When the Roma people arrived in Europe, curiosity was soon followed by hostility and xenophobia. Roma were enslaved for five centuries in Wallachia and Moldavia until abolition in 1864. Elsewhere in Europe, they were subject to ethnic cleansing, abduction of their children, and forced labor. During World War II, the Nazis murdered 200,000 to 800,000 Roma in an attempted genocide known as the Porajmos. They were marked for extermination and sentenced to forced labor and imprisonment in concentration camps. They were often killed on sight, especially by the Einsatzgruppen (essentially mobile killing units) on the Eastern Front.
In Communist Eastern Europe, Roma experienced assimilation schemes and restrictions of cultural freedom. The Romany language and Romani music were banned from public performance in Bulgaria. In Czechoslovakia, they were labeled a "socially degraded stratum," and Roma women were sterilized as part of a state policy to reduce their population. This policy was implemented with large financial incentives, threats of denying future social welfare payments, misinformation or after administering drugs (Silverman 1995; Helsinki Watch 1991). An official inquiry from the Czech Republic, resulting in a report (December 2005), concluded that the Communist authorities had practised an assimilation policy towards Roma, which "included efforts by social services to control the birth rate in the Romani community" and that "the problem of sexual sterilisation carried out in the Czech Republic, either with improper motivation or illegally, exists" [59], with new revealed cases up until 2004, in both the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
In the early 1990s, Germany deported tens of thousands of illegal immigrants to Eastern Europe. Sixty percent of some 100,000 Romanian nationals deported under a 1992 treaty were Roma. In Norway, many Roma were forcibly sterilized by the state until 1977.
In the Habsburg Monarchy under Maria Theresia (1740-1780), a series of decrees tried to force the Roma to sedentarize, removed rights to horse and wagon ownership (1754), renamed them as "New Citizens" and forced Roma boys into military service if they had no trade (1761), forced them to register with the local authorities (1767), and prohibited marriage between Roma (1773). Her successor Josef II prohibited the wearing of traditional Roma clothing and the use of the Romany language, punishable by flogging.[77] In Spain, attempts to assimilate the Gitanos were under way as early as 1619, when Gitanos were forcibly sedentarized, the use of the Romany language was prohibited, Gitano men and women were sent to separate workhouses and their children sent to orphanages. Similar prohibitions took place in later in 1783 under King Charles III, who prohibited the nomadic lifestyle, the use of the Calo language, Romani clothing, their trade in horses and other itinerant trades. Ultimately these measures failed, as the rest of the population rejected the integration of the Gitanos.
Other examples of forced assimilation include Norway, where a law was passed in 1896 permitting the state to remove children from their parents and place them in state institutions[79]. This resulted in some 1,500 Roma children being taken from their parents in the 20th century
The practice of placing Roma students in segregated schools or classes remains widespread in countries across Central and Eastern Europe. In Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania, many Roma children have been channeled into all-Roma schools that offer inferior quality education and are sometimes in poor physical condition, or into segregated all-Roma or predominantly Roma classes within mixed schools.[81] In Hungary and Bulgaria, many Roma children are sent to classes for pupils with learning disabilities, regardless of whether such classes are appropriate for the children in question or not. In Bulgaria, they are also sent to so-called "delinquent schools", where a variety of human rights abuses take place.
Despite the low birth rate in the country, Bulgaria's Health Ministry was considering a law aimed at lowering the birth rate of certain minority groups, particularly the Roma, due to the high mortality rate among Roma families, which are typically large. This was later abandoned due to conflict with EU law and the Bulgarian constitution.
