Associated Press

as found on Spokane.net

December 19, 1998

BONN, Germany — Germany’s upper house of parliament held a service Friday to commemorate Gypsy victims of the Holocaust.

“The murdered people are only really dead if no one remembers them anymore,” said Hesse state Gov. Hans Eichel, president of the Bundesrat.

On Dec. 16, 1942, Nazi SS chief Heinrich Himmler ordered the deportation of all Gypsies, also known as Roma and Sinti, in Germany and Austria to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in Poland.

Of the roughly 1 million Roma living in Europe at the time of World War II, historians estimate the Nazis and their allies killed between 25 percent and 50 percent, including 21,000 at Auschwitz.