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64-403: (Redirected from Jenische ) Yenish , also spelled Yeniche or Jenische , may refer to: Yenish people Yenish language Topics referred to by the same term [REDACTED] This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the title Yenish . If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to

128-425: A Landfahrersippenarchiv ('archive of travelling families'), but this effort was incomplete by the end of World War II. It appears that only very limited numbers of Yenish (compared with the number of Romani victims) were actually deported: five Yenish individuals are on record as having been deported from Cologne, and a total of 279 woonwagenbewoners ('caravan dwellers') are known to have been deported from

192-613: A Military Commission Court at Dachau . The life sentence imposed by the Dachau court was reduced to four years upon review. Upon her release from U.S. custody in October 1949, she was arrested by West German authorities, tried at Augsburg, and again sentenced to life imprisonment; she committed suicide in Aichach (Bavaria) prison in September 1967. The second commandant of the camp, between 1942 and 1945,

256-467: A bunk. The stink was beyond all description. They called the doctor. We inspected his records. There were only names in the little black book, nothing more. Nothing about who these men were, what they had done, or hoped. Behind the names of those who had died, there was a cross. I counted them. They totaled 242. 242 out of 1,200, in one month. As we walked out into the courtyard, a man fell dead. Two others, they must have been over 60, were crawling toward

320-993: A concentration camp: first, that they had managed to make contact with the French Resistance , some were disguised as civilians, and they were carrying false papers when caught; they were therefore categorized by the Germans as spies , which meant their rights under the Geneva Convention were not respected. The second explanation is that they had been categorised as Terrorflieger ("terror aviators"). The aviators were initially held in Gestapo prisons and headquarters in France. In April or August 1944, they and other Gestapo prisoners were packed into covered goods wagons and sent to Buchenwald. The journey took five days, during which they received very little food or water. A primary cause of death

384-407: A distinct group, as opposed to the generic class of vagrants of the early modern period, emerged towards the end of the 18th century. The adjective jenisch is first recorded in the early 18th century in the sense of " cant, argot ". A self-designation Jauner is recorded in 1793. Jenisch remained strictly an adjective that refers to the language, not the people, until the first half of

448-490: A greater potential to profit the SS because the nearby clay deposits could be made into bricks by the forced labor of prisoners. The first prisoners arrived on 15 July 1937, and had to clear the area of trees and build the camp's structures. By September, the population had risen to 2,400 following transfers from Bad Sulza, Sachsenburg, and Lichtenburg. On the camp's main gate, the motto Jedem das Seine (English: "To each his own"),

512-512: A language island of Yenish has existed there. In November 2021, on the initiative of linguist Heidi Schleich and now chairman Marco Buckovez, the association Jenische in Österreich (Yenish in Austria) was founded with headquarters in Innsbruck. As part of a meeting with the ethnic group spokespersons of the parliamentary parties, the association submitted a request for recognition in accordance with

576-459: A museum with permanent exhibitions about the history of the camp. It is managed by Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation, which also looks after the camp memorial at Mittelbau-Dora . Survivors who have written about their camp experiences include Jorge Semprún , who in Quel beau dimanche! describes conversations involving Goethe and Léon Blum , and Ernst Wiechert , whose Der Totenwald

640-477: A number of smaller camps comprising the Buchenwald complex. There, the division liberated over 21,000 prisoners, ordered the mayor of Langenstein to send food and water to the camp, and hurried medical supplies forward from the 20th Field Hospital. Third Army Headquarters sent elements of the 80th Infantry Division to take control of the camp on the morning of Thursday 12 April 1945. Several journalists arrived on

704-412: A radio installation at the facility where people were executed; he counted the numbers, which arrived by telex, and hid the information. He says that 8,483 Soviet prisoners of war were shot in this manner. According to the same source, the total number of deaths at Buchenwald is estimated at 56,545. This number is the sum of: This total (56,545) corresponds to a death rate of 24 percent, assuming that

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768-469: A site of large-scale trials for vaccines against epidemic typhus in 1942 and 1943. In all 729 inmates were used as test subjects, of whom 154 died. Other "experimentation" occurred at Buchenwald on a smaller scale. One such experiment aimed at determining the precise fatal dose of a poison of the alkaloid group; according to the testimony of one doctor, four Soviet POWs were administered the poison, and when it proved not to be fatal they were "strangled in

