To date, scholarship has undervalued the significance of this meeting on [the Third Reich’s] policy toward [Roma and Sinti], in part because there was no further pursuit of the question of the identity of the representatives of the SD and the RSHA and the necessity of their involvement.¹⁰ […] The participation of [Hans] Ehlich and [Georg] Harders in the 15 January 1943 meeting is evidence that the long‐standing goal of the ‘final regulation of the [Romani] question’ was to be decisively expedited on this day.

On the basis of their career profiles, both Ehlich and Harders were ‘makers of extermination policy.’ As strategists and practitioners, they were equipped with experience in the killing of the European Jews. Mass sterilization and the displacement of millions of people were just as much a part of their sphere of action as the ‘racial’ selection of individuals for an eventual decision on, for example, their Germanization or extermination. The institutions they represented were involved at an early stage in the planning for a comprehensive deportation of all [Roma and Sinti] from the Old Reich.

[…]

The decisions reached at the RKPA on 15 January 1943 regarding the further handling of the remaining [Roma] in the Reich following the deportations also included a policy of splitting up and isolating this group, an approach based on sterilization and intended to cause those of mixed ancestry, the Mischlinge, to disappear. The size of the group and its genetic rating had been painstakingly ascertained by the RHF in previous years.

By its account, the RHF had collected data on exactly 28,607 persons in the territory of the Reich and prepared evaluations of 18,904 of them by November 1942. Accordingly, 1079 were classified as ‘full [Roma],’ 1017 as Lalleri, 1585 as Roma, 211 as Balkan […], and 2652 as non‐[Romani]. The largest category consisted of 12,360 persons defined as ‘[Romani] Mischlinge.’¹⁸

The course for the treatment of the various categories had already been set. Unless already deported in 1938 or 1940, a small number of full [Roma] and Lalleri were to receive special status as ‘racially pure [Roma].’ All Roma […] and the vast majority of Mischlinge were to be deported to Auschwitz–Birkenau. Differentiation within these groups resulted from the classification by the RHF, which ascribed characteristic properties to each of the different ‘strains’ within the [Romani] population.¹⁹

[…]

The exclusion criteria for [Roma and Sinti] working in factories vital to the war effort and for [Roma and Sinti] holding and demonstrating foreign citizenship indicate that protests originating in the armament industry or with the Labor Office were as much to be avoided as diplomatic imbroglios with friendly or neutral states. Here too, the [Fascists] had learned lessons from their experiences during the deportation of the Jewish population.²⁷

[…]

Even though many planned sterilizations were not carried out, the RKPA’s sterilization policy for the most part followed the course agreed upon at the conference on 15 January 1943 until the war’s end. It had been decided at the conference that once sterilization was performed, the RHF would prepare new ‘evaluations’ for those affected, classifying them as non-[Romani] to exempt them from the ‘special law,’ while still retaining the prohibitions against marriage.

From December 1944 at the latest, in such cases the RKPA operated with individual waivers,⁸¹ which effectively superseded previous racial and biological evaluations prepared by the RHF. The ‘racial’ classification now merged with the Kripo’s aim of producing an overall decision on the status of those concerned.⁸² In no case, however, was Germanization, a measure also discussed at the conference in January 1943, carried out.⁸³

[…]

The ‘settlement of the [Romani] question with regard to the existence of this race’ was the formulation used by Heinrich Himmler in December 1938 in his discussion of the objective of [Fascism’s Romani] policy.¹⁰¹ Four years later, the registration was concluded and for all intents and purposes the fate of most [Roma and Sinti] — deportation — was sealed. Therefore, it was indeed a matter of the ‘final solution of the [ROmani] question’ when the [Fascists] decided upon the sterilization of all [Roma and Sinti] remaining in the Reich in January 1943, a step intended to render them extinct within one generation. Anyone ever registered and ‘evaluated’ as [Romani] was at risk.

(Emphasis added.)