“There was never an effort to
s y s t e mat ic a l ly lo ok for
la rge num b e rs of deaf pe op l e .
Instead, the ta rg e ts seemed
to be deaf pe ople who had
no defenses, such as ba b i e s ,
ho s pi talized children, and
deaf pe ople in menta l
i n s t i t u t ions. Once tho s e
i n di v i d uals were put in
i n s t i t u t ions, they were
killed. The techniques for
killing that were ev e n t ua l ly
used in the cam ps, inclu di n g
the dev e lopment of gas, were
f i rst dev e loped for killing
the disabled in ho s pi ta l s
and other places.”
– John Schuchman
Remarks at the Carol F. Reich Forum, April 2001
How it began
D eaf communities and organizations flourished in Europe from the middle 1800s
until the rise of the Nazis in Germany. Schools for the deaf educated children
in Berlin, London, Prague, and Budapest. At least 25 deaf cultural, social, athletic and
other organizations existed in Germany as late as the 1930s. The Nazis completely
destroyed this vibrant culture.
The Nazi campaign against the handicapped officially began on July 14, 1933, with
the passage by the Reichstag of the Law for the Prevention of Offspring with
Hereditary Diseases. This law was based on the view of some scientists that certain
conditions were hereditary and could be treated only by preventing the people who
had them from bearing children—in other words, through sterilization. The
conditions that the Nazis wished to eliminate by this law were mental illness,
retardation, physical deformity, epilepsy, alcoholism, hereditary blindness, and
hereditary deafness. A person who had any of these conditions at any time in life
could be sterilized even after being cured, since the aim was to eradicate “the
underlying pathology.”
During the 1930s and 1940s, under this law, as many as 375,000 people were
sterilized by force. An estimated 17,000 of them were deaf. Thirty-seven percent of
the deaf people who were sterilized were reported to the government by their teachers
or schools. A total of 220 “health courts,” comprised of doctors and judges, were set up
across Europe to administer this law. Later, the Marriage Law was passed, requiring
all couples to prove to the health courts, through detailed genealogical charts, that
their children would not carry the diseases.
Physicians were impaneled as judges in a nationwide medical court system
budgeted to cost exactly 12 million marks. After 1935, all those wishing to obtain a
marriage license had to present a genetic health certificate form. The new credo of
the German Physicians’ League stated: “The ill-conceived ‘love thy neighbor’ has
to disappear, especially in relation to inferior or asocial creatures…The life of an
individual has meaning only in the light of his meaning to his family and to his
nation state.”
In the 1970s, Horst Biesold distributed a questionnaire about sterilization to 1,215
deaf survivors of the Nazi regime, using the archives of German schools for the deaf
that still existed. Biesold learned that the sterilizations always involved surgery and
sometimes the complete removal of the testes or ovaries. They were often done
without anesthesia, causing intense suffering. Biesold estimated that 17,000 deaf
individuals were forcibly sterilized, 28 percent under the age of 18. The youngest deaf
person to be sterilized was only nine years old. Nine percent were women already
regnant. The victims came from at least 104 deaf institutions. Twenty-two percent of the
survivors surveyed were turned over to the Nazi doctors by their own teachers. In some
especially cruel cases, sterilization was used to discipline unruly students.
The biological purification laws directed at people with disabilities were largely
accepted by the German public. Even before the 1933 law, the Nazis had begun a
campaign of discrimination and persecution against groups they deemed undesirable.
The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service dismissed “non-Aryans”
and Democrats from working in the German government. After establishing his rules
about the disabled, Hitler was emboldened to introduce the so-called Nuremberg Race
Laws. Passed on September 15, 1935, these laws set forth the complete biological
criteria for “Germanness” and forbade intermarriage between non-Jews and Jews.
All information taken http://www.lexnyc.com/holocaust.pdf:
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