Témoins sourds, témoins silencieux

Directed by Brigitte Lemaine

As early as July 1933, Hitler introduced a racial hygiene law calling for sterilization, forced abortions and the first exterminations, including the T4 program, of a number of disabled and deaf people. For the first time, a seven-year investigation is being carried out into the history of the Jewish deaf under Nazism. It began in 1993, with a debate organized at the Bagnolet library, which showed that the deaf, gagged by their inability to speak, were unable to testify. Numerous testimonies, interspersed with images of the places where sterilizations took place (Hadamar hospital, Berlin...) and the Auschwitz museum, support this discussion. Historians such as Horst Biesold, a specialist in the problem of the deaf under Nazism, break the silence, unmasking the perverse logic of the Nazi regime in terms of racial hygiene and the annihilation of the disabled, and denounce the crucial role played by doctors in this sinister process.