nothing.' I lived with that for ten years. Until I understood
what he meant: my parents were Gypsies."
Mariella Mehr is a Yenish writer who now lives in Italy. For over 25
years she has been writing about the fate of the Yenish Gypsies in
Switzerland. From 1926 to 1972 Yenish children were ruthlessly hunted
down by the Oeuvre d'entraide aux enfants de la grand-route
(Association for Assistance to Traveller Children). Like hundreds of
others, Mehr was removed from her parents by force. In her family,
three generations were victims of forced sedentarisation: her mother,
herself and her son.
Seventy-two years after its foundation, a historical investigation
dispelled any ambiguity about the nature of the Oeuvre. In June last
year Ruth Dreyfuss, a member of the Federal Council, now President of
the Swiss Confederation, stated publicly: "The conclusions of the
historians leave no room for doubt. The Oeuvre d'entraide pour les
enfants de la grand-route is a tragic example of discrimination and
persecution of a minority that does not share the way of life of the
majority."
In the course of almost half a century, more than 600 Yenish children
were forcibly taken from their parents by the Oeuvre. They were removed
from their community and put in foster homes or orphanages. Many were
thrown into prison or shut up in mental asylums. They were to be
refashioned according to the ideals of a sedentary society. They
suffered humiliation, ill treatment and racism. The Yenish were hunted
down in German- and Italian-speaking Switzerland, but they were less
badly treated in the French-speaking cantons. The Oeuvre d'entraide
pour les enfants de la grand-route, was set up in 1926 by Pro
Juventute, a highly respected Swiss charitable foundation whose stated
aim is to "protect children in danger of abandonment and vagrancy". The
Oeuvre's founder and director, Alfred Siegfried (1890-1972), terrorised
Traveller children. The Yenish likened him to Hitler. He hunted down
Gypsies with the unfailing assistance of the police and the
authorities. Bent on "eradicating the evil of nomadism at its source,
i.e. the children, by systematic educative measures," he had a
pathological hatred of Travellers, whom he referred to as mentally
retarded psychopaths.
The Swiss weekly Der Schweizerischer Beobachter brought the scandal to
light in 1972. A year later, Pro Juventute was forced to close down the
Oeuvre. Faced with this black page in its history, in 1987 the Swiss
confederation recognised its moral, political and financial
responsibility for the campaign. But it was only in 1996 that the
Federal Council commissioned a historical study of the period to
"determine the aims, structures, funding and activities of the Oeuvre
d'entraide pour les enfants de la grand-route" and to "elucidate the
roles of the confederation and the Pro Juventute foundation". The
findings, made public in June 1998, were devastating. In the 1920s the
Swiss state set out to combat all forms of marginality. Travellers,
described as "social deviants", "good-for-nothings" and "degenerates",
were considered by contemporary criminal anthropologists as "congenital
vagrants" (2). Their way of life was unacceptable to a bourgeois
society convinced that vagrancy leads to crime. They had to be
"normalised".
The Yenish, whose nomadism was closely connected with the way they
earned their living, travelled in family groups. For them, the
transmission of artisan skills to their children was more important
than attending school. The authorities decided to attack their culture
and way of life. "Anyone wishing to combat nomadism efficiently must
aim to destroy the Travellers' communal existence," Alfred Siegfried
wrote. "Hard as it may seem, we must put an end to their family
community. There is no other way." The historians concluded that the
Oeuvre d'entraide pour les enfants de la grand-route, which was
supposed to be part of a "policy of social assistance and welfare", was
nothing else than a campaign of forced sedentarisation intended to
"free society from the evil of nomadic families and groups it deemed to
be inferior."
In 1930 the Federal Department of Justice and Police planned the
abduction of children over a period of ten years. The Department of the
Interior released funds for the operation. According to the historians'
report, "between 7% and 25% of the Oeuvre's budget was covered by
subsidies from the national authorities." This funding continued until
1967. The campaign also received money from private patrons and various
associations.
A census of Travellers was carried out at the request of the Oeuvre.
