Crying Hands: Eugenics and Deaf People in Nazi Germany

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When the Nazis assumed power in Germany in 1933, they immediately passed 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 traces the various sterilization laws later initiated throughout the world, including many passed and enforced 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 te Third Reich. And now their own trials finally have been acknowledged.