832-576: A term combining Sinti , Roma and Yenish), both sedentary and non-sedentary, in Switzerland, among them an estimated 20,000 Yenish people. Mariella Mehr had already claimed in 1979 that there were "about 20,000 Yenish", among whom only "a handful of families who are still travelling". From the 1920s until the 1970s, the Swiss government had a semi-official policy of institutionalizing Yenish parents as mentally ill and having their children adopted by members of

896-450: A tour of Dresden Castle and Church of Our Lady . During the visit they were accompanied by Elie Wiesel and Bertrand Herz , both survivors of the camp. Volkhard Knigge  [ de ] , the director of the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation and honorary professor of University of Jena , guided the four guests through the remainder of the site of the camp. During the visit Wiesel, who together with Herz were sent to

960-473: The Little camp as 16-year-old boys, said, "if these trees could talk." His statement marked the irony about the beauty of the landscape and the horrors that took place within the camp. President Obama mentioned during his visit that he had heard stories as a child from his great uncle, who was part of the 89th Infantry Division , the first Americans to reach the camp at Ohrdruf, one of Buchenwald's satellites. Obama

1024-496: The Soviet secret police imprisoned former Nazis and anti-communist dissidents. According to Soviet records, 28,455 people were detained, 7,113 of whom died. After the NKVD camp closed, much of the camp was razed, while signs were erected to provide a Soviet interpretation of the camp's legacy. The first monument to victims was erected by Buchenwald inmates days after the initial liberation. It

1088-456: The U.S. Third Army responded: KZ Bu. Hold out. Rushing to your aid. Staff of Third Army. According to Teofil Witek, a fellow Polish prisoner who witnessed the transmissions, Damazyn fainted after receiving the message. As American forces closed in, Gestapo headquarters at Weimar telephoned the camp administration to announce that it was sending explosives to blow up any evidence of the camp, including its inmates. The Gestapo did not know that

1152-488: The U.S. Third Army , and under the command of Captain Frederic Keffer, arrived at Buchenwald on 11 April 1945 at 3:15 p.m. (now the permanent time of the clock at the entrance gate). The soldiers were given a hero's welcome, with the emaciated survivors finding the strength to toss some liberators into the air in celebration. Later in the day, elements of the U.S. 83rd Infantry Division overran Langenstein, one of

1216-400: The "singing forest", so named because of the screams which emanated from this wooded area. Summary executions of Soviet POWs were also carried out at Buchenwald. At least 1,000 men were selected in 1941–42 by a task force of three Dresden Gestapo officers and sent to the camp for immediate liquidation by a gunshot to the back of the neck, the infamous Genickschuss . The camp was also

1280-530: The 19th century. Jean Paul (1801) glosses jänische Sprache (" Yenish language ") with so nennt man in Schwaben die aus fast allen Sprachen zusammengeschleppte Spitzbubensprache ("this is the term used in Swabia for an argot used by rogues which has been cobbled together from all sorts of languages"). An anonymous author in 1810 argues that Jauner is a deprecating term, equivalent to card sharp , and that

1344-551: The Allies. To the army of General Patton . This is the Buchenwald concentration camp. SOS. We request help. They want to evacuate us. The SS wants to destroy us. The text was repeated several times in English, German, and Russian. Damazyn sent the English and German transmissions, while Leonov sent the Russian version. Three minutes after the last transmission sent by Damazyn, the headquarters of

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1408-592: The Ethnic Groups Act on 23 March 2022. While there are references to Yenish people in France, there are no reported figures. Alain Reyniers  [ fr ] wrote in a 1991 article in the journal Etudes Tsiganes that the Yenish "probably form the largest group of travellers in France today". KZ Buchenwald Buchenwald ( German pronunciation: [ˈbuːxn̩valt] ; literally ' beech forest ')

