Asperger’s Nazi past
Doctor famed for autism work ‘sent children for euthanasia’
THE DOCTOR who gave his name to Asperger syndrome sent disabled children to their deaths in a Nazi euthanasia clinic, it has been claimed.
The assertion overturns the longestablished view that the child psychiatrist was a benign figure who saved children from being killed or used in horrific experiments.
Patient groups asked whether it was still acceptable to continue to name the condition after the doctor – who died a widely respected figure in 1980.
Dr Hans Asperger, an Austrian psychiatrist, was first to chronicle the form of high-functioning autism that bears his name in 1944. He wrote detailed case notes about child patients suffering from what he called ‘autistic psychopathy’ while working in Vienna under Nazi rule. It had been claimed that he actively opposed the Nazis.
But he is accused of consigning dozens of children to their deaths at Am Spiegelgrund, a children’s clinic in Vienna’s Steinhof hospital. There, some 789 children were either given lethal injections or left to starve – and their deaths recorded as pneumonia, researchers claim.
Dr Herwig Czech, a historian of medicine, has analysed previously unseen documents including Dr Asperger’s personnel file and case records of his patients from between 1928 and 1944. They had previously been thought to have been destroyed.
He concludes Asperger referred dozens of ‘profoundly disabled’ children to Am Spiegelgrund clinic where they were put to death.
The research details a further 31 children assessed by Asperger at another psychiatric hospital, Gugging, who were classified as ‘uneducable’ and ‘unemployable’. All were sent to Am Spiegelgrund in 1942, none of whom survived.
Dr Czech says Asperger ‘was a well-functioning cog in a deadly machine’ and adds: ‘These findings about Asperger are the result of many years of careful research. Asperger successfully sought to accommodate himself to the Nazi regime and was rewarded with career opportunities.’
Dr Czech cites the case of Herta Schreiber, three. She was diagnosed with ‘severe personality disorder’, ‘idiocy’ and ‘seizures’.
Asperger said ‘the child must be an unbearable burden to the mother, who has to care for five healthy children’ and recommended ‘permanent placement at Spiegelgrund’. Dr Czech said it may be that this was a ‘euphemism for murder’.
The deaths of the children formed part of ‘Aktion T4’, a programme personally authorised by Adolf Hitler, which set out to cull the incurable and severely disabled.
Carol Povey, at the National Autistic Society, said: ‘We expect these findings to spark a big conversation among the 700,000 autistic people in the UK and their family members.’