Deaf People in Hitler's Europe

Donna F. Ryan,John S. Schuchman

• Publisher: Gallaudet University Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781563682018
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Inspired by the conference "Deaf People in Hitler's Europe, 1933–1945, " hosted jointly by Gallaudet University and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1998, this extraordinary collection, organized into three parts, integrates key presentations and important postconference research.

Henry Friedlander begins "Part I: Racial Hygiene" by analyzing the assault on deaf people and people with disabilities as an integral element in the Nazi attempt to implement their theories of racial hygiene. Robert Proctor documents the role of medical professionals in deciding who should be sterilized or forbidden to marry, and whom the Nazi authorities would murder. In an essay written especially for this volume, Patricia Heberer details how Nazi manipulation of eugenics theory and practice facilitated the justification for the murder of those considered socially undesirable.

"Part II: The German Experience" commences with Jochen Muhs's interviews of deaf Berliners who lived under Nazi rule, both those who suffered abuse and those who, as members of the Nazi Party, persecuted others, especially deaf Jews. John S. Schuchman describes the remarkable 1932 film Misjudged People, which so successfully portrayed the German deaf community as a vibrant contributor to society that the Nazis banned its showing when they came to power. Horst Biesold's contribution confirms the complicity of teachers who denounced their own students, labeling them hereditarily deaf and thus exposing them to compulsory sterilization. The section also includes the reprint of a chilling 1934 article entitled "The Place of the School for the Deaf in the New Reich, " in which author Kurt Lietz rued the expense of educating deaf students, who could not become soldiers or bear "healthy children."

In "Part III: The Jewish Deaf Experience, " John S. Schuchman discusses the plight of deaf Jews in Hungary. His historical analysis is complemented by a chapter containing excerpts from the testimony of six deaf Jewish survivors who describe their personal ordeals. Peter Black's reflections on the need for more research conclude this vital study of a little-known chapter of the Holocaust.

Part I
Racial Hygiene

Introduction

Donna F. Ryan

Broad pseudoscientific theories, social policies, and mental images of an ideal population for the New Germany governed the treatment of deaf people during Hitler's regime. Recent scholarship in Holocaust studies has fit the wartime experiences of people with disabilities into the context of popular “eugenics” theories intended to preserve “Aryan” superiority by eliminating weak links in the gene pool. Beginning with prohibitions against marriage between Aryans and “damaged stock” and the forced sterilization of those judged likely to pass down inferior genes, negative eugenics theories would eventually lead to gruesome experiments and the mass murder of those deemed dispensable and dangerous to the hereditary future of Germany. While the willing architects of this social policy were academics, doctors, lawyers, and judges, the Nazis were also confronted with the need to popularize their ideas in order to ensure compliance and even outright support for their racial practices.

Henry Friedlander has demonstrated the integral connection between the Nazi treatment of those perceived as disabled and the planning and implementation of the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.”¹ In the following essay, he outlines the historical context for the persecution of deaf people. Based on the theory of eugenics, which was widely accepted by medical professionals in Europe and the United States, Nazi “racial hygiene” laws passed in 1933 and 1935 mandated the forced sterilization of the genetically unfit and forbade them to marry. As in many cases of Nazi injustice, Friedlander shows how the burden of proof of “innocence” fell on the accused.

In 1939, racial hygiene took a deadly turn. The so-called euthanasia program murdered disabled children first, using barbiturate overdose or starvation, in fulfillment of the goal of the destruction of “life unworthy of life.” The inclusion of deaf children in this program is documented. The effort to eradicate disabled adults entailed the construction of killing centers and the use of poison gas, precursors to the death camps of the Holocaust. While precise figures for deaf victims may be impossible to glean from the records, the murder of deaf adults, often mistakenly diagnosed as feebleminded but sometimes selected only because they were deaf, places deaf people among Nazi targets for annihilation within the Greater German Reich.

Robert Proctor's essay examines the role of medical professionals in the forced sterilization and murder of disabled people during the Third Reich.² He argues that racial hygiene, an extreme form of German eugenics, was the invention of medical scientists even before Hitler's assumption of power. With the institution of a strong state, doctors were authorized to put those theories into practice.

Like Friedlander, Proctor finds that doctors, nurses, and other health care professionals were deeply implicated in all assaults on disabled people. They reported genetic illnesses to the state and they served as judges for the Hereditary Health Courts. They performed the sterilizations, whether by surgical procedure, injection of super-cooled carbon dioxide, or X-rays. They killed disabled babies, including deaf infants, by injection or starvation and then undertook the systematic murder of disabled adults with overdoses of barbiturates or the use of gas chambers. Doctors trained in anthropology performed all “selections” at the death camps. They plundered corpses for gold and organs for study. They performed heinous medical experiments. When much of the apparatus of the euthanasia program was moved from Germany to Poland to reduce popular opposition, gas chambers from psychiatric hospitals were dismantled and shipped to Majdanek, Auschwitz, and Treblinka. Medical personnel familiar with operating the gas chambers followed.

