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In Germany, a number of social welfare organisations for deaf people existed at the accession to power of the Nazi Party in 1933. Some of these collaborated with the Nazi regime.
| | This article needs additional citations for verification .(April 2017) |
In Germany, a number of social welfare organisations for deaf people existed at the accession to power of the Nazi Party in 1933. Some of these collaborated with the Nazi regime.
Before 1927, there were hundreds of deaf clubs around Germany. Each club had its own agenda and differed by city and deaf community. In 1927, during Weimar Germany, a transformation began and changed the deaf community in Germany.
The Reichsgewerkschaft der Gehörlosen Deutschlands, abbreviated and stylized as ReGeDe, was known in English as The Reich Union of the Deaf of Germany, and was founded in 1927 in Weimar, Germany as a social organization. By the Easter of 1933, ReGeDe was part of the National Socialists' public welfare program. Less than a year later, ReGeDe claimed to have more than 3,900 members, including deaf activist Karl Wacker, who fought on behalf of the deaf community against the sterilization law. The ReGeDe union included such groups as deaf advocacy and support agencies, self-help organizations, sports clubs, and much more. "The division of deaf associations into church-affiliated groups, and athletic union, and others" was too much to Heinrich Siepmann, an activist in the deaf community. [1] He saw "just one association for the German deaf…a union" [1] The union he envisioned was the ReGeDe. Following Siepmann's example, further efforts were made to incorporate the remaining independent organizations into ReGeDe.
ReGeDe had a strong desire to do away with local deaf organizations, and the associations that now formed ReGeDe enticed, threatened, and coerced deaf children to become members, and appeals were made to their parents. Werner Thomas made such a plea to involve deaf children in Hitler Youth, found in the Newsletter of the Berlin Deaf Athletic Association: [1]
Of the Leipzig and Dresden Sports Associations almost one hundred percent of the members are doing their duty with joyful hearts as Hitler Youth. It is then all the more shameful that many Berlin athletes still oppose membership...training in Hitler Youth and the troopers is very worthwhile for the German people as a whole. There out youngsters will be trained in iron discipline, comradeship and self-sacrifice...We, as deaf, will never be called to the labor force, to the army and so on. Service in Hitler Youth offers you the last opportunity to go through a hard school...serving the interests of Adolf Hitler's Reich takes precedence over everything!!!...I urge you for the last time...to report to the troop leader...otherwise, dissociate yourselves with our fine community...Finally I appeal to the respected parents and also to my fellow club members to give their full understanding to the action that I have undertaken in the state's interest
ReGeDe's recruitment methods were successful, as it grew from 3,900 on Easter in 1933, to 11,588 members by January 1, 1937. Fear of the sterilization law most likely amplified these member numbers, as some deaf citizens believed that becoming a member of ReGeDe would allow them to be protected from the sterilization law. However, the leaders never promised protection from the law, it was only assumed by the German deaf.
As the Nazis gained more power, ReGeDe moved to become a more thorough Nazi organization. "Contributing greatly to this powerlessness [of the deaf peoples] was the unification and harmonization policy of the ReGeDe, whose Nazi leadership clique fully endorsed the ideology of Nazi eugenicists and race hygienists." [1] In 1927, shortly after ReGeDe's founding, Fritz Albreghs (1892–1945) became its chairman. [2] ReGeDe was led by the deaf Nazi Fritz Albreghs, the 'Fuhrer of the Deaf'. He used both sign and speech to get across the Nazi message. [3] Albreghs organized ReGeDe by Nazi leadership standards, and supervised it strictly. All local deaf clubs and associations were taken over by district associations, and those, in turn, were under the district inspectorates.
Siepmann, head of the German deaf athletic club, the Deaf Union for Physical Training also supported consolidation under Nazi leadership. "The organization's head, Fritz Albreghs, had applied for Party membership for everyone in ReGeDe." [1] Albreghs and the administrative head Ballier, both of whom signed the ReGeDe membership card, did not hesitate to denounce their "hereditarily diseased" fellows. Albreghs even wore a brown stormtrooper uniform and swastika-eventually most leaders of ReGeDe did as well. In 1942, Albreghs was removed from the leadership of ReGeDe, and Karl Brunner took leadership. However, the following year leadership was taken by Karl Engelmann, who lead the Deaf Hitler Youth. [2]
The actions of the German Deaf Workers Union founded in 1918, which joined the ReGeDe, were said to "instead of building up [the deaf community] had destroyed everything in a fratricidal war!" [1] Albreghs, Siepmann and Edmund Matz worked together to pursue a policy of unifying all organization for and of deaf Germans with the premise: "where resistance arises, it will gradually be eliminated" and "when necessary, harshly and ruthlessly". [1]
ReGeDe worked with teachers and administrators in encouraging support for the Nazi regime and its racial hygiene program. One regional association in 1937 reported that "collaboration with Nazi public welfare is excellent. Almost the entire body of teachers of the deaf are working effectively in our common sense of destiny." [1] Part of this "destiny" involved sterilization of deaf and other 'hereditarily diseased.' ReGeDe was a "strong proponent of sterilization", even going as far as releasing a statement that: "prevention is better than cure," and that it is patriotic to be sterilized since "the deaf do not need to be soldiers but sterilization is a sacrifice like soldiering." [1] People felt threatened by the sterilization law and joined ReGeDe in hopes of avoiding being sterilized. It was said that "whoever refused was taken away by police." [1] Teachers, principals, nurses, and ReGeDe leaders turned in deaf people, and sometimes even personally took them to the clinics. One deaf person who experienced these events recounted: "despite the fact that I was a party member, I was sterilized after a 12-month long judicial process." [1] Horst Biesold, the author of Crying Hands conducted a survey and found that 5 of the 1,215 forcibly sterilized deaf respondents reported that the ReGeDe had informed on them, with Albreghs and Ballier reporting 2 of those 5.
