Crying Hands: Eugenics and Deaf People in Nazi Germany

Publisher’s Introduction

Publisher’s Introduction THE GERMAN deaf community’s devastation by eugenics, educators, and National Socialism in the 1930s and early 1940s forms the subject matter of Crying Hands. Preparation of an American edition of this work, translated from Horst Biesold’s Klagende Hände, presented Gallaudet University Press with serious challenges. The original text published in Germany essentially reproduced Biesold’s dissertation in book form. A meticulous translation therefore yielded a manuscript crafted in a heavy academic style, replete with scores of documents in their original form and condition, organized as a research report, and containing sections written to influence contemporaneous German political discussions. While this presentation might appeal to a narrow audience of scholars familiar with German history, it presented too many obstacles for other readers. Yet the book’s evidentiary core and dramatic conclusions demand a wider audience. Interviews and survey data from deaf victims of Nazi eugenics practices exist nowhere else. In Crying Hands deaf voices bear witness to one of the horrifying results of Nazism; perhaps more importantly they call attention to a particular approach to disability that is not entirely foreign to American readers. The complicity of teachers in the forced sterilization of deaf children, captured in documents discovered by Biesold and interviews with deaf survivors, provides evidence of another kind of horror that needs to be understood, both for its historical significance and for its meaning in today’s world, in which the medicalization of social problems and genetic engineering are becoming commonplace. vii In order to make the new book accessible and relevant to American readers, therefore, we have altered the German text’s presentation and organization while retaining Biesold’s arguments and as much of his original language as possible. Henry Friedlander, a leading scholar of the Holocaust and author of Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution, has written a new historical introduction for the American edition, in which he frames the context for the particular experiences of deaf people that Biesold describes and analyzes in detail. In addition, a new compilation of references to English language books on related subjects has been added. Some textual material from the German edition has been moved into the appendices of the English book. Biesold’s questionnaire , which was distributed to deaf survivors, is no longer in the text; it now occupies appendix 1, along with Biesold’s explication of various questions within the form itself. Similarly, the raw data from the questionnaires is now in appendix 2. A large collection of documents related to Gertrud Jacob, the subject of an interview in chapter 6, composes appendix 3. Other textual material has been moved into endnotes when it was believed to be more properly a reference than an integral part of the narrative. Some sections that Biesold did not include in the main text have been integrated with it for the American edition. These parts, which the author had labeled “Excursus 1: Deaf Victims of the ‘Euthanasia Action,’” and “Excursus 2: The Jewish Deaf in Germany,” seemed essential to the text for an American audience . Segments of the manuscript that discussed sterilized deaf Germans’ efforts to achieve compensation from the government, by contrast, were removed from the Gallaudet University Press version. In the course of his research, Biesold gathered a huge quantity of original and photocopied documents to support his arguments. These items, which are referred to as “Biesold Archive” followed by a number in the endnotes to the American edition, became his personal property, and they were so indicated in the original publication . Happily, Biesold has released them so that other scholviii Publisher’s Introduction ars may use them as well. They now can be found in the Biesold Archive, Library of the Institute for German Sign Language and Communication of the Deaf, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany. Crying Hands tells a painful story. The mutilation and suffering of children, adolescents, and parents, whose only crime was deafness, appears repeatedly in the documents and survivor testimony Biesold collected. Accounts of educators’ complicity in atrocities against their own deaf students, moreover, is a second source of particular anguish for us in the Gallaudet University community. We hope that this translated and edited text will contribute to public understanding and debate about the troubling issues it raises. Publisher’s Introduction ix ...