After having the parents legally divested of their rights, Alfred
Siegfried took more than 300 children into care. In his view, the
success of his educational endeavours depended on the children's total
break with their family surroundings. "Almost every time that as a
result of our benevolence or an unfortunate encounter (sic), children
who had not yet adjusted or were of unstable character came into
contact with their parents," he wrote, "all our efforts came to
nothing" (3).
Robert Huber, who was abducted at the age of eight months, met his
mother for the first time when he was 20. "The woman before me was a
complete stranger. And this woman, my mother, told me I had ten
brothers and sisters ... The family no longer existed. None of us knew
where the others were ... The Yenish had to do military service. The
children were abducted while the men were in the army. When they
returned, they found their wives in tears. And if they demanded their
children back, they were threatened with prison or internment in a
mental hospital." The Yenish were Swiss citizens with all the duties
but none of the rights.
This policy was widely supported by the clergy. As the primary purpose
was to socialise the children by inculcating the work ethic, they
received only a minimal education. For the boys, the only prospect was
apprenticeship. The girls were restricted to domestic work. Whether
they were entrusted to nuns, sent to work on farms (where they were
used as cheap labour) or locked up in penitentiaries, they were daily
subjected to ill treatment, racism and even sexual abuse. Uschi Waser
is chair of a foundation called Naschet Jenische (Yenish, stand up!).
In the space of 18 years she was placed in 23 different institutions.
Her case file runs to 3,500 pages. Overwhelmed by its contents, she
explains that "Siegfried claimed all Gypsies are liars and thieves ...
They don't become liars; they are born that way."
Hereditary inferiority
These prejudices were shared by many Swiss scientists and drove their
research. They took shameless advantage of the Oeuvre's activities to
bolster their theories of the "hereditary inferiority" of nomads.
Although it was not standard practice, forced sterilisation also
occurred. "Nomadism, like certain dangerous diseases, is primarily
transmitted by women," Alfred Siegfried wrote in a 1964 report on the
Oeuvre's activities. Mariella Mehr describes the methods employed:
"When I was three years old, they realised I didn't want to talk. They
decided to force me. They used a kind of bath tub ... The patients were
made to lie in the tub and covered with a plank so they couldn't get
out. Only their heads were above water. They were kept there in
freezing-cold water for up to 20 hours." Joseph Jörger, a psychiatrist
who was for many years director of the Waldhaus clinic in Coire where
many Yenish were interned, was one of the first Swiss ideologists of
racial hygiene. According to the historians' report, about a hundred of
these victims of science in the service of politics were still in
clinics or institutions in 1988.
Since 1987 all files concerning the Oeuvre's activities have been
transferred from the cantonal authorities to the federal archives in
Berne. They are subject to a 100-year ban on publication. Only the
Yenish have access to them. Shocked by their contents, which they
feared could one day be used against them, the Yenish at first asked
for the archives to be destroyed. Then, after the myth of Swiss
neutrality had been exposed, they realised the importance of preserving
their history. They are also conscious of the damage done to their
travelling-based culture by the policy of forced sedentarisation. The
Swiss Yenish, whose numbers are estimated at 35,000, now live for the
most part in concrete housing blocks. Only about 5,000 still travel the
roads.
The Oeuvre d'entraide des enfants de la grand-route pursued its
activities in the "favourable" period between the wars. In a climate of
feverish nationalism, Europe set about upholding moral values and
preserving Western culture. Economists were worried by demographic
trends, and the elite saw the high birthrate of working-class and
"marginal" populations as a threat to the capitalist order. A strong
nation could not afford to be burdened by feeble-minded social deviants
and foreigners who might hold back its economic development. It was a
problem of "social hygiene", and antinatalist eugenics provided the
answer.
In 1908 Francis Galton, the British inventor of eugenics, was already
advocating the establishment of eugenics societies throughout the world
(4). The purpose of the new "science" was to improve the human species
by modifying the gene pool. Its proponents advocated the control of
reproduction through the sterilisation or castration of those who might
"biologically weaken" the race.
