Between 1926 and 1972, with the approval of the highest authorities, a national charity "Oeuvre d¹Entraide pour les Enfants de la Grande Route" (part of the Foundation Pro-Juventute) dedicated itself to the elimination of nomadic lifestyles. For nearly 50 years, their unrelenting 'effort' took more than 600 children belonging to Switzerland's Jenische (gypsy) community from their parents' care. Placed in orphanages, corrective facilities or even forced to work for peasant foster families, the children were mistreated and racially abused. Some of those thrown into jail or interned in psychiatric clinics, where subjected to dubious experiments by scientists keen to prove the gypsies' racial inferiority. Considered as "criminals, good-for-nothings”, the Swiss Jenisches were forced to abandon their traditional gypsy way of life. The community still bears the scars of those nightmarish years.