The couple Barbara and Joseph Winter worked as itinerant traders and lived with their son Julius Winter in a flat in Augsburg. Another son, Joseph, died in 1935. From the end of 1938, the Sint*izze and Rom*nja were increasingly discriminated against and disenfranchised in Germany. Barbara and Joseph Winter were unable to continue working as traders. From 1942, they lived in Munich, in their little garden house at Perlacher Straße 123.
Barbara, Joseph and Julius Winter were arrested on 13 March 1943 and deported to the so called "gypsy camp" in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp just five days later. Barbara Winter was murdered there a few weeks later. Her son Julius Winter may have been the victim of pseudo-medical experiments. He was forced to undergo an examination and probably an operation in the camp's surgical ward before being murdered. The exact date of his death is not known.
His father Joseph Winter was transported to Buchenwald concentration camp in 1944, where he had to fulfill extremely hard forced labour in the Harzungen and Mittelbau-Dora subcamps. In February 1945, the SS evacuated the Harzungen camp and transferred 4,000 prisoners, including Joseph Winter, to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
British troops liberated Bergen-Belsen concentration camp on 15 April 1945. After only a few weeks in freedom, Joseph Winter died in the Bergen-Belsen military hospital on 16 June 1945 as a result of the brutal forced labour and his imprisonment.
