Deaf People in Hitler's Europe (review)

In June 1998 a conference was held at Gallaudet University, a school for the deaf in Washington, D.C., on "Deaf People in Hitler's Europe, 1933-1945." The present volume includes the proceedings of that conference, along with some additional articles. It is organized in four parts: Part 1 features general articles on what the Nazis called "racial hygiene," with Henry Friedlander writing on Holocaust studies and the deaf, Robert Proctor on eugenics in Nazi Germany, and Patricia Heberer on the physically challenged within the public health system during that regime. Part 2 features essays on the deaf in Germany, including the Third Reich, by Jochen Muhs, John S. Schuchman of Gallaudet, Kurt Lietz (with a translated piece originally published in Germany in 1934), and Horst Biesold (with a reprinted article from 1999). Part 3 deals specifically with deaf Jewish victims from Hungary in the Nazi era, with contributions by Schuchman and Donna F. Ryan (also of Gallaudet University). Part 4 contains a pensive piece by Peter Black of the Holocaust Memorial Museum; under the general heading of "Concluding Thoughts," it is meant as "A Call for More Research."

The purpose of Gallaudet University is undoubtedly a laudable one, and to organize a conference on the deaf on the one hand and fascism and the Holocaust on the other is very much in keeping with this noble goal. However, attempting to fashion a reader from such a congress may be another matter, for the subjects treated in this volume do not hang together very well: they are topically disparate, and the quality differs from chapter to chapter. To begin with, the three pieces in part 1 by Friedlander, Proctor, and Heberer eloquently repeat well-worn facts and theses presented by these authors elsewhere, and show merely a forced relationship to the actual problems of the deaf in the proposed setting. The other contributions, except for Black's, deal with specific situations of the hearing-handicapped, but they are not systematic in themselves and their choice and overall coherence is questionable. This makes for an uneven balance. Why, for instance, should there be so much emphasis on deaf Jews merely in Hungary, and comparatively little on those in Germany, or none on those in Poland?

Another problem haunting the entire book has to do with the specificity of afflicted persons, and of deafness itself. On the one hand, deaf Nazis, including the leader of the Nazi Association of the Deaf (!) as well as members of the Deaf Storm Troopers (SA), are treated seemingly at the same level as deaf Jews. (Where, then, are the victims, and where the perpetrators?) On the other hand, the distinction between deafness as a congenital disorder and as an uninherited condition is not systematically made. In the three introductory chapters, the point is stressed repeatedly (perhaps too often, as Friedlander, Proctor, and Heberer tend to echo each other) that according to Nazi laws of eugenics and the resulting necessity of selecting out the unfit, it was the congenitally deaf who posed the greatest problem for the Nazis. Now, since the Hungarian Fascists, for instance, did not follow these eugenic rules but were, nonetheless, concerned about deaf Jews in their midst, this introduces a new dimension to the book, somehow removed from what I see as the crucial issue underlying the entire volume's theme, namely, the Nazis' stigmatization of all the congenitally ill.

Apart from these conceptual and structural problems, there are those of faulty or missing details in composing history. With all their emphasis on a healthy Volksgemeinschaft, regardless of the congenitally stricken, I would like to know what exactly moved the Nazis to organize their own deaf associations...