Horst Biesold Crying Hands - Eugenics and Deaf People in Nazi Germany

Annotation

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 beingsmen, women, and childrenwith impaired hearing were sterilized against their will, and even fewer know that many of the deaf were also murdered. --From the Foreword 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.