1472-453: The GDR. The political instrumentalisation of these memorials, especially for the current needs of the GDR, became particularly clear during the major celebrations of the liberation of the concentration camps, as historian Anne-Kathleen Tillack-Graf analysis in her thesis about the official party newspaper Neues Deutschland . Today the Buchenwald camp site serves as a Holocaust memorial. It has

1536-661: The German people would take responsibility for Nazi crimes, instead of dismissing them as atrocity propaganda . Gen. Dwight Eisenhower also invited two groups of Americans to tour the camp in mid-April 1945; journalists and editors from some of the principal U.S. publications, and then a dozen members of the Congress from both the House and the Senate, led by Senate Majority Leader Alben W. Barkley . War correspondent Osmar White reported that above

1600-514: The Gestapo". Furthermore, from 1941, Soviet POWs were executed in mass killings. Arriving prisoners selected for execution were not entered into the camp register and therefore were not among the 33,462 dead listed. One former Buchenwald prisoner, Armin Walter, calculated the number of executions by the number of shootings in the spine at the base of the head. His job at Buchenwald was to set up and care for

1664-635: The Nazi regime. All prisoners worked primarily as forced labor in local armaments factories. The insufficient food and poor conditions, as well as deliberate executions, led to 56,545 deaths at Buchenwald of the 280,000 prisoners who passed through the camp and its 139 subcamps . The camp gained notoriety when it was liberated by the United States Army in April 1945; Allied commander Dwight D. Eisenhower visited one of its subcamps. From August 1945 to March 1950,

1728-587: The Netherlands in 1944. Lewy (2001) has discovered one case of the deportation of a Yenish woman in 1939. The Yenish people are mentioned as a persecuted group in the text of the 2012 Memorial to the Sinti and Roma Victims of National Socialism in Berlin. In 2001, Swiss National Councillor Remo Galli, as speaker of the foundation Zukunft für Schweizer Fahrende , reported an estimate of 35,000 "travellers" ( Fahrende ,

1792-418: The administrators had already fled. A prisoner answered the phone and informed headquarters that explosives would not be needed, as the camp had already been blown up, which was not true. US Corporal Rick Carrier discovered the camp on April 10th 1945, and reported the location up the chain of command. A detachment of troops of the U.S. 9th Armored Infantry Battalion, from the 6th Armored Division , part of

1856-400: The camp was used by the Soviet occupation authorities as an internment camp, NKVD special camp Nr. 2 , where 28,455 prisoners were held and 7,113 of whom died. Today the remains of Buchenwald serve as a memorial and permanent exhibition and museum. The Schutzstaffel (SS) established Buchenwald concentration camp at the beginning of July 1937. The camp was to be named Ettersberg , after

1920-579: The camp workers for personal gain. Other camp officials were charged, including Ilse Koch. The trial resulted in Karl Koch being sentenced to death for disgracing both himself and the SS; he was executed by firing squad on 5 April 1945, one week before American troops arrived. Ilse Koch was acquitted by the SS court and released. However, she was rearrested by American occupation authorities in June 1945, and chosen as one of 31 Buchenwald defendants to stand trial before

1984-483: The camp's brothel . The SS later fired the SS woman on duty in the brothel for corruption; her position was taken over by "brothel mothers" as ordered by SS chief Heinrich Himmler . The majority of women prisoners, however, arrived in 1944 and 1945 from other camps, mainly Auschwitz , Ravensbrück , and Bergen Belsen . Only one barracks was set aside for them; this was overseen by the female block leader ( Blockführerin ) Franziska Hoengesberg, who came from Essen when it

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2048-405: The camp, near the canteen, so that oftentimes Ilse Koch could be seen riding in the morning to the beat of the prisoner orchestra. Koch himself was eventually imprisoned at Buchenwald by the Nazi authorities for incitement to murder. The charges were lodged by Prince Waldeck and Morgen , to which were later added charges of corruption , embezzlement , black market dealings, and exploitation of

2112-429: The camp, nor ever acted as guard. In total, however, more than 530 women served as guards in the vast Buchenwald system of subcamps and external commands across Germany. Only 22 women served/trained in Buchenwald, compared to over 15,500 men. About 136 subcamps and satellite commandos belonged to Buchenwald concentration camp. In 1942, the SS began to use its forced labor supply for armaments production. Because it

