wrote this on June 10.
Surdus mentioned interpreting issues in one of his recent posts including that we might as well go on the dole as we're meant to. We're too burdensome on society so would it be cheaper to live in subsidized housing and if unmarried with kids, living on $400 a month including Medicaid and Medicare benefits? Crappy and fast food are cheaper, and with health woes building up from shitty food and lack of exercise by standing around in front of building chatting... Under the thumb and stringent brackets of where you can break from welfare rolls into a proper job earning minimum wage.. OK I need to stop.
In one the posts I wrote early in 2006, I purchased the last copy of "Deaf People in Hitler's Europe" from Amazon. I've read it a little by little. It is no easy feat and not easy on the eyes. Since middle school the teachers drummed in the pros and cons of World War Two and how "history must not be repeated"... During Cold War and in recent years whatever horrible deed a government does to their people would entice cries and warnings that we must not forget! Yet we let them do it. Wheels of history continues to spin. It's easier said than done. Always. I took the course in '99 and the current edition isn't much different.. A few recent additions to the impacts on the German and Jewish Deaf communities since then. At the time of research, the Deaf survivors were few and memories even less intact. Those with efficient memories were reluctant to share.
I still haven't finished the book - like I said, not easy on the eyes. And I'm not in school and there's no classmates to have a discussion with. It'd be a year before friends and I could digest it, our busy schedule to get together. So I gave it a skim and you get the gist:
The information is pretty much the same from the course in '99. Overview of the Nazi rise to power taking advantage of German disillusionment from the first World War and feeling screwed over by Versailles treaty. Scapegoats and those impeding the path to German (or Aryan) greatness needed to be found and pointed at. The Jews, the Romas, homosexuals and the handicapped were the obvious choices. Those considered as afflictions and genetically unfit were deemed to be listed as follows: schizophrenia, manic-depressive (bipolar) disorder, epilepsy, Huntington's, and "hereditary feeblemindness. In addition, the unacceptable physical conditions and diseases were blindness, deafness, physical deformity and alcoholism. Sterilization procedures followed and eventually T-4 programs. The gas chambers from T-4 centers were moved to concentration camps in Poland and elsewhere for quicker and efficient killings.
The Nazi policies were based on US policies on sterilization of mentally retarded, for example. The Nazis took it more to the extreme than the US government did. Many scientists and doctors were willing to participate in work of sterilization, experimentations, gassing, and so on. A mass production. There are reprints of letters translated into English from German from teachers for the deaf to the Third Reich giving the student stats, and doctors reporting sterilization results of deaf teenage girls to parents.
It is now July 6 and I can't find the damn book. Hopefully I'll complete this or make a better summation some time soon.
