Crying Hands: Eugenics and Deaf People in Nazi Germany

2. The Concept of Hereditary Deafness under National Socialism

28 2 The Concept of Hereditary Deafness under National Socialism SCIENTIFIC literature on the incidence of hereditary deafness was inconsistent in the years preceding Nazi rule. Moreover, Nazi race hygienists distorted what little evidence there was about the frequency of hereditary deafness (as well as its applicability to particular individuals) to fit their ideological goals and preconceived beliefs. The first German records on the heritability of deafness date from 1836, when an ear, nose, and throat specialist by the name of Kramer addressed the question. He noted that “until now, no case is known where deaf parents produced deaf children.”1 Much later in the nineteenth century, in volume 1 of the Journal for Deaf Education of November 15, 1888, an anonymous author wrote that “both physicians and teachers of the deaf . . . have been deeply engaged in the question of whether deafness is hereditary.” The author concluded that “this question must, in general, be answered in the negative,” but he also added that “this file is not yet closed.”2 The first German statistics collected on hereditary deafness are found in a 1902 study by F. Bezold, an ear doctor and professor of otolaryngology at the University of Munich.3 Among the 196 congenitally deaf persons this specialist examined, “there was not a single case in which one could posit an assured direct genetic transmission from father or mother or even, skipping a generation , from the grandparents.”4 After citing a colleague who had found among 6,133 deaf persons investigated only six with either a deaf father or deaf mother (three of whom were from a single marriage), Bezold came to the conclusion that “transmis- sion from deaf parents or grandparents to their direct offspring” was rare.5 Bezold accorded greater importance to “indirect transmission ,” that is, “deafness in the collateral lines of families.” He calculated a figure of “6.1 percent of cases in which one or more of the relatives suffered from deafness or extreme hearing loss.”6 A study published in 1924 presented similar findings: “The genetic transmission of deafness in a direct line from parents or grandparents is very infrequent, and even in the case of deafness in both parents it occurs only exceptionally.”7 The statistics of the state census of impairments from 1925 estimated “about 45,000 deaf-mutes” in Germany. The genetic factor supposedly accounted for “about one third.”8 In 1935, M. Werner believed that hearing individuals carrying a single, recessive gene for deafness were much more numerous than those deaf persons with two recessive genes. He wrote that the number of “recessive homozygotic carriers of deafness would have to number from 13,000 to 14,000, while the number of heterozygotic carriers who spoke and heard normally, would number 1.5 million.”9 Schumann’s 1926 essay “The ‘Lex Zwickau’ and the Deaf” concluded that “opinions on the percentage of hereditary deafness are widely divergent” and mentioned studies claiming anywhere from 15 percent to two-thirds of all deafness to be hereditary.10 By the 1930s, research devoted to racial hygiene was reaching its own conclusions. In 1931, Otmar von Verschuer, director of the Frankfurt Institute for Racial Hygiene, made public “his careful and scientifically conducted investigations into the extent of genetic affliction in the German people.”11 In his view, 15,000 persons suffered from hereditary deafness. Eugen Fischer, director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology in Berlin, reached similar conclusions in 1933. He claimed that of the “45,000 deaf people in Germany, 23 to 30 percent” would be hereditarily deaf, “i.e., about 10,000 to 13,000.”12 After 1935, there was a flood of publications and academic dissertations concerning the heritability of deafness. At this time it was politically correct to produce evidence in support of the notion of a high percentage of “genetic inferiors.” The dissertation The Concept of Hereditary Deafness 29 of K. Wördehoff illustrates the specious arguments that were used. He investigated forty-five cases for “the significance of heredity in the etiology of inner ear hearing loss.” In twelve of these cases, he established a “hereditary defect and constitutional inferiority.” In his calculation, this amounted to 26.67 percent. This percentage did not suffice for his argument, though, so he added a further “nine cases whose genesis was unclear” to his twelve genetically flawed examples. He assumed that these nine cases were due...