He introduced the concept of autistic psychopathy a few years before Leo Kanner published his famous work on the subject. He called for little patients to be treated with love - and without blinking an eye he sent them to slaughter. What role did Asperger play in the Nazi Child Euthanasia Program?
Hans Asperger is widely believed to be an empathetic, progressive psychiatrist, who initiated the discussion on neurodiversity in Europe and, in a time when the turmoil of war was around, focused solely on his work, dissociating himself from the politics of the National Socialist party, and even its opposing. As Edith Sheffer describes in his book "Asperger's Children":
He was a devout Catholic and never joined the NSDAP. He also enjoyed the opinion of a defender of disabled children against persecution by the National Socialists (...) Asperger used the diagnosis of autism to create a psychiatric protected register, the equivalent of the Schindler's list .
However, this is only one side of a doctor who has dedicated a career to researching autistic disorders. The second was definitely darker. Although Asperger himself claimed after the war that he risked his life by fighting the regime and saving his little patients, it has recently emerged that he was also actively involved in the murder of abnormal babies.
Sheffer emphasizes:"He was a close colleague of the leaders of the child euthanasia program in Vienna and, taking advantage of the many positions held in the National Socialist state, sent dozens of Viennese children to the Spiegelgrund facility where they were killed."
The article was inspired by the book Children of Asperger. Medicine at the services of the Third Reich of Poznań Publishing House
How is it possible that a man who declared himself a defender of children at risk of extermination (and actually saved many of them from death) sent sick children to slaughter himself? The truth - though sad - is banal. Well Asperger, like many of his contemporaries working under the supervision of the Nazis, divided his patients into categories . Those who had the potential and, with the help of specialists, were able to "integrate" and those who were not prognosing, terminally ill. And for them in the Third Reich (and its subordinate Austria) there was no place.
Over the dead to the goal
In National Socialist medicine, only a doctor who fit within the framework of the criminal ideology could count on promotion. And yet Hans Asperger made a dizzying career. Born on February 18, 1906 in the small agricultural village of Hausbrunn in Austria, his childhood interests were literature and history rather than human anatomy or the psyche.
He had an above-average talent for languages (which later became the basis for supposing that he himself suffered from Asperger's syndrome, his described developmental disorder on the autism spectrum), and he literally devoured books. He called himself the "mad reader" and boasted that as an adult he had accumulated as many as 10,000 volumes in his home library.
Hans Asperger with children
He called himself by name, in the third person. He discovered his scientific calling in the second grade of junior high school - during the dissection of the mouse's liver. At the age of 19, he left his hometown and began studying medicine at the University of Vienna. He graduated on March 26, 1931 - and almost immediately found employment with a salary of 120 shillings a month as an assistant professor at the Children's Hospital run by a Nazi sympathizer, Franz Hamburger. The director liked the young doctor. In the book "Children of Asperger" Edith Sheffer reports:
Asperger started working at the Children's Hospital in May 1931, and already in the fall of 1932, Hamburger transferred him to the Clinic of Therapeutic Pedagogy . A year and a half later, despite Asperger's relatively young age and inexperience compared to a large proportion of the staff, Hamburger appointed him director.
Among his subordinates were many of Hitler's supporters. Besides, he himself did not hide his support for National Socialism. He was a member of the Patriotic Front, the extremely nationalist organization Bund Neuland, and from 1934 also the Association of German Doctors in Austria (this grouping supported the Nazi postulates and was anti-Semitic). During this time, he completed a two-month internship at a clinic in Leipzig.
The article was inspired by the book Children of Asperger. Medicine at the services of the Third Reich of Poznań Publishing House
After the annexation of his homeland by the Third Reich in 1938, the position of Asperger and his subordinates only strengthened. His child psychiatry in the National Socialist trend gained international fame. It was then that Asperger began researching a disorder he termed "autistic psychopathy" , and became director of Motorized Counseling for Mothers, a screening program for children and infants aimed at, inter alia, creating a register of disabled or genetically contaminated toddlers. He also worked closely with the Vienna Central Health Office, which actively carried out the Nazi operation of sterilization of the disabled and the elimination of "life not worth living" (the so-called T4 action).At the end of 1941, with three colleagues (two of whom ran the Spiegelgrund factory and organized the practice of killing children), he founded the Vienna Society for Medicinal Pedagogy, implementing the policy of racial hygiene. As Sheffer points out, “Asperger publicly encouraged his colleagues to move the 'difficult cases' to the Spiegelgrund - and followed his recommendations himself. (…) The surviving documents suggest that he contributed to sending dozens of children to their deaths ”. The author estimates that thanks to him, at least 44 small patients were admitted to the clinic.
In October 1943 (shortly after the presentation of his postdoctoral dissertation on autistic psychopathy), Asperger was drafted into the army. He was sent as a doctor to an infantry division of the Wehrmacht stationed in the Independent Croatian State allied with the Third Reich. He stayed there until August 1945.
"Black Asperger"
After the war, when the criminal activities of Spiegelgrund came to light, Asperger was acquitted of all charges. He returned to practicing medicine. In 1957 he became director of the University Children's Hospital in Innsbruck, and 5 years later he replaced Hamburger as director of the Vienna facility. He wrote a textbook of medical education which was reissued many times and upheld his image as a defender of the disabled.
In 1977, during an interview, he said about himself (as usual in the third person): "black [Catholic - ed. ed.] Asperger did not report people with brain damage for extermination ” . He also maintained that he had been persecuted by the Nazis for his views, and he was even threatened with arrest by the Gestapo twice (but there is no evidence of this). But even if he did, it had no effect on his brilliant career.
So what was the truth? Was Hans Asperger really a "Child Psychiatry Schinder" or a criminal? Edith Sheffer in "Asperger's Children" notes that this is a complex issue. As he claims:
Asperger was a pawn in the National Socialist Child Euthanasia program, far less active than some of his associates. He was not personally involved in the killings, and the number of casualties Asperger may have contributed to appear small compared to the millions of those killed in the Holocaust . (...) But you cannot close your eyes to the fact that Asperger was acting as a conscious participant under the mass killing system.
He was never judged for it. Until the end of his life, he worked with children and published works in the field of psychology and psychiatry. He died on October 21, 1980. Soon after his death, British researcher Lorna Wing started using the term "Asperger's syndrome" to refer to autism spectrum disorders. The researcher's Nazi past is forgotten. Today his name functions as a noun to describe "high functioning autists" and no one talks about the extermination of "a life not worth living" anymore.