Horst Biesold collection

Horst Biesold (1939-2000) was a German teacher for the deaf in Bremen, German. Horst was hearing, but had many deaf friends through various sporting activities. In 1975, after discovering that one of his deaf friends was sterilized by the Nazi government, Horst decided to do research on the sterilization of the deaf during the Holocaust. He interviewed more than 1000 deaf victims and published Crying Hands in 1999. He was married to Ilse and had two sons, Lars and Sven. The collection includes original and photocopies of documents relating to Bertholdt Jacobs and Margarete Crohn who lived in Berlin, Germany and fled to Shanghai, China and to Otto Gantz and his family including correspondence, certificates, and court proceedings. The collection also includes photocopies and originals of documents and copyprints of photographs pertaining to the treatment of deaf children during the Holocaust. Documents include correspondence between Nazi officials, lists of names, documentation of laws, memorandums, forms, statistics, and descriptions of experiments. The copyprints in the collection are of the negatives also included in the collection. Negatives are kept in cold storage and require additional time before they can be served for researchers.