Initiatives of the civil society

The newspaper Bayerischer Rundfunk (BR.de) issued a report online.

Romani associations demand the institution of the 2nd August as the official Commemoration Day of the Roma Genocide.

Compensation: The International Organization for Migration (IOM) – whose headquarters are in Geneva -, in partnership with the Government of Germany, was one of the institutions in charge of paying compensations to Roma survivors of concentration camps. The Stiftung EVZ "Erinnerung, Verantwortung, Zukunft" (Foundation "Remembrance, Responsibility and Future") has funded various projects on forced labour during the Second World War, has prepared lectures on this subject and, furthermore, was responsible for the payment to survivors of forced labour camps.

NGO project: The German Roma Center Göttingen e.V. participates in the project « School of Remembrance – Producing knowledge about the Roma genocide and how to prevent anti-Gypsyism Partners » with Serbian NGOs, the Women’s Space from Niš and the Forum for Applied History from Belgrade. The Serbian government has recently acknowledged the importance of raising awareness about the extermination of the Jews during Nazi occupation and in early 2012 organized the first temporary exhibition on the Holocaust in Serbia 1941-1944. The history of the Roma genocide in Serbia during the Second World War, however, is still insufficiently studied and widely unknown. The two-year project ‘School of Remembrance’ is designed to collect information and produce knowledge on several levels. While one focus is on the historical research of the Roma genocide, its causes and mechanisms, another part of the project deals with anti-Gypsyism and systematic discrimination against the Roma today and asks how to fight it. They issued a first study in December 2014 on "The suffering of the Roma in Serbia during the Holocaust". Other educational materials and general information on the Serbian Roma victims of the Genocide can be found on their website.

The Documentation Centre of German Sinti and Roma and the Bavarian and Federal Agency for Civic Education worked on a project called "Between Discrimination and Emancipation: History and Culture of Sinti and Roma in Germany and Europe Partners". The project consists of putting together a collection of papers on the past and present of Sinti and Roma for teachers, scholars, students, disseminators of civic and political education. While organisations of civic education are generally able to make regular changes to their websites, the editors of textbooks are much slower. The proposed collection put together in this project is supposed not only to increase the availability of information to deal with the topic ‘Sinti and Roma’ in the classroom and elsewhere, but to show the life of Sinti and Roma from the perspective of the interaction with the majority society, based on historical evidence as well as through the recollections of members of the minority.

In Frankfurt a. M., the "Förderverein Roma e.V." organised the exhibition: "Frankfurt - Auschwitz", from the 11th of August to the 11th of September 2009. There is a catalogue: Frankfurt-Auschwitz. Dokumentarisch-kunstlerische Ausstellung zur Vernichtung der Roma und Sinti (2009). Pictures and information are still available.

The “Haus der Wannsee-Konferenz” (House of the Wannsee Conferene. Memorial and Educational Site) in Berlin holds a permanent exhibition about "The Wannsee Conference and the Genocide of the European Jews", in which there is information about measures taken against Roma people during the Nazi period, measures which were decided in a meeting in that house. For instance, the rooms 4 “Racist Policy and the persecution of Jews in Germany 1933-1939”, and 5 “War and Genocide in Eastern and South-eastern Europe” and 12 “The ghettos” evoke the Roma Genocide. It is possible to get access to information related to the Nuremberg Laws of 15 September 1935.

In 2000, the House of the Wannsee Conference set up an exhibition on the traces of the ghetto of Lodz in Poland which included information about the Roma who lived there.

The Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism has devoted a special exhibition on the “Persecution of Roma and Sinti in Munich and Bavaria 1933-1945” in 2016 and 2017.

The theatre play “Roma Army”, a Gorki Theatre production (Berlin), about a group of actors calling for a Roma army for the purpose of self-defence, celebrated overwhelming success. Since 2017 the play has played performances in a couple of major European cities.