Born on 10 June 1927 in the village of Weiden on the edge of the Black Forest, Anton grew up in relative safety with his parents, Elvira and Ludwig Reinhardt, and his two siblings. After his father’s early death, his mother remarried another Sinto, Johann Bühler. Like many German Sinti, Anton became a victim of the Nazi regime. In August 1944, at the same age as the students are now, he was scheduled to undergo forced sterilisation.

Anton escaped, walking over 100 kilometres on foot, swimming across the Rhine, and reaching the Swiss town of Koblenz in the canton of Aargau. However, he was arrested there on 25 August 1944 and taken to the district prison in Zurzach. Despite his desperate pleas, Swiss police returned him to German authorities on 8 September 1944. Anton was imprisoned in the Schirmeck-Vorbruck security camp in the de facto annexed Alsace region. By March 1945, he was in Sulz, a subcamp of the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp. Though he managed to escape, he was recaptured by a German Volkssturm unit on 30 March 1945 and sentenced to death by a summary court. On the morning of 31 March 1945—Holy Saturday—Anton was forced to dig his own grave before being executed with a shot to the neck by SS Hauptsturmführer Karl Hauger. The only mercy he was granted was the opportunity to write a farewell letter.