Nazis introduce a law to legalize eugenic sterilization. Gypsies are being selected from January onwards for sterilization by injection and castration, and being sent to camps at Dachau, Dieselstrasse, Sachsenhausen and elsewhere. Gypsies become subject to the restriction of the Nuremberg Law for the Protection of Blood and Honor. Marriage with white people is forbidden. Criteria defining who is Gypsy are exactly twice as strict as those defining any other group.
Gypsies are first targeted population to be forbidden to attend school.
Himmler's recommendation that certain Roma be kept alive in a compound under the Law for the Protection of Historic Monuments for anthropologists to study, is ridiculed and never implemented. The aim should therefore be the elimination without hesitation of this defective element in the population. The first mass genocidal action of the Holocaust takes place in January of this year, when 250 Romani children are used as guinea pigs to test the cyanide gas crystal, at the concentration camp at Buchenwald. Employment of any kind is forbidden to Gypsies in this same year. 1941 Gypsies are the first targeted population to be forbidden to serve in the army.