Deaf People in Hitler's Europe, and: Surviving in Silence: A Deaf Boy in the Holocaust: The Harry I. Dunai Story (review)

During the past decade, increasing attention has been paid to the Nazi persecution, sterilization, and murder of children and adults with physical and mental disabilities. Scholars also have linked the Nazi war on those with handicaps, the subsequent genocides against the Gypsies and other groups, and the effort to annihilate the Jews of Europe. At least one recent text has incorporated the connections between the "euthanasia" of individuals with disabilities and the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question."¹

The appearance of major works on the Nazi war on the deaf provides fascinating material that increases our understanding of the practice of "racial hygiene." The excellent collection of essays edited by Donna F. Ryan and John S. Schuchman deals with Nazi biomedical social policy toward both Jewish and non-Jewish deaf Germans, while Harry Dunai's intriguing memoir provides a complementary personal account. These books also should be supplemented by Horst Biesold's recent study of the deaf in Nazi Germany.² All three have been published by Gallaudet University, which is the sole liberal-arts college for deaf students.

Derived from an international conference held in Washington, D.C., in 1998, Deaf People in Hitler's Europe was broadened with interviews of deaf German Jewish and non-Jewish survivors. Ryan and Schuchman wisely organized the collection by working from the general (theory and practice of Nazi "racial hygiene") to the specific (the experience of deaf individuals). It might have been helpful, however, had the volume begun with the specific sociocultural problems of deaf people and then offered an overview of deaf communities in modern Western culture, an approach that would have provided a useful frame of reference for a relatively unfamiliar area of study.

The introductory essays by Henry Friedlander, Robert Proctor, and Patricia Heberer trace the growth of extreme policies, from sterilization in 1933 to punitive laws in 1935, culminating in mass murder by 1939. Under these policies deaf individuals were often misdiagnosed as feebleminded. Although informative and well written, these essays frequently cover the same ground.

Friedlander calls attention to the sterilization of disabled individuals in the United States, a practice that predated that of the Nazis; the radicalization of the "eugenics" movement in Germany during the First World War; and the culmination of the Nazi attempt to restructure the human species with the establishment of six killing centers in Germany by 1941. The result was the sterilization and murder of hundreds of thousands of Germans. Proctor notes the chilling fact that much of the German medical profession embraced and carried out Nazi ideology. In 1941 the mainly medical staff of one of the "euthanasia" centers celebrated the gassing and cremation of its 10,000th "patient." For the first time in history, institutions were conceived and organized for the sole purpose of killing. Some of the staff were transferred to the death camps in the East in order to kill Jews efficiently. Heberer adds that categories of the "disabled" were expanded during the war to include German military casualties, victims of Allied bombings, and sickly forced laborers.

The essays on the assault on the German deaf community are fascinating and illuminating. Jochen Muhs's interviews of deaf Berliners show that the German deaf were both perpetrators and victims. The Nazis established a Reich Union of the Deaf, the purpose of which was to discredit earlier efforts to treat the deaf with respect. Some of the deaf, however, approved of the Nazi regime and joined the storm troopers and the Hitler Youth, although...