Crying Hands: Eugenics and Deaf People in Nazi Germany (review)

Horst Biesold. Crying Hands: Eugenics and Deaf People in Nazi Germany. Translated by William Sayers. Originally published as Klagende Hände (Solms, Germany: Jarick Oberbiel, 1988). Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet University Press, 1999. xix + 230 pp. Ill. $39.95.

On 20 May 1938 the Supreme Genetic Health Court in Jena, after an assessment by Prof. J. Zange, director of the university's ear, nose, and throat clinic, issued the following judgment against a young deaf mother of two normally hearing boys:

Gertrud Jacob must then be sterilized. It is inadmissable to refrain from this measure on the grounds of her intellectual competence and admirable qualities of character. Here it is simply a matter that her unimpeachably identified predisposition to deafness not be transferred to a future generation. Deafness . . . is always a severe impairment for a gifted person, and thus the predisposition must also be eradicated. (p. 125)

About 400,000 "hereditarily diseased" Germans (95 percent under psychiatric diagnosis) were sterilized as part of the eugenics program during the Third Reich. Among them, less than 1 percent--that is, between 2,000 and 4,000--were sterilized because of "hereditary deafness."¹ At that time, there were some 45,000 deaf-mutes and deaf people in Germany; one can thus estimate that between one in twelve and one in twenty deaf people or deaf-mutes were sterilized under Nazi rule. This is a relatively low figure in view of some eugenicists' claims, since German medical geneticists estimated that at least 15,000 of these deaf people owed their condition to "heredity." Horst Biesold has dedicated his book to this forgotten category of Nazi victims.

This book is important, given that one of the numerous legends cultivated in Germany after 1945 was that educators of the deaf, and physicians generally, had protected their patients from the grasp of Nazi racial hygiene cleansing.² Several institutions approached by Biesold during his investigation clung so tightly to this legend that they chose to destroy their archives when he requested access. (It should be the duty of historians of medicine to prevent such destructions.) In this respect, one of the most interesting chapters in the book shows the part played by educators of the deaf as "willing collaborators" with Nazi racial hygiene politics. Biesold's close historical investigation into the stand taken by educators of the deaf toward eugenic sterilization of their pupils dismisses the legend of a widespread "rescue mentality" (p. 42) among this profession. This includes both special educators and the Nazi leadership of the Reich Union of the Deaf of Germany (REGEDE) itself, Germany's unified association of the deaf founded in 1927. Deaf leaders of the REGEDE made the organization a "strong proponent of sterilization" and did not hesitate to denounce their "hereditarily diseased" companions (p. 100), most particularly if they were Jews, to Nazi health authorities. Besides political enthusiasm for Nazism, this can be explained by the fact that German teachers of deaf students, being convinced that heredity played "a very important role" in this handicap, often saw eugenics as part of their professional responsibilities (pp. 16, 19). Although it is not stressed by the author, economic calculation also motivated some eugenic claims: according to Nazi racial hygiene literature, eight years of schooling for a deaf-mute pupil in a public institution cost around 20,000 RM, compared to 1,000 RM for a regular pupil in primary school.

The section on the fate of Jewish deaf people tells the tragic story of the internationally renowned Israelite Institution for the Deaf founded in 1873 by Markus Reich in Berlin. Also fascinating is the section on "deaf resistance." Biesold has documented some cases of resistance to Nazi racial hygiene against the deaf, made possible by a sign language that remained obscure to Gestapo agents, and a widespread sense of solidarity that allowed quick transmission of news across great distances...