‘Cruelty men, Nazis and Tinker Experiments’ – leaked report reveals the cultural genocide of Scotland’s Travellers
A leaked research report into the historic state sponsored abuse of Scottish Travellers/Nawken has laid bare the role of both the Scottish state and religious institutions in the “cultural genocide” of Scotland’s only “indigenous ethnic minority”.
The 80-page report also reveals that the Scottish Government colluded with the Nazis and allowed their scientists to study Scottish Gypsy Travellers in 1938 – just before the Second World War started.
The report – funded by the Scottish Government and which had not yet been made public - was leaked by Scottish Traveller campaigner and academic Doctor Lynne Tammi-Connelly who became concerned that the Scottish Government were delaying the publication of the report and were attempting to ‘sanitize’ it and remove the most shocking content.
“I take no pleasure in leaking this report but given the fact that the government has been sitting on it for months and their many attempts to have a lot of content removed, I felt I had no choice,” Dr Lynne Tammi-Connelly wrote in a Facebook post alongside a link to the report.
The report – researched and written by Scotland’s top academics - details how the Scottish state and religious institutions – such as the Quarriers and Barnardo’s – used ‘cruelty men’ to seize children from families and put them into workhouses in an effort to “erase” Scottish Gypsy Traveller culture.
Some of the children were also then sent abroad to the colonies to work, and almost all were never seen by their families again.
The researchers state in the report that they are clear that what happened was an act of “cultural genocide,” where the Scottish state and the religious institutions sought to 'detinkerise' children, ‘abolish tinkerdom', and 'end the gypsy race.’
Another tool that the Scottish state used to eradicate Scottish Gypsy Travellers/Nawken was the setting up of what were effectively small-scale concentration camps which families were forced to live on until they were able to be assimilated into the wider population, which were collectively known as the ‘Tinker Experiments”.
These abuses continued until the 1970’s, say the researchers, and has since been followed by a policy of assimilation that continues to this day.
The report also reveals that in the 1938, just before the Second World War, the Scottish Government allowed Wolfgang Abel, a top German eugenicist (a discredited science of inferior and superiors human ‘races’) to visit Scottish Gypsy Travellers and study them for his Nazi masters back in Berlin.
Nazi Germany went on to murder and kill a million Romanies (and also non-Romani Travellers) during the Holocaust.
The report calls for an apology from the Scottish Government, and reparations and actions to ameliorate the generational trauma that Scottish Gypsy Travellers/Nawken suffered during over a century of Scotland’s “cultural genocide”.
The draft report can be downloaded and seen on Dr Lynne Tammi-Connely’s website Aye Right:
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(Lead picture: Scottish Travellers by Loch Eriboll ©National Trust Images/Edward Chambré Hardman Collection)