2176-651: The camp, the Belgian Edmond Vandievoet, recounted his experiences in a book whose English title is "I escaped from a Nazi Death Camp" [Editions Jourdan, 2015]. In his work Night , Elie Wiesel talks about his stay in Buchenwald, including his father's death. Jacques Lusseyran , a leader in the underground resistance to the German occupation of France, was eventually sent to Buchenwald after being arrested, and described his time there in his autobiography. On 5 June 2009 U.S. President Barack Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel visited Buchenwald after

2240-471: The children suffering an ordeal of successive foster homes and orphanages. In all, 590 children were taken from their parents and institutionalized in orphanages, mental institutions, and even prisons. Child removals peaked in the 1930s to 1940s, in the years leading up to and during World War II. After public criticism in 1972, the program was discontinued in 1973. An organisation for the political representation of travellers (Yenish as well as Sinti and Roma)

2304-551: The choice between slave labor or inevitable execution. Many inmates were killed by human experimentation or fell victim to arbitrary acts perpetrated by the SS guards. Other prisoners were simply murdered, primarily by shooting and hanging. As part of Action 14f13 , prisoners deemed too weak or sick to work were sent to Sonnenstein Killing Facility , where they were murdered with carbon monoxide gas. Walter Gerhard Martin Sommer

2368-451: The crematorium door was a verse beginning 'Worms shall not devour me, but flames consume this body. I always loved the heat and light…'. Thirty SS perpetrators at Buchenwald were tried before a US military tribunal in 1947, including Higher SS and Police Leader Josias Erbprinz zu Waldeck und Pyrmont , who oversaw the SS district that Buchenwald was located in, and many of the doctors responsible for Nazi human experimentation. Almost all of

2432-415: The crematorium" and subsequently "dissected". Among various other experiments was one which, in order to test the effectiveness of a balm for wounds from incendiary bombs , involved inflicting "very severe" white phosphorus burns on inmates. When challenged at trial over the nature of this testing, and particularly over the fact that the testing was designed in some cases to cause death and only to measure

2496-434: The defendants were convicted, and 22 were sentenced to death. However, only nine death sentences were carried out, and by the mid-1950s, all perpetrators had been freed except for Ilse Koch , who was tried by a West German court and given a life sentence. Additional perpetrators were tried before German courts during the 1960s. Between August 1945 and 1 March 1950, Buchenwald was the site of NKVD special camp Nr. 2 , where

2560-569: The efforts of Polish engineer (and short-wave radio-amateur , his pre-war callsign was SP2BD) Gwidon Damazyn, an inmate since March 1941, a secret short-wave transmitter and small generator were built and hidden in the prisoners' movie room. On April 8 at noon, Damazyn and Russian prisoner Konstantin Ivanovich Leonov sent the Morse code message prepared by leaders of the prisoners' underground resistance (supposedly Walter Bartel and Harry Kuhn): To

2624-580: The hill in Thuringia upon whose north slope the camp was established. The proposed name was deemed inappropriate because it carried associations with several important figures in German culture, especially Enlightenment writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe who had lived in Weimar . Instead the camp was to be named Buchenwald, in reference to the beech forest in the area. However, Holocaust researcher James E. Young  [ de ] wrote that SS leaders chose

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2688-402: The intended article. Retrieved from " https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Yenish&oldid=854577082 " Category : Disambiguation pages Hidden categories: Short description is different from Wikidata All article disambiguation pages All disambiguation pages Language and nationality disambiguation pages Yenish people The Yenish people as

2752-429: The latrine. I saw it, but will not describe it. After Patton toured the camp, he ordered the mayor of Weimar to bring 1,000 citizens to Buchenwald; these were to be predominantly men of military age from the middle and upper classes. The Germans had to walk 25 kilometres (16 mi) roundtrip under armed American guard and were shown the crematorium and other evidence of Nazi atrocities. The Americans wanted to ensure that

2816-582: The main camp, with prisoners provided insufficient food and inadequate shelter. Although it was highly unusual for German authorities to send Western Allied POWs to concentration camps, Buchenwald held a group of 168 aviators for two months. These men were from the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Jamaica. They all arrived at Buchenwald on 20 August 1944. All these airmen were in aircraft that had crashed in occupied France . Two explanations are given for them being sent to

