Eugenics and Deaf People in Nazi Germany
Horst Biesold
Introduction by Henry Friedlander
Now in Paperback!
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View the table of contents. Read an excerpt. Read reviews: ForeWord Magazine, Choice, Donald Moores (Former Editor, American Annals of the Deaf; Coeditor, Educational and Developmental Aspects of Deafness). |
$34.95s print edition $34.95 e-book
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“Horst Biesold’s Crying Hands treats a neglected aspect of the Holocaust: the fate of the deaf in Nazi Germany. His book covers a story that has remained almost unknown. 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 of the deaf were also murdered.”—From the Introduction by Henry Friedlander
When the Nazis assumed power in Germany in 1933, they wasted no time in implementing their radical policies, first by securing passage of the Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases. Among those designated by this law as “congenitally disabled” were deaf people. Horst Biesold’s newly translated book examines this neglected aspect of Nazi “racial hygiene” through interviews with more than 1,000 deaf survivors of this brutal law that authorized forced sterilizations, abortions, and eventually murder.
Crying Hands meticulously delineates the antecedents of Nazi eugenics, beginning with Social Darwinism (postulated in the mid-nineteenth century) and tracing the various sterilization laws later initiated throughout the world, including many passed and practiced in the United States. This exceptional scholarship is movingly paralleled by the human faces fixed to the numbing statistics, as in story after story those affected recount their irretrievable loss, pain, and misplaced shame imposed upon them by the Nazi regime. Through their stories, told to Biesold in German Sign Language, they have given voice to the countless others who died from the specious science practiced by the Third Reich. And now their own trails finally have been acknowledged.
Horst Biesold was a professor and teacher of deaf students in Bremen, Germany.
Print Edition: ISBN 978-1-56368-255-1, 6 x 9 paperback, 252 pages, 10 tables, 25 figures, 20 photographs
$34.95s
E-Book: ISBN 978-1-56368-196-7
$34.95
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