

At the end of 1938, SS chief Heinrich Himmler issued a decree creating the formal legal basis for the deportation of the Sinti and Roma. From October 1939, they were not allowed to leave their place of residence and were to be concentrated in collection camps "until their final deportation". The Gerste family, who lived in Niedersachswerfen, was also affected.
On 10 March 1939, the Nordhäuser Allgemeine Anzeiger newspaper reported on the planned construction of a barrack at Holungsbügel. 73 Sinti and Roma living in Nordhausen at the time were to be deported to this forced accommodation on the outskirts of the town. The collective accommodation, where the families had to live in cramped conditions, was surrounded by a barbed wire fence. The city made the residents work in cleaning the streets, tending the greenery and in a brickworks.
Among those who worked in the brick factory was the Sinto Jakob Gerste, born in 1926. He had lived in Nordhausen with his five siblings and parents since the early 1930s. In 1940, the National Socialists deported his father to Neuengamme via the Buchenwald concentration camp and his mother to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Three years later, the Gestapo deported Jakob Gerste and his siblings to the Auschwitz concentration camp. There, the SS murdered his younger brothers Hermann, Rudolf and Heinrich. Jakob Gerste was forced to work as a bricklayer in Auschwitz. In May 1944, the SS transferred him via Buchenwald to the