The Yenish Community in Hall in Tirol under National Socialism

AI-generated symbolic representation of a Yenish family travelling along a road through a Tyrolean Alpine landscape during the first half of the twentieth century. The figures are shown exclusively from behind and cannot be identified. The image does not depict a documented event or historical individuals. Image: AI-generated historical reconstruction created for the Digital Biographical Archive of the Austrian Resistance in Tyrol, Elisabeth Walder, 2026.

Introduction

The history of the Yenish is one of the long-neglected chapters of National Socialist persecution. Yenish families also lived in Hall in Tirol—known as Solbad Hall during the Nazi period—where they had faced social exclusion, official surveillance, and economic discrimination for generations.
Under National Socialist rule, this discrimination escalated into existential persecution. Yenish people were registered, criminalised, deprived of their rights, subjected to forced sterilisation, and deported to concentration camps. The authorities used a range of stigmatising categories, classifying those affected as “Gypsies”, “asocials”, “work-shy”, “habitual criminals”, or “community aliens”.
The life stories of Franziska Raiminius and the brothers Franz and Rudolf Monz reveal how Nazi persecution affected Yenish people living in Hall. The research of Tyrolean historian Horst Schreiber makes it possible to place these individual lives within the wider history of the persecution of the Yenish in Tyrol.
Note on historical terminology: Terms placed in quotation marks are taken from National Socialist or earlier administrative records. They are discriminatory external designations and are reproduced here solely for the purpose of critical historical analysis.

Who Are the Yenish?

The Yenish are a population group with their own cultural traditions and language who have lived for centuries primarily in German-speaking Central Europe. Yenish communities have existed in Austria, Germany, Switzerland, France, South Tyrol, and other European regions.
Their historical origins have not been conclusively established. One widely discussed theory suggests that many Yenish originated among impoverished sections of the local rural population who began travelling temporarily or permanently to secure a livelihood. Travelling groups can be traced in Tyrol from at least the sixteenth century. From the seventeenth century onwards, people from the Upper Inn Valley and the Vinschgau increasingly travelled alone and later in family groups, often returning to their home communities during the winter.
Many Yenish worked as basket weavers, knife and scissor sharpeners, itinerant traders, brush makers, umbrella repairers, horse dealers, and in other mobile trades. These occupations were not evidence of an unwillingness to work. They were forms of employment adapted to the economic and social circumstances in which Yenish families lived.
The Yenish language is based predominantly on German and regional dialects. It also contains influences from Romance languages, Romani, Yiddish, and Hebrew. It strengthened social cohesion within the community while also offering some protection from an often hostile majority society.
In Tyrol, Yenish people were subjected to derogatory external labels such as “Karrner”, “Dörcher”, and “Laninger”. These terms conveyed social prejudices and contributed to their exclusion. The community’s own designation, “Yenish”, should therefore be preferred.
Unlike in Switzerland, the Yenish are still not recognised in Austria as a national minority under the Austrian Ethnic Groups Act. Their history, culture, and experiences of persecution remain insufficiently represented in Austria’s public memory. ERINNERN:AT – Horst Schreiber: The Yenish under National Socialis

Historical Context

Exclusion and Forced Settlement before 1938

The persecution of the Yenish did not begin with National Socialism. For centuries, municipalities and state authorities attempted either to expel travelling families or to force them to settle permanently. Their wagons and dwellings were destroyed, trading licences were restricted, and social assistance was frequently denied.
Horst Schreiber describes this history as an interaction between spatial exclusion and social confinement. On the one hand, municipalities attempted to remove Yenish families from their territories. On the other, members of the community were confined in workhouses, poorhouses, orphanages, reform institutions, psychiatric hospitals, prisons, and other institutions.
The removal of children from Yenish families was especially damaging. This practice was intended to break up family structures, prevent the transmission of Yenish language and culture, and force children to adopt a way of life determined by the majority society.
The Nazi regime was therefore able to draw upon pre-existing prejudices, police files, welfare records, population registers, and administrative practices. National Socialism adopted these structures, radicalised them, and combined them with its racist and social-biological ideology.

