Kateřina Čapková

Senior Fellow (10/2024 – 03/2025)

From Forced Assimilation to Extermination. Two Divergent Policies Toward Roma and Sinti in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia

The aim of this research project is a detailed analysis of the wartime experiences of Roma and Sinti in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, based on extensive archival research in central and local archives in the Czech Republic and in Germany, embedded in the European context of the Roma and Sinti Holocaust. Different models of discriminatory policies can be distinguished in the countries of Nazi-occupied Europe or in the countries of the Nazi allies. While in most of them segregation and deportation to concentration camps or mass murder prevailed, France is an example of the path of social engineering with the goal of forced assimilation. However, in no other country outside of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia can we find a situation in which both policies can be found in chronological order. Until the spring of 1942, the Protectorate government sought the forced assimilation of Roma into society; from the summer of 1942, local Roma and Sinti were deported to special camps, and from March 1943 directly to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

This history of a completely opposite policy towards Roma and Sinti within a few years can help us to answer several crucial questions, the most important of which is the relationship, similarities and differences between the policies of segregation/extermination and forced assimilation that have accompanied the history of the Roma through the centuries to the present.

Kateřina Čapková is a senior researcher at the Institute of Contemporary History, Prague, and a teacher at both Charles University and NYU in Prague. Her research focuses on modern Jewish history in Europe, the history of refugees and migration, and, recently, the history of the Roma and Sinti. Her Czechs, Germans, Jews? National Identity and the Jews of Bohemia (Berghahn, 2012; in Czech 2005 and 2014) was called the Outstanding Academic Title of 2012 by Choice magazine. Together with Hillel Kieval she is co-editor of the multi-author volume Prague and Beyond: Jews in the Bohemian Lands, which looks at the history of the Jews of Bohemia and Moravia from the early modern period to recent times (Penn Press, 2021; in German 2020; in Czech 2022; in Hebrew 2024). With Eliyana Adler she co-edited the volume Jewish and Romani Families in the Holocaust and its Aftermath (Rutgers UP, 2020) and with Kamil Kijek the volume Jewish Lives under Communism. New Perspectives (Rutgers UP, 2022). In 2016 she initiated the establishment of the Prague Forum for Romani Histories, an academic platform for sharing and encouraging research on history of Roma and Sinti.

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