In January, 1940, 250 children were crowded together at the Buchenwald concentration camp. They were there for a cruel test scheduled by their captors. Nazi leaders needed an effective gas to carry out their Final Solution, and they were about to confirm that they had found one, Zyklon-B. The Nazis launched their test, and the gas did its job. All 250 children died. Millions of Jews would die from this gas in the years to follow, yet none of the children sacrificed on that grim winter day was Jewish. They were all Gypsies.

To think of the Holocaust is to naturally remember the millions of Jews who died at the hands of the Nazis and their maniacal leadership. That is as it should be. But at the same time, we should also recall those others who also fell victim to the same madness. At the head of that list are the Roma, a people more commonly called Gypsies. After the Jews, the Gypsies lost proportionately the highest number of people during World War II, apparently because Adolph Hitler and his cohorts just didn't like them.

The Roma had arrived in Europe hundreds of years earlier from a starting point, believed to be somewhere in northern India. The original inhabitants of Europe thought them to be from Egypt, hence the name Gypsy. The circumstances that compelled their migration are unclear, but might have been tied to military conflicts in south Asia. Anthropologists had long theorized Gypsy origins as Indian because of similarities in their language, Romany, and languages common only to India. Those theories have since been supported by DNA tests that connect the Gypsies to DNA found almost exclusively in south Asia. But none of that mattered in the dark days that began in 1933 and ended in 1945.

Nor did it matter that, by Germany's own typology, Gypsies were clearly Aryan. Although the wholesale imprisonment and slaughter of so many millions was allegedly to protect the "Aryan bloodline" from contamination, the truth points instead to the virulent racism and mindless hatred of Hitler and his toadies. It seems the Gypsies, though they were Aryan, simply weren't Aryan enough.

The Nazi hatred for Gypsies probably stemmed from the image they had of this wandering people. Over the centuries, the Gypsies had acquired a reputation as thieves and troublemakers, the result of local prejudices and discrimination. Their itinerant lifestyle ensured they were easily branded as such, when in reality, they probably had no higher percentage

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