Exclusion from the National Socialist “National Community”

The National Socialist Volksgemeinschaft, or “national community”, was a racist and exclusionary concept. The regime evaluated individuals according to whether they were considered “hereditarily healthy”, politically compliant, settled, and economically useful.
Yenish ways of life challenged this ideal. Self-employment, itinerant trading, changing occupations, or the absence of a permanent residence could be interpreted as evidence of alleged unwillingness to work. Poverty was not recognised as the result of structural discrimination. Instead, the authorities treated it as a supposedly inherited personal or collective characteristic.
The Yenish were not deported as a uniformly defined group under one central, Reich-wide policy. Rather, their persecution took place through several overlapping classifications. Depending on the authority and the individual case, they could be persecuted as alleged “Gypsies”, “asocials”, “community aliens”, “habitual criminals”, or “professional criminals”.
These changing classifications made persecution particularly arbitrary. A denunciation, minor previous convictions, unlicensed itinerant trading, or the accusation that someone did not engage in “regular employment” could lead to imprisonment in a concentration camp.

Registration of the Yenish in Tyrol and Hall

In June 1938, the Nazi authorities ordered that fingerprints be taken from all people over the age of fourteen whom they classified as “Gypsies” or as “travelling in the manner of Gypsies”. The Tyrolean authorities were explicitly instructed to extend these measures to the people they disparagingly called “Karrner”.
The pseudoscientific study of the Yenish by the Institute of Hereditary and Racial Biology at the University of Innsbruck was of particular significance for Hall. The institute’s director, Friedrich Stumpfl, and his assistant, Armand Mergen, examined Yenish people according to racial-biological and criminal-biological criteria.
According to Horst Schreiber’s research, Mergen lived among Yenish people in Hall for almost three months without revealing the true purpose of his presence. He observed 244 individuals and constructed biographies and family genealogies. The people concerned were not properly informed about the aims or possible consequences of this research.
These investigations were not harmless academic studies. They formed part of the racial-biological registration and criminal-police surveillance of the Yenish and helped prepare the ground for coercive measures. Friedrich Stumpfl also produced reports used in forced-sterilisation proceedings.
The Hall Mental Hospital was likewise involved in Nazi hereditary-health policies. Using the case of the young Yenish woman Maria Schöpf, Horst Schreiber demonstrates how medical assessments prepared in Hall contributed to a forced sterilisation order. The language of these records illustrates how social prejudice was transformed into supposedly scientific medical diagnosis.

Title Text.

Franziska Raiminius (born 1912)– An Unresolved Fate

Franziska Raiminius was born in Brno on 5 July 1912. According to the records examined to date, she belonged to the Yenish community. She lived in Hall with her parents, her partner Franz Monz, and their two children.
For a time, she used the name Margarethe Reinhardt. The Innsbruck Criminal Police identified her under her former name. In 1941, she was sentenced to two months’ imprisonment for alleged falsification of her name. Whether and to what extent she used the other name specifically to protect herself against persecution cannot be conclusively established from the surviving sources.
On 5 March 1943, Franziska Raiminius was admitted to Buchenwald concentration camp. On 21 August 1944, she was transferred to Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp. On 16 October 1944, she was deported to Auschwitz.
Her subsequent fate remains unknown. Unless evidence of her death or survival is found, she should not be described without qualification as having been murdered in Auschwitz. What can be established with certainty is that she was a victim of National Socialist persecution and repeated deportation.
The uncertainty surrounding her fate is itself part of this history. Many families never received reliable information about the death or whereabouts of their relatives. Incomplete camp records and the destruction or loss of documents continue to impede historical reconstruction.