2880-483: The number of persons passing through the camp according to documents left by the SS, 240,000 prisoners, is accurate. On 4 April 1945 the U.S. 89th Infantry Division overran Ohrdruf , a subcamp of Buchenwald. Buchenwald was partially evacuated by the Germans from 6 to 11 April 1945. In the days before the arrival of the American army, thousands of the prisoners were forcibly evacuated on foot . Thanks in large part to

2944-737: The proper designation for the people should be jenische Gasche , Gasche being a slang word derived from the Romani term for 'non-Romani'. Many Yenish people in Germany became sedentary in the second half of the 19th century. The Kingdom of Prussia in 1842 introduced a law forcing municipalities to provide social welfare to permanent residents without citizenship. As a consequence, there were attempts to prevent Yenish people from taking permanent residence. Recently established settlements of Yenish, Sinti , and Roma, dubbed "gypsy colonies" ( Zigeunerkolonien ), were discouraged and attempts were made to incite

3008-483: The same day, perhaps with the 80th, including Edward R. Murrow , whose radio report of his arrival and reception was broadcast on CBS and became one of his most famous: I asked to see one of the barracks. It happened to be occupied by Czechoslovaks. When I entered, men crowded around, tried to lift me to their shoulders. They were too weak. Many of them could not get out of bed. I was told that this building had once stabled 80 horses. There were 1,200 men in it, five to

3072-521: The sedentary Swiss population. The name of this program was Kinder der Landstrasse ('Children of the Road'). The separation of children was justified as the Yenish being a 'criminal milieu' of 'homelessness and vagrancy' was later criticized as a violation of the fundamental rights of the Yenishe to family life, with children separated from parents by force without due criminal procedure, and resulting in many of

3136-503: The settlers to move away, in the form of various forms of harassment, and in some cases physical attacks. By the late 19th century, many recently sedentary Yenish were nevertheless integrated into local populations, gradually moving away from their tradition of endogamy thus being absorbed into the general German population. Those Yenish who did not become sedentary by the late 19th century took to living in trailers . The persecution of Romani people under Nazi Germany beginning in 1933

3200-421: The site of the camp precisely to erase the cultural legacy of the area. After the area of the camp was cleared of trees, only one large oak remained, supposedly one of Goethe's Oaks . The camp, designed to hold 8,000 prisoners, was intended to replace several smaller concentration camps nearby, including Bad Sulza  [ de ] , Sachsenburg , and Lichtenburg . Compared to these camps, Buchenwald had

3264-510: The temperature of human skin, all year round. The three National Memorials of the GDR, built next to or on the sites of the former concentration camps Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen , and Ravensbrück , played a central role in the GDR's remembrance policy under Erich Honecker . They were controlled by the Ministry of Culture and thus by the government. According to their statute, these memorials served as places of identification and legitimisation of

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3328-566: The time which elapsed until death was caused, one Nazi doctor's defence was that, although a doctor, he was a "legally appointed executioner". The SS left behind accounts of the number of prisoners and people coming to and leaving the camp, categorizing those leaving them by release, transfer, or death. These accounts are one of the sources of estimates for the number of deaths in Buchenwald. According to SS documents, 33,462 died. These documents were not, however, necessarily accurate: Among those executed before 1944, many were listed as "transferred to

3392-524: Was Hermann Pister (1942–1945). He was tried in 1947 ( Dachau Trials ) and sentenced to death, but on 28 September 1948 he died in Landsberg Prison of a heart attack. The number of women held in Buchenwald was somewhere between 500 and 1,000. The first female inmates were twenty political prisoners who were accompanied by a female SS guard ( Aufseherin ) ; these women were brought to Buchenwald from Ravensbrück in 1941 and forced into sexual slavery at

3456-406: Was SS- Obersturmbannführer Karl-Otto Koch , who ran the camp from 1 August 1937 to July 1941. His second wife, Ilse Koch , became notorious as Die Hexe von Buchenwald ("the witch of Buchenwald") for her cruelty and brutality. In February 1940 Koch had an indoor riding hall built by the prisoners who died by the dozen due to the harsh conditions of the construction site. The hall was built inside