Emilie Klusener-Esch founded the women's division of association of the deaf in 1911, but it was not active. Emilie was involved in the development of introducing deaf women to Nazi ideology. She joined the Nazi women's organization in 1932, and shortly thereafter, Albreghs gave her authority to establish the Reich women's union within the ReGeDe. [1] Emilie was voluntarily sterilized, even though she came from a "hereditarily sound" family. She touted that being sterilized is a sacrifice, and used that sacrifice as a model to convince other deaf women to also be voluntarily sterilized.
The Deaf Union for Physical Training was an athletic club. It was founded by Heinrich Siepmann, a leader of the Deaf who proposed the consolidation of the separate Reich Union with the athletics division under the Nazi regime. Athletics was seen as a means by which children could be conditioned, not only physically, but socially in favor of representing Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party as a whole. It was felt that children should engage in athletic activity at least once a week. The tactics by which recruitment efforts were made included, among others, enticement, threats, and coercion. [1]
Friends of the Deaf, also known as Jedide Ilmim, was a Jewish support organization for deaf people founded by Markus Reich and was continued by his son, Felix Reich. [4] The "Friends of the Deaf" was established in an effort to help fund the school Markus Reich had founded, the Israelite Institute for the Deaf of Germany. The efforts made by this group would aid in amassing support from the community for the Deaf cause. [1]
The Nazi term Gleichschaltung or "coordination" was the process of Nazification by which Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party successively established a system of totalitarian control and coordination over all aspects of German society and societies occupied by Nazi Germany "from the economy and trade associations to the media, culture and education". Although the Weimar Constitution remained nominally in effect until Germany's surrender following World War II, near total Nazification had been secured by the 1935 resolutions approved during the Nuremberg Rally, when the symbols of the Nazi Party and the State were fused and German Jews were deprived of their citizenship.
The Nazi Party, officially the National Socialist German Workers' Party, was a far-right political party in Germany active between 1920 and 1945 that created and supported the ideology of Nazism. Its precursor, the German Workers' Party, existed from 1919 to 1920. The Nazi Party emerged from the extremist German nationalist, racist and populist Freikorps paramilitary culture, which fought against the communist uprisings in post–World War I Germany. The party was created to draw workers away from communism and into völkisch nationalism. Initially, Nazi political strategy focused on anti–big business, anti-bourgeois, and anti-capitalist rhetoric, which was later downplayed to gain the support of business leaders. By the 1930s, the party's main focus shifted to antisemitic and anti-Marxist themes. The party had little popular support until the Great Depression, where worsening living standards and vast unemployment drove Germans into political extremism.
The German Labour Front was the nationalized labour organisation of the Nazi Party, which replaced the various independent private trade unions in Germany during the Policy of Nazification (Gleichschaltung).
Wilhelm Frick was a prominent German politician of the Nazi Party (NSDAP), who served as Minister of the Interior in Adolf Hitler's cabinet from 1933 to 1943 and as the last governor of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.
The Hitler Youth was the youth organisation of the Nazi Party in Germany. Its origins date back to 1922 and it received the name Hitler-Jugend, Bund deutscher Arbeiterjugend in July 1926. From 1936 until 1945, it was the sole official boys' youth organisation in Germany and it was partially a paramilitary organisation. It was composed of the Hitler Youth proper for male youths aged 14 to 18, and the German Youngsters in the Hitler Youth for younger boys aged 10 to 14.
The League of German Girls or the Band of German Maidens was the girls' wing of the Nazi Party youth movement, the Hitler Youth. It was the only legal female youth organization in Nazi Germany.
The Kreisau Circle (1940–1944) was a group of about twenty-five German dissidents in Nazi Germany led by Helmuth James von Moltke, who met at his estate in the rural town of Kreisau, Silesia. The circle was composed of men and a few women from a variety of backgrounds, including those of noble descent, devout Protestants and Catholics, intellectuals, military personnel, socialists and conservatives. Despite their differences, the members of the Kreisau Circle found common interest in their opposition to Hitler's regime on moral and religious grounds. At their meetings, the circle discussed how they would reorganize the German government after the end of the Third Reich.