Franz Monz – Persecuted as an “Asocial Element"

Franz Monz was born in Weihershofen on 17 January 1918. He worked as a basket maker and lived in Hall with his partner Franziska Raiminius and their two children.
According to the sources examined by Horst Schreiber, the Innsbruck Criminal Police arrested him on 21 March 1941. The police classified him as an alleged “asocial element” on account of six previous convictions. The Nazi authorities frequently used earlier convictions—including minor property or trading offences—to construct a supposedly permanent condition of “community alienation”.
Franz Monz arrived at Dachau concentration camp on 16 November 1941. There, the SS registered him under the discriminatory category “Gypsy”. On 12 February 1942, he was deported to Gusen concentration camp, which formed part of the Mauthausen camp complex.
He was required to wear the prisoner marking “AZR”, an abbreviation for Arbeitszwang Reich, or “Compulsory Labour Reich”. This classification was used for people whom the Criminal Police had imprisoned in concentration camps as alleged “asocials”.
On 2 December 1944, Franz Monz was transferred to the main camp at Mauthausen. Three days later, he was sent to the Melk subcamp. There, prisoners were forced to excavate underground tunnels for the German armaments industry under lethal conditions.
Franz Monz was subsequently deported to the Ebensee concentration camp, where he was liberated by US forces in May 1945. He survived years of persecution, forced labour, deprivation, and concentration camp imprisonment.
His survival did not, however, bring full recognition of the injustice committed against him. For decades after 1945, people persecuted as alleged “asocials” were largely excluded from official recognition and compensation as victims of National Socialism.

Rudolf Monz – Death in Mauthausen Concentration Camp

Rudolf Monz, the brother of Franz Monz, was born in Lauterach in Vorarlberg on 6 October 1912. He worked as a basket maker and lived with his parents at Weissenbach 7 in Hall in Tirol.
According to Horst Schreiber’s research, Rudolf Monz was arrested on 19 September 1938. On 30 June 1939, he was transported from the Innsbruck police prison to Dachau concentration camp.
He was later transferred to Mauthausen concentration camp, where he died on 19 January 1940 at the age of only twenty-seven.
This requires an important correction to the previous version of this page: Rudolf Monz did not die in Dachau but in Mauthausen. Official causes of death recorded by concentration camp administrations must always be treated critically. The SS frequently used medical-sounding explanations to conceal the consequences of starvation, forced labour, abuse, disease, systematic neglect, and murder.
Rudolf Monz is one of the identified victims of National Socialist persecution from Hall in Tirol.

read more: 

🇬🇧 Memo (EN) Rudolf Monz

Therese Monz – Imprisonment in Ravensbrück and Auschwitz

Horst Schreiber also discusses Therese, or Theresia, Monz from Solbad Hall. In 1941, the twenty-five-year-old was persecuted because of a relationship with a Polish man. Nazi racial ideology criminalised intimate relationships between Germans and Polish forced labourers.
National Socialist newspapers publicly defamed women accused of such relationships. Therese Monz was described using the degrading propaganda term Polenliebchen, or “Polish lover”.
On 22 August 1941, the Gestapo transferred her from the Innsbruck police prison to Ravensbrück concentration camp. She was subsequently deported to Auschwitz. She survived and returned to Tyrol.
A votive plaque in the Theresienkirche on Innsbruck’s Hungerburg is a particularly important testimony to her survival. On the plaque, she gave thanks for her return after 32 months of concentration camp imprisonment.
The plaque was created at a time when released concentration camp prisoners were required to remain silent about their experiences. It was therefore not only an expression of religious faith but also a courageous public testimony to the existence of Auschwitz and the concentration camps.
The life of Therese Monz deserves to be documented in a separate biographical article.