3520-722: Was a Nazi concentration camp established on Ettersberg hill near Weimar , Germany , in July 1937. It was one of the first and the largest of the concentration camps within the Altreich . Many actual or suspected communists were among the first internees. Prisoners came from all over Europe and the Soviet Union , and included Jews , Poles , and other Slavs , the mentally ill, and physically disabled, political prisoners, Romani people , Freemasons , and prisoners of war. There were also ordinary criminals and those perceived as sexual deviants by

3584-461: Was an SS- Hauptscharführer who served as a guard at the concentration camps of Dachau and Buchenwald. Known as the "Hangman of Buchenwald", he was considered a depraved sadist who reportedly ordered Otto Neururer and Mathias Spanlang , two Austrian priests, to be crucified upside-down . Sommer was especially infamous for hanging prisoners from trees by their wrists, which had been tied behind their backs (a torture technique known as strappado ) in

3648-512: Was directed not exclusively against the Romani people but also targeted "vagrants who travel around after the manner of the gypsies" (" nach Zigeunerart umherziehende Landfahrer "), which included the Yenish and people without permanent residence in general. Travellers were scheduled for internment in Buchenwald , Dachau , Sachsenhausen and Neuengamme . Yenish families began to be registered in

3712-484: Was evacuated. All the women prisoners were later shipped out to one of Buchenwald's many female satellite camps in Sömmerda , Buttelstedt , Mühlhausen , Gotha , Gelsenkirchen , Essen , Lippstadt , Weimar , Magdeburg , and Penig , to name a few. No female guards were permanently stationed at Buchenwald. Contrary to popular opinion, the notorious "Bitch of Buchenwald" Ilse Koch never served in any official capacity at

3776-603: Was founded in 1975, named Radgenossenschaft der Landstrasse ("Wheel Cooperative of the Road"). The Swiss federal authorities have officially recognized the "Swiss Yenish and Sinti" as a "national minority". With the ratification of the European language charter in 1997, Switzerland has given the status of a "territorial non-tied language" to the Yenish language . Around 1800, a group of Yenish settled in Loosdorf near Melk, and since then

3840-462: Was illness due to harsh camp conditions. Like all concentration camps, prisoners at Buchenwald were deliberately kept in a state of starvation , many while performing grueling forced labor , making consequent illnesses prevalent. Malnourished and suffering from disease, many were literally "worked to death" under the Vernichtung durch Arbeit policy ( extermination through labor ), as inmates only had

3904-468: Was inscribed. The SS interpreted this to mean the " master race " had a right to humiliate and destroy others. It was designed by Buchenwald prisoner and Bauhaus architect Franz Ehrlich , who used a Bauhaus typeface for it, even though Bauhaus was seen as degenerate art by the National Socialists and was prohibited. This defiance however went unnoticed by the SS. Buchenwald's first commandant

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3968-499: Was made of wood and only intended to be temporary. A second monument to commemorate the dead was erected in 1958 by the German Democratic Republic (GDR) government near the mass graves. It was inaugurated on 14 September 1958 by GDR Prime Minister Otto Grotewohl . Inside the camp, there is a stainless steel monument on the spot where the first, temporary monument stood. Its surface is maintained at 37 °C (99 °F),

4032-478: Was more economical to rent out prisoners to private firms, subcamps were set up near factories which had a demand for prisoner labor. Private firms paid the SS between 4 and 6 Reichsmarks per day per prisoner, resulting in an estimated 95,758,843 Reichsmarks in revenue for the SS between June 1943 and February 1945. So the subcamps of Buchenwald were mainly used for armament production and other fabrications and are considered labour camps. Conditions were worse than at

4096-478: Was written in 1939 but not published until 1945, and which likewise involved Goethe. Scholars have investigated how camp inmates used art to help deal with their circumstances, and according to Theodor Ziolkowski writers often did so by turning to Goethe. Artist Léon Delarbre sketched, besides other scenes of camp life, the Goethe Oak , under which he used to sit and write. One of the few prisoners who escaped from

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