For the first time, this film tells the whole story of the persecution of German gypsies during the Nazi era from the perspective of the Sinti. Unpublished police files and photos of race researchers, documents of the thorough process of registration and recording, are the most important part of our evidence.
We, a gypsy (Sinteza) and a non-gypsy, have a shared past that we don’t want to reject or ward off. We asked ourselves the question whether the German gypsies (Sinti) have received any reparations.
In doing so, we came across previously withheld material. Material that had been kept back to prevent or delay reparations.
This evidence, meticulously compiled by the perpetrators, was not allowed to be made public in an effort to avoid having to acknowledge the genocide committed against our people.
Instead, the perpetrators were called upon in the reparations proceedings as experts, in whose eyes the Sinti had to be criminals. The courts believed the perpetrators and not the victims.
Source: press booklet for the film Das Falsche Wort – ‘Reparations’ for Gypsies (Sinti) in Germany? by Melanie Spitta and Katrin Seybold. Published by Katrin Seybold Film GmbH, Munich 1987.
Note: Terms used in the original by the authors/filmmakers were deliberately not marked, changed, or deleted in order to keep them true to the source, since they belong to a historical context. The same applies to the film titles in the filmographies. This highlights the fact that Seybold and Spitta were also committed to fighting for linguistic recognition of the self-designation of the Sinti within the majority society of Germany.
