Asperger ‘sent disabled children to their deaths’
AUSTRIA: The pioneering Austrian paediatrician whose name came to describe patients with a form of autism was in fact a Nazi collaborator who sent children to their deaths, new research has revealed.
Hans Asperger has for decades been regarded as a hero in the field of autism treatment and research, said to have shielded his young patients from the menace of Nazi Germany’s occupation of Austria. But analysis of a crucial set of documents, which were previously assumed to be destroyed, shows that he not only collaborated with the Nazis but ‘‘actively contributed’’ to their eugenics programme.
Published in the journal Molecular Autism, the study says Asperger referred ‘‘profoundly disabled’’ children to the Am Spiegelgrund clinic in Vienna despite knowing what took place there. The children were murdered through starvation or lethal drugs as part of the Third Reich’s goal of engineering a genetically ‘‘pure’’ society through ‘‘racial hygiene’’. Their cause of death was recorded as pneumonia.
Asperger, who died in 1980, subsequently became director of a Viennese children’s clinic. After the war, he was appointed chair of paediatrics at the University of Vienna. In his inauguration speech, he boasted of being hunted by the Gestapo for supposedly refusing to hand over children.
However, the new research by Herwig Czech, a historian of medicine at the Medical University of Vienna, finds no evidence for this. Instead, he concludes that ‘‘Asperger managed to accommodate himself to the Nazi regime, and was rewarded for his affirmations of loyalty with career opportunities’’. Czech also found that the paediatrician ‘‘publicly legitimised race hygiene policies, including forced sterilisations’’.
A linked editorial, co-written by Cambridge University experts, says Asperger ‘‘willingly became a cog in the Nazi killing machine’’, and that the psychiatric profession ‘‘became part of the eyes and ears of the Third Reich’’. Asperger was the first to designate a group of children with distinct psychological characteristics as ‘‘autistic psychopaths’’. He published a study on the topic in 1944, which only found international acknowledgement in 1980, after which ‘‘Asperger’s syndrome’’ became increasingly used, in recognition of his contribution to the field. Asperger’s syndrome is one of a range of similar conditions on the autism spectrum disorder which affects a person’s social interaction, communication and behaviour.
Carole Povey, director at the UK’s Centre of Autism, said: ‘‘Noone with a diagnosis of Asperger syndrome should feel in any way tainted by this very troubling history.’’ – Telegraph Group