What is already on the record
What is already on the record
Four chapters, all opened late
The following wrongs have been officially examined and acknowledged - not as individual cases, but as state practice. Every one of them needed decades before it was recognised.
1930-1981
Administrative detentionAt least 60,000 people were locked away by cantons and communes in some 650 institutions, without an offence and without due process. Examined by an independent expert commission, final report 2019, titled Organised Arbitrariness.
1926-1973
Children of the Country Road586 Yenishi children were demonstrably taken from their families, with communal and cantonal authorities taking part and federal money flowing until 1967. In 2025 the Federal Council acknowledged that the persecution of the Yenish qualifies, by today's international law, as a crime against humanity.
Who are the Yenish?A distinct people of Central Europe, documented in Switzerland since the 16th century - by their own account a travelling people of craftsmen and traders, with a language of their own, Yenish.
The Yenish did not immigrate. They formed inside Central Europe out of the local population - out of people who, from the 17th century on, were shut out of land and guild and ended up on the road: families uprooted by the Thirty Years' War, discharged soldiers, landless peasants, wandering craftsmen. Over generations the same routes and trades - knife-grinding, basketry, peddling, scrap - made them a people with an identity of their own.
Yenish is not a foreign tongue but German grammar with a vocabulary of its own, borrowed from Yiddish, Hebrew and Romani - the languages of those who shared the road. The name itself, first recorded in Vienna in 1714, most likely goes back to the Romani word for knowing: the knowing ones.
What they are not: not Sinti, not Roma - those came from the Indian subcontinent and speak Romani. Today some 30,000 to 35,000 people of Yenish origin live in Switzerland, about one in ten still travelling. Recognised in Switzerland as a national minority since 1998, the only country to do so.
The Yenish did not immigrate. They formed inside Central Europe out of the local population - out of people who, from the 17th century on, were shut out of land and guild and ended up on the road: families uprooted by the Thirty Years' War, discharged soldiers, landless peasants, wandering craftsmen. Over generations the same routes and trades - knife-grinding, basketry, peddling, scrap - made them a people with an identity of their own.
Yenish is not a foreign tongue but German grammar with a vocabulary of its own, borrowed from Yiddish, Hebrew and Romani - the languages of those who shared the road. The name itself, first recorded in Vienna in 1714, most likely goes back to the Romani word for knowing: the knowing ones.
What they are not: not Sinti, not Roma - those came from the Indian subcontinent and speak Romani. Today some 30,000 to 35,000 people of Yenish origin live in Switzerland, about one in ten still travelling. Recognised in Switzerland as a national minority since 1998, the only country to do so.
until 1981
Compulsory social measures and placementsTens of thousands of children and young people were indentured, placed away from home and exploited in institutions. The Federal Council apologised in 2013, the AFZFG came into force in 2017, and the solidarity payment of 25,000 francs had to be claimed by March 2018.
20th century
Forced sterilisations, castrations and adoptionsCoerced procedures and adoptions were part of the same apparatus and were covered by the expert commission as well. They remain less researched than the detentions to this day - not least because the records are missing.
The pattern is the same in all four chapters: decades of practice, then outside pressure, then an admission, then a commission. Never the other way round. And every time the first obstacle was the same one - the records.
OL-DESources
- Bundesgesetz ueber die Aufarbeitung der fuersorgerischen Zwangsmassnahmen und Fremdplatzierungen vor 1981 (AFZFG, SR 211.223.13)
- Unabhaengige Expertenkommission Administrative Versorgungen, Schlussbericht Organisierte Willkuer, 2019
- Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz, Hilfswerk fuer die Kinder der Landstrasse
- Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz, Artikel Jenische
- Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz, Artikel Rotwelsch (Jenisch als Sondersprache)
- Eidgenoessische Kommission gegen Rassismus EKR, Themendossier Jenische, Sinti und Roma, 2024
- Schweizerisches Bundesarchiv, Dossier zu den Akten der Pro Juventute, 1998
- Bundesrat, Entschuldigung bei den Opfern fuersorgerischer Zwangsmassnahmen, 11.04.2013
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