GERMANY: Roma from around Europe gathered at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp yesterday to remember the 60th anniversary of the liquidation of the so-called "Gypsy Camp" in which nearly 3,000 Roma were murdered.
They were joined by politicians from Poland and Germany in laying wreaths and lighting candles in front of crematorium V, scene of the gassing on August 2nd, 1944.
It was the final, brutal act of the mass extermination of Roma known as the Porrajmos, the "devouring", in Romany.
"It is extremely important for those who visit such places to have broader information about the thousands of murdered Roma," said Mr Roman Kwiatkowski, leader of Poland's Roma Association.
He said Roma still face huge discrimination in Europe and called the mass murder 60 years ago "a warning for present and future generations".
By the end of the second World War, only an estimated half of Europe's one million pre-war Roma population was still alive. However, victim numbers vary widely because many Roma left no written record, with some estimates of those murdered as low as 200,000 and others as high as 800,000.
Some 23,000 Roma were murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp where altogether 1.5 million people, mostly European Jews, were killed.
Not all Roma prisoners were gassed; many died of starvation or outbreaks while some children were used as human guinea pigs in the experiments of the Nazi doctor, Josef Mengele.
Germany was represented at the memorial service by Mr Jürgen Trittin, the German environment minister, who called the liquidation a "genocide that is part of our history".
"We Germans carry the historical as well as the political responsibility for it," he said, but noted that it took decades for the German government to recognise the Nazi persecution of Roma.
Many Roma stripped of German citizenship by the Nazis continued to be denied their rights by post-war German authorities who, in some cases, continued to process their cases using Nazi files.
Only in 1982 did the German establishment officially recognise that Roma were victims of genocide.
In Hungary, home to an estimated 600,000 Roma, the government yesterday called the mass murder of Roma "a tragedy for the entire Hungarian nation . . . your sorrow is our sorrow, your pain is also ours."