The real Ernst Lossa was born in 1929 in Augsburg. Lossa was a member of the Yenish, who are a group of Germans who have their own dialect and who travel from place to place. (Perhaps the most comparable English-speaking group are the Irish Travelers.) Lossa was a troubled kid, whose father ended up in Dachau at least twice (although he was released). After committing many petty crimes, Ernst ended up at a sanatorium called Kaufbeuren, which is still in operation today.
In 1939 the Nazis, under a decree called Aktion T4, announced that anyone who they thought was incurably ill or "mentally defective" would be sent to a concentration camp called Hadamar.
According to the guidelines for educators on teaching the Holocaust, printed in 1999 by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC, up to half a million Gypsies (Romani and Sinti) and at least 250,000 mentally and physically disabled were victims of the Nazi genocide.
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