This chapter offers a sketch of a wider project, which attempts to reconstruct the Romani Holocaust as an experience shared by Romani and non-Romani Germans. The project is a regional case study, and the principal documents on which it rests are some 300 photographs, now in the holdings of the Liverpool University Library. The photographs were taken at locations in Central Germany during the 1930s by Hanns Weltzel, an amateur naturalist and freelance writer. Their subjects are Romanies, most of them members of a handful of Sinti families. Along with a small collection of manuscript papers, the photographs record a relationship between Weltzel and these families, carried on sometimes face to face, sometimes in letters, and sometimes at second hand or in the imaginations of the parties, which lasted into the 1960s. They also record the descent of German society into war, genocide and defeat. Most of Weltzel's subjects perished in concentration camps or in Auschwitz. Weltzel himself was arrested and executed by the Soviet military authorities in 1952, and it was widely believed that his disappearance had something to do with his having betrayed ‘his’ Sinti to their Nazi persecutors. In addition to taking photographs, Weltzel had gathered genealogical information, and both the Sinti themselves and postwar Gypsiologists maintained that he had at least handed over his material to the race scientists and possibly even actively collaborated with the Nazi project of registration, selection and deportation. The documentary evidence for Weltzel's complicity is ambiguous at best. But if he is a dubious candidate for the title of ‘perpetrator behind the camera’ (cf. Gilsenbach here), it is nonetheless clear that the Holocaust, in transforming the lives of both photographer and subjects, exposed the ambivalence of their relationship.

As will become clear, Weltzel's photographs are not simply the artefact of that relationship, but were in an important way the medium through which the relationship was constructed. Photography, of course, has a central role in the history of Romani–gadjo relations. In his memoirs, published in English translation in 1999 as A Gypsy in Auschwitz, the Berlin Sinto Otto Rosenberg recounts a bizarre incident from 1945.