In Switzerland, the scientists in charge of the eradication of nomadism
were strongly inspired by national-socialist ideology. They helped to
establish a policy that ultimately led to the extermination of at least
half a million Gypsies during the second world war. Professor Walter
Leimgruber, one of the authors of the historians' report, confirms the
close collaboration between scientists from Switzerland and Germany:
"Swiss and German psychiatrists worked together," he writes, "and Swiss
psychiatrists played a large part in drafting the legislation of the
Third Reich." The first European law on the sterilisation of the
mentally ill was passed in 1928 in Switzerland, in the Canton of Vaud.
This close collaboration is illustrated by the career of Ernst Rüdin
(1874-1952), a psychiatrist from German-speaking Switzerland who was
director of the Basel University Psychiatric Clinic. In 1933 Rüding
became chairman of Germany's Racial Hygiene Society, which he had
helped to found. He advocated the internment of alcoholics and the
mentally ill, and eventually joined the Nazi Party. He was one of the
three authors of the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased
Progeny, which was passed in Germany in July 1933 and made
sterilisation compulsory for people suffering from congenital mental
deficiency, manic-depressive insanity, schizophrenia, epilepsy,
hereditary deafness or blindness, chronic alcoholism, etc. This law,
under which some 400,000 victims were mutilated, led to the decision of
1 September 1939 on the forced euthanasia of mentally ill patients.
In France, the surgeon and biologist Alexis Carrel, who won the Nobel
prize for medicine in 1912, drew up a programme for "hereditary
biological aristocracy". The programme was to be implemented via
eugenics which, Carrel argued, was essential for the perpetuation of an
elite. In his view a race was duty bound to reproduce its best elements
(5). In 1941, with authorisation from the Vichy government, he set up
the Fondation française pour l'étude des problèmes humains, for the
purpose of investigating "all suitable measures for safeguarding,
improving and developing the French population."
In the 1930s a number of other European countries introduced eugenics
legislation. Norway and Sweden passed compulsory sterilisation laws in
1934. A year later, Denmark and Finland followed suit. These laws
allowed the sterilisation of the mentally ill, the mentally deficient,
epileptics, and patients suffering from hereditary diseases. Parents
deemed incapable of raising their children properly could also be
sterilised. The mass sterilisation policy claimed 40,000 victims in
Norway and 6,000 in Denmark.
In 1921 Sweden had become the first country to establish a state
institute of racial biology. It pursued its compulsory sterilisation
policy until 1976, as part of a social and racial hygiene programme
(6). The victims totalled around 63,000.
In March 1998, after a six-month long investigation, an official
committee of inquiry proposed compensation of up to 175,000 Swedish
kronor ($21,000) for the victims. The enabling legislation was passed
by the Swedish parliament on 19 May of this year. The surviving
victims, estimated at between 6,000 and 15,000, will nevertheless be
required to prove they were sterilised against their wishes for
"psychological disorders", "epilepsy" or "other forms of mental
deficiency". So, if they can overcome the feelings of shame and
humiliation that have kept them silent for so long, they will be faced
with this further obstacle.
___________________________________________________________________
* Journalist. Her report on the persecution of the Yenish children
(Opération enfants de la grand-route) was recently shown on the
Franco-German TV channel Arte.
(1) The three main communities of Gypsies in Central Europe are the
Yenish (German speakers said to be of German origin), Sinti and Roma.
For further reading, see Études tsiganes, vol 8, no 2, Paris, 1996.
(2) Sylvia Thode-Studer, Les Tsiganes suisses, la marche vers la
reconnaissance, Realités sociales, Lausanne, 1987.
(3) Alfred Siegfried, Kinder der Landstrasse, Pro Juventute, Zurich,
1964.
(4) See Jacques Testard, Le Désir du gène, Flammarion, Paris, 1994, p.
38.
(5) See Alexis Carrel, Man the unknown, Hamish Hamilton, London, 1935.
(6) The Guardian, London, 6 March 1999.
Translated by Barry Smerin
___________________________________________________________________
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED © 1999 Le Monde diplomatique
<http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/en/1999/10/?c=11gypsy>
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