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Abstract
Although the repression and elimination of Roma from Hungarian society in the 1940s did not reach the same extent as in the German and Austrian part of the Third Reich, their characterization as lazy and work-shy, used to justify their persecution, was similar. This paper establishes the presence of racial hygienic discourse related to Roma during the late 1930s and the first half of the 1940s in Hungary, and traces its survival and influence on regional policy-making in the postwar period. It furthermore explores the transformation and adaptation of racism and eugenics to the socialist ideology of equality based on citizens’ participation in productive work in the early state socialist period, including the first Party declaration on the situation of Roma in Hungary in 1961. Specific attention is paid to the role of medical experts who discussed the “radical solution of the Gypsy-question” in the early 1940s and the immediate years following World War II. Reflecting on wider transformations of racism in the postcolonial and post-World War II period in Europe and North America, the paper contributes to scholarship that complicates the evaluation of the state socialist past, including the connection between medicine and politics in Cold War Europe.
Acknowledgements
I would like to particularly thank Peter Hanebrink for his support and comments on an earlier version of this paper. I would equally like to thank the anonymous reviewers of this article for their helpful and inspiring feedback.
Notes
1. Szabolcs-Szatmár county as an administrative district was created in 1950 out of the former Szabolcs and Szatmár-Bereg counties. In this northeastern region of Hungary, the density of the Romani population, which was higher than the national average, kept “the solution of the Gypsy-question” on the municipal agenda after World War II.
2. I predominantly use the term “Gypsy” throughout this paper to denote that there is a difference between those whom authorities identified as Gypsies and those who would identify themselves as Gypsy or Roma. I do not use inverted commas around the term “Gypsy” for the sake of readability.
3. Robert Ritter was head of the Race Hygiene and Population Biology Research Center, established in 1936. The research center was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and was linked to the National Health Office. The aim of the center was “‘to reveal with exact methods the root causes of social developments in the biological, i.e. ultimately in the laws of heredity’ in order to legitimize the ‘eradication of the unintegrated and the unproductive’” (Fings, Heuss, and Sparing Citation1997, 58).
4. Figures on the deported and executed Roma from and in the territory of Hungary during World War II are highly debated. Some researchers place the number of Romani victims between 40,000 and 70,000. These estimates do not take into consideration that the deported and executed Roma from the counties of Burgenland and Niederösterreich in Austria also had Hungarian family names. (I am grateful to Gerhard Baumgartner for drawing my attention to this point.)
5. The Hungarian expression used here for productivity (szaporaság) is associated with the fertility of animals. When used to describe human fertility, it has a derogatory meaning, referring to too high fertility and too many descendants as a result of “animal-like” sexuality.
6. The concept of heredodegeneration was originally developed by Hungarian psychologist Károly Schaffer (1864–1939) and neurologist Ernő Jendrassik (1858–1921) at the beginning of the twentieth century. Researching inherited diseases of the central nervous system, Jendrassik first used the term to describe “familial nervous diseases that manifested themselves sometime after birth.” Schaffer extended the notion to cover “any familial neurological disease with a defined microscopic pathology,” such as the Tay–Sachs disease (Baran et al. Citation2008). The concept was abused by racial scientists in Hungary during the 1930s and 1940s advocating the qualitative racial improvement of the nation. Schaffer himself, however, was an outspoken critic of negative eugenic measures in the interwar period and had an important role in preventing the introduction of the “Hungarian Sterilization Bill” in the 1930s (Turda Citation2015, 207).
7. Gregor Mendel's original discovery in the 1860s referred to inheritance patterns in plants.
8. Act 15 of 1941 (known as the Marriage Law or the Third Jewish Law) that prohibited “mixed race” (Jewish and non-Jewish) marriages also introduced compulsory marriage counseling.
9. The name ONCSA comes from Országos Nép- és Családvédelmi Alap [National Fund for Public and Family Protection], which was used for the financing of the housing program.
10. As mentioned before, this proposal was also introduced in the Hungarian Parliament in 1942 but was ridiculed and rejected (Purcsi Citation2004).
11. Turda (Citation2015, 213) mentions that eugenicists, who were not involved in scientific racial discourse during the 1930s and 1940s, ensured the survival of eugenic ideas into the 1950s in Hungary.
12. Historian István Feitl (Citation2008) drew attention to ministerial proposals in the first half of the 1950s on the Gypsy-question, signaling that there were efforts to provide guidelines on the “solution of the Gypsy-question” at the national level long before the first Party resolution was finally issued in 1961.
13. Food rationing introduced during World War II in 1942 was abolished in 1949 but reintroduced between 1951 and 1952.