Proctor shows that doctors were not Hitler's pawns but pioneers in the development of racial hygiene theories and the technology to carry out monstrous crimes. Medical practitioners and theorists functioned in a world where eugenics theories were valued and where their personal prestige and economic position were much enhanced by service to the Nazi state.

Patricia Heberer's essay draws an important linkage in eugenics theory between heredity and social problems in the modern world. In this way, it was possible to apply this theory not only to those racially outside the German Volk—the Jews, Roma, and Sinti—but also those within the community whose social value was questionable—people with physical and cognitive disabilities, homosexuals, alcoholics, prostitutes, the illegitimately born, criminals, those suffering from sexually transmitted diseases or tuberculosis, the poor, and even those considered lazy or work shirkers. The origins of social ills were believed to be hereditary, and so biological solutions could be imposed through energetic public health policies carried out by physicians, social workers, public welfare agencies, and even educators. These theories were acceptable to a broad German audience who had seen so many “fit” individuals sacrificed for the Fatherland in World War II, while “unfit” members of society were consuming a disproportionate share of the public treasury in a country that suffered a long and deep economic depression. Progressively more severe funding cuts for mental health and long-term-care facilities fostered deteriorating conditions, leading to malnutrition and disease.

Heberer characterizes Nazi public health measures as more and more radical until deliberate murder appeared the logical outcome. As the T4 program became more widely known, Hitler issued an order to terminate its operations in August 1941, but it actually continued, carefully controlled from Berlin. Moreover, the killing operations in the concentration camps broadened the definition of unfit to include mentally and physically ill prisoners, those who did not work, and those the camp administrators deemed troublesome. As Patricia Heberer argues here, the category of unfit was gradually expanded from the hereditarily compromised, disabled, and racially invaluable to all those no longer useful to society, especially during wartime. Ultimately, even German soldiers and workers from Eastern Europe, if unable to perform to full potential, found themselves victims of this curious utilitarianism. National Socialist logic had been carried to its most extreme conclusion, in which public health and social policies merged.

Notes

1. Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).

2. For a full treatment of this subject, see Robert Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988).

Holocaust Studies and the Deaf Community

Henry Friedlander

The fate of deaf people in Nazi Germany is a neglected aspect of the Holocaust. Certainly, few would think of them as Holocaust victims or survivors. In the United States, even in Germany, few are aware that during the Nazi era, human beings—men, women, and children—with impaired hearing were sterilized against their will, and even fewer know that many deaf people were also murdered. Under Nazi rule, they shared the fate of all persons with mental and physical disabilities.

First, we must define our terms. The Nazi regime championed an ideology of human inequality designed to assure the health and purity of the German national community. Membership in the community was to be based on biology; race and not culture was to determine inclusion. It thus became the official policy of the German state to exclude those deemed to pose a threat to the nation's health and purity. This exclusion was based on biology and directed against groups of human beings considered “alien” or “inferior;” heredity determined the fate of groups and individuals. We therefore can apply the term “Holocaust” or “genocide” to the fate of all those human beings whose selection for exclusion and murder was based on their heredity.¹

Although the drive against supposedly alien influences was directed against large numbers of human beings classified as incompatible with the Nordic ideal of “Aryan” Germans—for example, persons of African or Asian descent—only two so-called alien groups resided in Central Europe in sufficient numbers to require the intervention of the state: Jews and Gypsies. Against them, the Nazi regime inaugurated a concerted policy of isolation, discrimination, and repression. Their isolation culminated in the Nuremberg racial laws of September 1935, which prohibited marriages between Germans and members of the proscribed groups; it also made any sexual contact between them illegal and punishable by death. During the 1930s, the exclusion of Jews involved, in addition to isolation and marginalization, the drive to force them to leave the country, and the exclusion of Gypsies—that is, Sinti and Roma—involved their incarceration in so-called Gypsy camps. During the war, the German state practiced a far more radical form of exclusion, the mass murder of all members of the excluded groups, applying the so-called Final Solution of the Jewish and Gypsy Question in every European country occupied by or allied with Germany.²

A long tradition of anti-Semitism in Christian Europe had prepared the ground for the popular acquiescence to the isolation of the Jews. But only the transformation of religious into racial anti-Semitism during the nineteenth century made possible the exclusion of Jews regardless of their commitment to German culture. Their heredity, and not their culture, determined their fate. The same applied to the Gypsies. As a result of the American and French revolutions, previously repressed minorities, including Jews and Gypsies, had been granted citizenship during the nineteenth century, but the equality engendered by emancipation had been challenged by the rise of scientific theories of race that opposed the absorption of outsiders.³

Disabled people made up the third target of the Nazi policy of exclusion. Alongside Jews and Gypsies, human beings with physical or mental disabilities—designated as “unfit”—were also to be eliminated from the German national community. They too faced a long tradition of prejudice, which, in the nineteenth century, also transformed into a racially based theory of their inferiority.

