Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>How can we write a comprehensive, transnational history of the Porrajmos—one that grasps the cumulative nature of anti-Gypsy persecution in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland between 1870 and 1945? The Nazi Genocide of the Sinti and Roma Peoples: A Transnational History traces the evolution of policies targeting the so-called ‘Gypsies’, moving beyond the national frame to foreground a shared regional logic of exclusion and biopolitical control. While the genocide of Europe’s Jews has long dominated Holocaust historiography, the Porrajmos has only recently been acknowledged and studied as a distinct history of suffering and systematic destruction. Yet no existing study fully captures the transnational continuities and ruptures that shaped this process. Drawing on German, Austrian, and Swiss archival sources and engaging with the theoretical lens of ‘biopolitics’, this book examines the shifting treatment of Gypsies from liberal assimilationist efforts during the Kaiserreich to the Nazi embrace of racial extermination—what Michel Foucault terms a transition from biopolitics to thanatopolitics. It also explores how Nazi Germany influenced and coordinated policy beyond its borders, particularly through the International Criminal Police Commission, precursor to Interpol. The book reveals the scope of Nazi collaboration with Austria and Switzerland, showing how only Austria followed Germany into genocidal territory, while Switzerland opted for sedentarization and exclusion rather than mass murder. In doing so, The Nazi Genocide of the Sinti and Roma Peoples offers a critical new history of the Porrajmos—both as a product of national regimes and a transnational project of racialized state violence.</jats:p>