Horst Schreiber’s Research

Historian Horst Schreiber’s study “The Yenish under National Socialism” provides an essential basis for understanding the history of persecution in Tyrol. His research demonstrates that National Socialist policy drew both upon long-standing practices of exclusion and upon the racist, social-biological, and productivity-based ideology of the Nazi “national community”.
His most important findings include:

• Discrimination against the Yenish began long before 1938 and continued after 1945.
• The Nazi regime drew upon existing registers, welfare files, police records, and social prejudices.
• Yenish people were persecuted not only according to alleged racial criteria but also through social and criminal-police classifications.
• The classification “asocial” was not an objective description but an instrument of exclusion and persecution.
• Municipal authorities, the police, judiciary, welfare system, medical profession, and academic institutions participated in registration and persecution.
• Yenish people without a permanent residence were particularly vulnerable, but settled Yenish families also lived under constant threat.
• The Nazi regime did not deport the Yenish as one uniformly defined group. Nevertheless, many individual Yenish people were persecuted, while the entire community experienced discrimination and pressure to assimilate.
• Persecution also aimed to destroy Yenish family structures, cultural identity, and language.

Of particular importance for the history of Hall is Schreiber’s finding that Armand Mergen lived for several months among Yenish people in the town while concealing the purpose of his research. Hall was therefore not only the home of persecuted Yenish families but also a site of their pseudoscientific observation and racial-biological registration.
Schreiber’s study was published as:
Horst Schreiber, “Die Jenischen im Nationalsozialismus”, in Michael Haupt and Edith Hessenberger, eds, Fahrend? Um die Ötztaler Alpen. Aspekte Jenischer Geschichte in Tirol, Innsbruck–Vienna–Bolzano 2021, pp. 124–155.
The German-language article is available through ERINNERN:AT.

Oliver Seifert’s Contribution to the Research

Oliver Seifert’s study of Nazi policy towards Roma and Sinti in the Gau of Tyrol-Vorarlberg is also relevant to the history of the Yenish.
Although Yenish, Roma, and Sinti are distinct groups with their own histories, cultures, and languages, the authorities repeatedly treated them under overlapping discriminatory categories. Measures directed against people whom the regime labelled “Gypsies” or “travelling in the manner of Gypsies” were also applied to Yenish people disparagingly referred to in Tyrol as “Karrner”.
Seifert examines the role of the regional authorities, district administrations, Criminal Police, and other institutions in implementing persecution. His research helps explain how local and regional officials sometimes promoted more radical measures against travelling and marginalised people rather than merely carrying out orders from Berlin.
Oliver Seifert, Roma und Sinti im Gau Tirol-Vorarlberg. Die “Zigeunerpolitik” von 1938 bis 1945, Tyrolean Studies in History and Politics, vol. 6, Innsbruck–Vienna–Bolzano: StudienVerlag, 2005.

Critical Assessment of the Sources

Research into Yenish lives presents a fundamental source problem. Much of the surviving documentation was created by the police, courts, welfare authorities, health offices, medical institutions, and concentration camp administrations. These institutions viewed the people concerned through a discriminatory and often openly hostile lens.
Terms such as “asocial”, “work-shy”, “neglected”, and “community alien” must not be adopted as neutral descriptions. They do not accurately describe the personalities or conduct of those persecuted. Instead, they reveal the ideology and intentions of the authorities that produced the records.
Previous convictions must also be examined in their historical context. By withdrawing trading licences and restricting traditional forms of mobile employment, the authorities frequently forced Yenish people into illegality. Minor violations could later be used by the Criminal Police to justify an allegation of permanent “asociality” and ultimately imprisonment in a concentration camp.
Wherever possible, official records should therefore be supplemented by family memories, oral histories, personal testimonies, and the perspectives of Yenish people themselves.

