Althaus/Weltzel collection
Photographs of German Gypsies, 1930s-1960s, taken by Georg Althaus and Hanns Weltzel with 1 file of Weltzel's papers.
Hermann Martin Georg Althaus (1898-1974), the son of a Lutheran missionary, worked as a minister near Braunschweig, Germany, where he met and helped local Sinti, and studied their language and culture.
After 1945, Althaus campaigned to expose Nazi collaborators amongst the Lutheran church hierarchy and fought to maintain his ministry to 'Israel and the Gypsies', later focused exclusively on Sinti. Althaus corresponded with many German gypsiologists, and with Dora Yates of the Gypsy Lore Society, through whom he contacted Hanns Weltzel's widow and acquired his papers and photographs.
Johannes Otto Luis Hanns Weltzel (1910-1952) was a photo-journalist who lived in Rosslau, a small east German town which Romanies regularly visited. In the 1930s, he engaged with the local Romani culture, photographing the Sinti people, learning to speak their language and compiling genealogical charts. At the invitation of Dora Yates, he wrote articles for the Journal of Gypsy Lore Society in 1938 and again in 1948-49, when he provided eyewitness descriptions of the plight of Nazi Germany's Romanies. Hanns Weltzel was later accused of handing his genealogical tables to Nazi race scientists and helping to organise Romani deportations, and was executed by the Soviets in 1952.