Pennsylvania Senator Edgar Cowan stated , In response Senator John Conness of California observed , Persecution of Romani people reached a peak during World War II in the Porajmos ( literally , '' the devouring '' ) , a descriptive neologism for the Nazi genocide of Romanis during the Holocaust . Because the Romani communities in Central and Eastern Europe were less organized than the Jewish communities and the Einsatzgruppen , mobile killing squads , who travelled from village to village massacring the Romani inhabitants where they lived typically left few to no records of the number of Roma killed in this way , although in a few cases , significant documentary evidence of mass murder was generated.it is more difficult to assess the actual number of victims . Historians estimate that about 2,000,000 Roma and Sinti were killed by the Nazis and their collaborators , or more than 85 % of the Romani in Europe at the time
Porajmos
Romani genocide
Antiziganism