Asperger ‘sent children to be killed by Nazis’
THE doctor who gave his name to Asperger syndrome sent disabled children to their deaths in a Nazi euthanasia clinic, it has been claimed.
This overturns the long-established view that the psychiatrist was a benign figure who saved children from being killed.
Dr Hans Asperger, an Austrian psychiatrist who died in 1980, was first to chronicle the form of high-functioning autism that bears his name in 1944. He worked in Vienna under Nazi rule, but it had been claimed he actively opposed the Nazis.
However, he is now accused of consigning dozens of children to their deaths at Am Spiegelgrund, a clinic in Vienna. There, some 789 children were either left to starve or given lethal injections – and their deaths recorded as pneumonia, researchers claim.
Dr Herwig Czech, a historian of medicine, analysed previously unseen documents including Dr Asperger’s personnel file and case records of his patients from between 1928 and 1944. He concluded Asperger referred dozens of ‘profoundly disabled’ children to Am Spiegelgrund, where they were put to death.
Dr Czech cites the case of Herta Schreiber, three. She was diagnosed with ‘severe personality disorder’, ‘idiocy’ and ‘seizures’. Asperger recommended ‘permanent placement at Spiegelgrund’, and Dr Czech said it may be that this was a ‘euphemism for murder’.