The Czech government said it had struck a deal to move a pig farm from the site of a former Nazi concentration camp where hundreds of Roma perished during the Second World War.
Czech culture ministry spokeswoman Simona Cigankova said the contract for the property would be “finalised by September,” but declined to name a sum.
Between 1940 and 1943, Nazi Germany and its Czech collaborators imprisoned close to 1,300 Czech Roma at the concentration camp, located in Lety, a village 75 kilometres (50 miles) south of the capital Prague.
In all, 327 Roma, including 241 children, died at the camp staffed by an ethnic Czech commander and guards, while more than 500 were sent to Nazi Germany’s infamous Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in occupied southern Poland.
The communist Czechoslovakian regime built the pig farm on the site in the 1970s.
Activists began lobbying the European Union in May last year to halt subsidies paid to the farm.
Alongside European Jews, the continent’s smaller Roma minority was a target of Nazi genocide during the Second World War.
The Czech Republic, an EU country of 10.5 million, has a Roma community estimated to number between 250,000 and 300,000.
Of the roughly one million Roma who lived in Europe prior to the Second World War, historians believe that Nazi Germany killed over half.
