THE ROMANIAN POLICE AND ITS ROLE IN THE ROMA DEPORTATIONS

In Romania, Roma deportation had many local specificities and cannot be reduced to a single cause or discourse. These particularities could remain incomprehensible due to the researchers' tendency to focus almost exclusively on the elites. This obstructs the understanding of a more complex interplay between different actors who contributed to the deportation of the Roma. It is important to bring into discussion the bottom-up perspective of Police as an agency, because: 1) it criminalized the Roma over a long period of time; 2) in 1942, when charged with identifying and deporting the "problem-Gypsies", Police had a considerable leeway in labelling those who were to be deported. What I intend to do is to analyse how the law enforcement agencies perceived the Roma. Then, against this backdrop, I will compare these interwar perceptions and proposed measures to the measures taken by Antonescu's regime during WWII, without neglecting the local initiatives.(1)