Conclusion

The persecution of the Yenish in Hall in Tirol was not a marginal aspect of local National Socialist history. It formed part of a broader system that evaluated, classified, and excluded people according to racist, social, and economic criteria.
Franziska Raiminius and Franz, Rudolf, and Therese Monz represent people whose poverty, way of life, family background, or personal relationships were criminalised by the Nazi authorities.
Rudolf Monz died in Mauthausen concentration camp. Franz Monz survived Dachau, Gusen, Mauthausen, Melk, and Ebensee. Franziska Raiminius was deported through Buchenwald and Ravensbrück to Auschwitz; her subsequent fate remains unknown. Therese Monz survived Ravensbrück and Auschwitz and left behind an extraordinary public testimony in the form of her votive plaque.
Horst Schreiber’s and Oliver Seifert’s research also demonstrates that persecution was not carried out exclusively by central Nazi institutions. Municipal authorities, the police, judiciary, welfare organisations, medical institutions, and academic researchers all participated.
In Hall, Yenish people were not only monitored and deported. They also became the subjects of pseudoscientific hereditary and criminal-biological research.
Remembering these people restores their names and at least part of their individual histories. It also demonstrates the danger of interpreting poverty, cultural independence, or nonconformity as evidence of supposed human inferiority.
The history of the Yenish is part of the history of Hall—and part of a culture of remembrance in which every biography matters.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Who are the Yenish?

The Yenish are a population group with their own cultural traditions and language, living in several European countries. Historically, many Yenish worked in mobile trades. Not all Yenish travelled permanently; numerous families had become settled long before the Nazi period.

Are the Yenish the same as Roma and Sinti?

No. Yenish, Roma, and Sinti are distinct groups with their own histories, cultures, and languages. Because some of their traditional forms of employment and mobility appeared similar to outsiders, the authorities frequently subjected them to overlapping discriminatory classifications.

Why were the Yenish persecuted under National Socialism?

They were persecuted through racist, social-biological, and criminal-police classifications. Nazi officials categorised Yenish people as alleged “Gypsies”, “asocials”, “work-shy”, or “community aliens”. These classifications could result in surveillance, imprisonment, forced sterilisation, and deportation to concentration camps.

Were all Yenish people deported to concentration camps?

No. There was no single central policy ordering the collective deportation of every Yenish person. Nevertheless, many were imprisoned under different persecution categories, while the entire community was subjected to discrimination, surveillance, and pressure to abandon its cultural identity.

Why was Hall important in the persecution of the Yenish?

Several Yenish families lived in Hall, and members of these families were deported to concentration camps. In addition, racial and criminal biologist Armand Mergen lived among the Yenish in Hall for almost three months while concealing the purpose of his research. The Hall Mental Hospital was also involved in hereditary-health proceedings and forced sterilisation.

What happened to Franz Monz?

The Innsbruck Criminal Police arrested Franz Monz in March 1941. He was imprisoned in Dachau and subsequently deported to Gusen, Mauthausen, Melk, and Ebensee. He survived and was liberated by American forces in May 1945.

Where did Rudolf Monz die?

Rudolf Monz was initially imprisoned in Dachau concentration camp. He died in Mauthausen concentration camp on 19 January 1940. 

What happened to Franziska Raiminius?

Franziska Raiminius was sent to Buchenwald in 1943 and transferred through Ravensbrück to Auschwitz in 1944. Her subsequent fate remains unknown.

Who was Therese Monz?

Therese Monz was a Yenish woman from Solbad Hall who was persecuted because of a relationship with a Polish man. She was imprisoned in Ravensbrück and Auschwitz but survived. Her votive plaque in the Theresienkirche in Innsbruck commemorates her return.

Why are Nazi classifications placed in quotation marks?

Terms such as “asocial”, “work-shy”, and “community alien” were discriminatory categories created and used by the Nazi regime. Quotation marks emphasise that these are not objective descriptions of the persecuted people.

Are the Yenish recognised as a national minority in Austria?

Unlike in Switzerland, the Yenish are not currently recognised as a national minority under Austria’s Ethnic Groups Act. Organisations and researchers continue to advocate greater public and political recognition of their culture and history.