This is a list of words, terms, concepts and slogans of Nazi Germany used in the historiography covering the Nazi regime. Some words were coined by Adolf Hitler and other Nazi Party members. Other words and concepts were borrowed and appropriated, and other terms were already in use during the Weimar Republic. Finally, some are taken from Germany's cultural tradition.
Volksgemeinschaft is a German expression meaning "people's community", "folk community", "national community", or "racial community", depending on the translation of its component term Volk. This expression originally became popular during World War I as Germans rallied in support of the war, and many experienced "relief that at one fell swoop all social and political divisions could be solved in the great national equation". The idea of a Volksgemeinschaft was rooted in the notion of uniting people across class divides to achieve a national purpose, and the hope that national unity would "obliterate all conflicts - between employers and employees, town and countryside, producers and consumers, industry and craft".
The Nazi Party/Foreign Organization was a branch of the Nazi Party and the 43rd and only non-territorial Gau ("region") of the Party. In German, the organization is referred to as NSDAP/AO, "AO" being the abbreviation of the German compound word Auslands-Organisation. Although Auslands-Organisation would be correctly written as one word, the Nazis chose an obsolete spelling with a hyphen.
The Deutsches Jungvolk in der Hitlerjugend was the separate section for boys aged 10 to 13 of the Hitler Youth organisation in Nazi Germany. Through a programme of outdoor activities, parades and sports, it aimed to indoctrinate its young members in the tenets of Nazi ideology. Membership became fully compulsory for eligible boys in 1939. By the end of World War II, some had become child soldiers. After the end of the war in 1945, both the Deutsches Jungvolk and its parent organization, the Hitler Youth, ceased to exist.
Nazi eugenics refers to the social policies of eugenics in Nazi Germany, composed of various pseudoscientific ideas about genetics. The racial ideology of Nazism placed the biological improvement of the German people by selective breeding of "Nordic" or "Aryan" traits at its center. These policies were used to justify the involuntary sterilization and mass-murder of those deemed "undesirable".
Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring or "Sterilisation Law" was a statute in Nazi Germany enacted on July 14, 1933, which allowed the compulsory sterilisation of any citizen who in the opinion of a "Genetic Health Court" suffered from a list of alleged genetic disorders – many of which were not, in fact, genetic. The elaborate interpretive commentary on the law was written by three dominant figures in the racial hygiene movement: Ernst Rüdin, Arthur Gütt and the lawyer Falk Ruttke.
Holocaust victims were people targeted by the government of Nazi Germany based on their ethnicity, religion, political beliefs, and/or sexual orientation. The institutionalized practice by the Nazis of singling out and persecuting people resulted in the Holocaust, which began with legalized social discrimination against specific groups, involuntary hospitalization, euthanasia, and forced sterilization of persons considered physically or mentally unfit for society. The vast majority of the Nazi regime's victims were Jews, Sinti-Roma peoples, and Slavs but victims also encompassed people identified as social outsiders in the Nazi worldview, such as homosexuals, and political enemies. Nazi persecution escalated during World War II and included: non-judicial incarceration, confiscation of property, forced labor, sexual slavery, death through overwork, human experimentation, undernourishment, and execution through a variety of methods. For specified groups like the Jews, genocide was the Nazis' primary goal.
National Political Institutes of Education were secondary boarding schools in Nazi Germany. They were founded as ‘community education sites’ after the National Socialist seizure of power in 1933.
The National Socialist People's Welfare was a social welfare organization during the Third Reich. The NSV was originally established in 1931 as a small Nazi Party-affiliated charity active locally in the city of Berlin. On 3 May 1933, shortly after the Nazi Party took power in Weimar Germany, Adolf Hitler turned it into a party organization that was to be active throughout the country. The structure of the NSV was based on the Nazi Party model, with local, county (Kreis) and district (Gau) administrations.
The Hereditary Health Court, also known as the Genetic Health Court, was a court that decided whether people should be forcibly sterilized in Nazi Germany. That method of using courts to make decisions on hereditary health in Nazi Germany was created to implement the Nazi race policy aiming for racial hygiene.
During the era of National Socialism in Germany the discrimination towards the "Hereditarly Diseased" was at its peak. Racial hygiene was a big concern and the intent to fix it made Germany take extreme measures. People who were deaf and hard-of-hearing and all disabled people were considered a "social burden". Adolf Hitler and many others feared that deafness was a hereditary gene that could be passed on from mother or father to the child. Germany's main solution to decrease the numbers was through sterilization.
The Reich Family is mainly known for their involvement with deaf education during the time of The Holocaust.
Misjudged People is a 1932 German documentary film that features the German deaf community. It was produced by the Reich Union of the Deaf of Germany to give the German public a positive perception of the capabilities of deaf people. It was banned by the Nazis in 1934 to avoid promoting that perception.
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