The Wiener Holocaust Library’s Director, Dr Toby Simpson, wrote to The Times in response to Oliver Moody’s article Porajmos: the Nazi genocide forgotten by the world (29 September 2020). We were pleased to see our comments published in The Times on Monday 5 October.

Dr Simpson’s response was as follows: 

Sir, Oliver Moody’s article (“Roma still scarred by Nazi genocide”, Sep 29) is a welcome contribution to raising awareness of racist persecution. It is incorrect, however, to say that estimates of the death toll range from 130,000 to 1.5 million. A death toll of at least 200,000 has been documented since the 1960s, when Donald Kenrick, a pioneering scholar of Romani culture, deposited his findings at The Wiener Holocaust Library. There is ample reason for believing the true number to be much higher, but no justification for entertaining a lower estimate. Michaela Küchler’s efforts toward a reckoning with history are to be applauded. Documentation of the Porajmos is indeed relatively scarce compared with the Holocaust but it is far from absent, as the library showed in our exhibition last year, Forgotten Victims: The Nazi Genocide of the Roma and Sinti. If we are to make progress in fighting anti-Gypsyism today this evidence must be accurately and judiciously brought to bear.