It took decades for Germany to officially recognize the Romani Holocaust—the Nazi genocide of approximately 500,000 European Roma and Sinti during World War II. Several more decades passed before the European Holocaust Memorial Day for Sinti and Roma was established as an official day of remembrance, celebrated annually on August 2.

This date marks the Nazi liquidation of the so-called "Gypsy Family Camp" at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration and Extermination Camp on the evening of August 2-3, 1944. Based on initiatives by Polish Roma groups, this event was first commemorated in 1994, fifty years later. Thousands of deported Roma and Sinti had already died from malnutrition and disease, and that evening, thousands more were killed by gas chambers, shootings, and beatings by Nazi forces.

In 2015, the European Parliament officially declared August 2 as the European Roma Holocaust Memorial Day. Across eastern Europe, including southeastern Poland, small towns and villages hold commemorations remembering the killing of Polish Roma during Nazi occupation.

Memorial sites also exist due to the targeted deportations and killings of Hungarian Roma following German occupation in 1944 and under Hungary's fascist Arrow Cross regime. Additionally, under dictator Ion Antonescu, allied with Nazi Germany, Romania independently organized mass deportations of Jews and Roma to Transnistria, where about 380,000 Jews and 11,000 Roma were murdered or died from hunger and disease.

These commemorations serve as a somber reminder of the atrocities faced by Roma and Sinti communities during World War II and the ongoing efforts to honor their memory across Europe.