The scientific movement responsible for the harsher view of disabled people was known as “eugenics.” The term had been coined in 1881 by the British naturalist and mathematician Francis Galton and described by the leading American eugenicist, Charles B. Davenport, as “the science of the improvement of the human race by better breeding.” Eugenicists firmly believed that the increase of foreign and inferior populations prevented human advancement. To deal with so-called inferiors, eugenicists like Davenport called for the study of specific problems posed by “inferior” humans as, for example, “deaf-mutism, criminality, hereditary insanity, feeblemindedness, epilepsy.”⁴ At first, eugenicists attempted to achieve their goals through “positive” eugenics, that is, an increase of the birth rate of “superior” populations; but, as this approach did not yield results, the movement turned to “negative” eugenics, that is, the sterilization and exclusion of inferior populations.⁵

The political campaign of the eugenics movement in the United States, designed to prevent members of other races and ethnic groups from entering the country, was successful after World War I with the enactment of the 1924 Johnson Immigration Restriction Act. This act remained the law of the land until after World War II; it restricted the immigration of ethnic groups considered undesirable through the establishment of quotas and was one reason that refugees from Nazi terror and survivors of Nazi genocide had difficulty entering the United States.

The idea that mentally and physically disabled human beings must be excluded from the gene pool was a staple argument of the international eugenics movement, and the campaign of the American eugenicists in favor of sterilizing the disabled was relatively successful. In 1907, Indiana enacted the first sterilization law, and by the middle of the 1930s, more than half of the states had passed laws that authorized the sterilization of “inmates of mental institutions, persons convicted more than once of sex crimes, those deemed to be feebleminded by IQ tests, ‘moral degenerate persons,’ and epileptics.”⁶

In 1927, one such law, a Virginia statute that authorized directors of state institutions to order the compulsory sterilization of disabled patients diagnosed as suffering from “an hereditary form of insanity or imbecility,” reached the U.S. Supreme Court.⁷ The case involved an order for the compulsory sterilization of a woman diagnosed as feebleminded, whose mother had been classified the same way, and whose child had also been stigmatized as retarded. In his prescient plea to the court, I. P. Whitehead, attorney for plaintiff Carrie Buck, warned the justices that if the state can impose a procedure that “violates her constitutional right of bodily integrity,” the results would be ominous. He argued that if the Virginia law were declared constitutional, “then the limits of the power of the State (which in the end is nothing more than the faction in control of the government) to rid itself of those citizens deemed undesirable according to its standards, by means of surgical sterilization, have not been set.” Further, he warned that such a finding by the court would mean that “a reign of doctors will be inaugurated and in the name of science new classes will be added, even races may be brought within the scope of such regulation, and the worst forms of tyranny practiced.”⁸ Oliver Wendell Holmes, speaking for the majority of the court, including Louis Brandeis and William Howard Taft, pushed aside such arguments. His justification for upholding the Virginia law presaged the arguments used later by eugenicists in Nazi Germany:

We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.⁹

In the United States, eugenics eventually lost scientific acceptance and public support. New scientific discoveries led to the rejection of eugenic research results. Moreover, events in Nazi Germany during the 1930s, and the close cooperation between American and German eugenicists, seriously damaged the standing of the American eugenics movement, and the revelation of Nazi crimes in the 1940s discredited eugenics theories—at least for the next fifty years.¹⁰

The eugenics movement in Germany was in the beginning, prior to World War I, relatively moderate. It emphasized “positive” eugenics and did not adopt the anti-Semitism popular on the German right. World War I radicalized the German eugenics movement. Not only did eugenicists begin to advocate “negative” eugenics, particularly sterilization, but many also adopted a racist viewpoint. During the Weimar Republic, German eugenicists agreed on “negative” eugenics but divided into a Nordic and anti-Nordic wing on the question of race. The proponents of the Nordic orientation subscribed to the belief in the superior qualities of the Nordic or Germanic peoples; moreover, the Nordic wing, centered in the Munich chapter of the eugenics movement, did not reject racial anti-Semitism and embraced this form of racism completely after the Nazis assumed power.¹¹

The Munich chapter was led by Fritz Lenz, who occupied at the University of Munich the first chair in eugenics, as well as by Eugen Fischer and Ernst Rüdin. The Freiburg anthropologist Eugen Fischer had become famous through his book, The Rehoboth Bastards and the Problem of Miscegenation Among Humans, writt...