I guess I just kind of assume all my friends are rational and intelligent and lovely people- it took the wind right out of me to discover that one had kind of slipped under the net:
"...I also went to Auschwitz, that was, just...so incredible, you've got to go there."- Uhm, yeah, I will, I mean, it's not on 'my list' or anything, but, yeah, sure, I'll probably check it out at one point or another.
"Hitler had the right idea though."
- WHAT?!?
"Oh, not about the Jews and the homosexuals, but before he got them he went after the Gyppos."
- Who? Uhm...WHAT?
"Gyppos. God I hate the fucking Gyppos. I'd fully support getting rid of them."
- Why?
"Gyppos are awful! Gyppos steal everything that's not nailed down. They don't value human life at all."
- What, they don't value human life, so you want to burn them all?"Hitler didn't burn people! He gassed them."
The scary thing is, this person is a teacher (at one point she wondered aloud, quite seriously, if there had ever been, in the whole of history, a single Gypsy who 'wanted more' and 'got out'), and appears otherwise like a completely normal person.
I do remember saying at one point: "Even if your insaniac charges are absolutely spot on and right, once you start rounding up one group of people and incinerating them, you're less than a hair's breadth away from rounding up any and all groups of people and incinerating them. Even if that group iconsists 100% of criminals- the definition of what that is can change in an instant." Which I think is the best case against the death penalty that I've ever randomly stumbled into.
Needless to say, the person in question is no longer on my Christmas-card list.
This is a 
yikes! that is full on.
i think you engaged with that difficult situation well - i probably would've been stunned into silence.
Appalling! Strange to think that this breed of dinosaur still exists... it's especially scary to find in people of our generation. I come across a lot of this in SA, but mostly from much older people (who don't occupy positions such as teacher... wonder what she's been passing on to those kids).