In the afternoon of July 28, 2020, Peter Höllenreiner died, who had been closely associated with the work of the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma and the Documentation Center for many years. Peter Höllenreiner survived the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp as a child. In recent years, he has been intensively looking into his own history and that of his family. As a Holocaust survivor, he has participated in numerous Central Council events and documented the history of persecution of Sinti and Roma as a witness.
Peter Höllenreiner was born in Munich on March 17, 1939. In March 1943, he and his family were deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, where he arrived the day before his fourth birthday and was registered in the camp register of the so-called “Gypsy Camp” with the number 3531. In 1944 Peter Höllenreiner was deported from Auschwitz-Birkenau to Ravensbrück and from there to Mauthausen in March 1945.
The number tattooed on his forearm in Auschwitz had Peter Höllenreiner removed in the post-war period - in order to have it tattooed again a few years later as a protest against the continuing discrimination against Sinti and Roma in post-war Germany, not least by the so-called "Land Driver's Center" at the Bavarian State Criminal Police Office.
