During the Holocaust, the Nazis and their allies murdered an estimated 500,000 Roma as part of an extermination campaign that took place alongside the genocide of Europe’s Jews. Among them were nearly all of the 39 children taken from their families and placed in a children’s home in Mulfingen, Württemberg. Many of them became subjects for the doctoral research of Eva Justin, a staff member at the Racial Hygiene and Population Biology Research Unit, the office that the Nazis set up to provide the pseudoscientific basis for what they called the Final Solution to the Gypsy Question. The children were ultimately deported to Auschwitz, where all but a few of them were murdered in the gas chambers. While Justin, who died from cancer in 1966, was investigated for her activities during the Third Reich, she never faced criminal penalties for them and even worked among Romani families in the 1960s as a psychologist for the Frankfurt municipal health department.
Wednesday, March 19 3-4 pm SC 216 - Student Center Music Room
The Benjamin and Bessie Zeigler Jewish Studies Program at Ball State University, provides the university and community with an understanding and an appreciation for Jewish history, Jewish culture, and the Jewish faith. For further information, and if you need accommodation to attend this lecture, please contact program co-director Rob Phillips rfphillips@bsu.edu