Historian exposes Asperger’s Nazi links
Book details doctor’s collaboration in child euthanasia program
After UC Berkeley historian Edith Sheffer learned that her 17-month-old son had autism, she did what many parents in her situation do: She read everything she could.
And like many parents, Sheffer soon came across stories about Hans Asperger. In autism circles, he’s long been known as the pioneering Viennese doctor whose name became synonymous in the 1980s and 1990s with a more “favorable” view of autism and its high-functioning variations.
Back in World War II Vienna, Asperger described qualities that are popularly used to explain socially awkward, single-minded math and science whizzes. At various points, people have tossed around the term “Asperger’s” to explain the unique talents of Albert Einstein, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg.
“It’s become a way to confer
superhuman status on people,” Sheffer, who lives in Palo Alto, said in an interview. “In Silicon Valley, it’s almost a badge of honor.”
But in her new book, Sheffer doesn’t tell a story about Asperger’s contributions to pediatrics or psychiatry.
As the title of Sheffer’s book suggests, “Asperger’s Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna,” she instead presents a dark history of a seemingly dedicated, mildmannered physician who, according to recently unearthed records, was complicit in Nazi child euthanasia programs that were the regime’s first program in mass extermination.
Similar findings about Asperger’s Nazi ties were presented in a study published in April in the journal Molecular Autism by Herwig Czech, a historian at the Medical University of Vienna.
Both Sheffer and Czech show how Asperger, working at the University of Vienna’s Curative Education Clinic, actively contributed to efforts by the Third Reich to exterminate children with mental or behavioral defects. Under Nazi eugenics policies, these children were considered to be a threat to the gene pool and to Adolf Hitler’s ideal of Volk, a socially cohesive, racially homogenous Aryan nation. Accounts say 5,000 to 10,000 children were killed in clinics between 1940-45 as part of the program.
After World War II, Asperger tried to distance himself from Nazi policies and was never held accountable, said Sheffer, a senior fellow at UC Berkeley’s Institute of European Studies. Continuing his career at the University of Vienna, he portrayed himself as a Nazi resister and “psychiatric Oskar Schindler,” Sheffer added. He claimed he saved numerous children from being sent to Am Spiegelgrund, Vienna’s infamous children’s hospital ward, where nearly 800 young patients were murdered.
Asperger’s claims of heroism stuck through the 20th century, as his broader, spectrum idea of autism became widely accepted in medicine and popular culture.
Rates of autism spectrum diagnoses skyrocketed. “While the specific medical, genetic, and environmental causes behind the rise are much debated, most agree that at least some of the increase is due to the widening of diagnostic criteria,” Sheffer wrote in her book.
Records show that Asperger initially advanced these ideas to help socially or behaviorally challenged children who he thought were intelligent and therefore worthy of nurturing, individualized care, according to Sheffer. But he also diagnosed dozens of other children as not worth saving, and those children were sent to Am Spiegelgrund, where they were killed or subjected to painful medical experiments.
Sheffer says she came across this aspect of Asperger’s
career while visiting Vienna for a conference in 2011. She took a break to do some research on the doctor out of interest for her son.
“I thought the records had been destroyed,” said Sheffer. “I really wanted to learn how Asperger had come up with his ideas about autism that stressed its positive straights, and I loved that story about his psychiatric Schindler’s list.”
“But from the very first file, it was clear he was complicit in Nazi racial hygiene measures,” Sheffer said. “I found out it wasn’t a heroic story, but a horror story.”
She said Asperger never joined the Nazi party and was never directly involved in medical experiments
“But from the very first file, it was clear he was complicit in Nazi racial hygiene measures. I found out it wasn’t a heroic story, but a horror story.” — Edith Sheffer, Palo Alto resident and UC Berkeley historian
or in facilitating children’s deaths. He just referred the children to the clinic, where doctors and nurses were willing to carry out those acts.
One of the children was 5-year-old Elisabeth Schreiber, according to Sheffer’s book.
The little girl had “motor unrest” and was only able to speak one word — “mama,” Sheffer wrote. It didn’t help that her parents were poor and unable to care for her in their small apartment with four other children.
When Elisabeth arrived at Am Spiegelgrund in March 1942, she was affectionate and seemed eager for connection with her caregivers, Sheffer said. But the girl was diagnosed with “congenital feeblemindedness of the highest order,” which meant she wouldn’t survive long. Her final months were horrifying. Her caregivers subjected her to medical experiments, including lumbar punctures, and gave her high doses of barbiturates, causing her to become listless and to develop pneumonia, from which she died in September 1942.
Asperger’s story shows how civilized people and societies can descend into totalitarian rule and barbarity. Vienna was once a European cultural capital and home to famed artists and thinkers. But as the Nazis came to power, Asperger and others became inured to the alarming violations of humanity as they sought to advance their ambitions or remain safe.
“Asperger may well also have felt, as he said, he was in a ‘truly dangerous situation,’ and pressured into participation in the euthanasia program,” Sheffer wrote. “Anyone in his milieu, with colleagues like his, would have felt pressured. That said, Asperger chose his milieu and colleagues. He had numerous, volitional ties to the euthanasia program,
and it pervaded his professional world.”
Even though Asperger didn’t join the Nazi party, his career prospered, especially after the purge of Jewish and liberal doctors that came with Germany’s annexation of Austria in 1938, Sheffer said. During the war, he was promoted to associate professor at the young age of 37.
After the war, Asperger abandoned his work in autism to devote himself to writing about terminally ill children and issues around personal morality, choice and religion, Sheffer wrote. He died in 1980.
He might have remained what Sheffer called an “unremarkable” footnote in the history of autism research had it not been for a British psychiatrist who discovered his work. This psychiatrist and others used it to create a broader “spectrum” idea of autism.
In 1994, Asperger’s syndrome was recognized in the fourth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. It was removed from the 2013 revision of the manual in favor of the more general term of autism spectrum disorder. Still, Sheffer wrote, Asperger’s syndrome remains an official diagnosis in most countries, and the term is part of the medical lexicon.
The revelations about Asperger’s Nazi ties have stirred debate in autism circles. For her part, Sheffer feels it’s time to rethink using the term. The matter resonates personally for her because of her son, who’s now 14, in high school and is “doing great.” She noted in an op-ed in The New York Times that other conditions named after Naziera doctors involved in extermination programs have since been renamed.
Sheffer’s call for change has picked up an endorsement from a prominent Bay Area autism expert.
Jill Escher, president of the Autism Society San Francisco Bay Area, agrees the term Asperger’s should be removed from the official vocabulary of mental disability, partly because of Asperger’s past and partly because the term no longer has much relevance to today’s understanding of autism.
“I would even argue that ‘Aspie,’ to mean a socially challenged, sciencegeeky kind of kid or adult, has taken on a life of its own, quite divorced from the Nazi-era psychiatrist’s work and legacy,” Escher added.
But the change in approach may take some time to gain universal acceptance. Even Czech, whose study also called attention to Asperger’s past, says the term should be used as long as it serves a purpose.
“I don’t think erasing history is an answer,” he told the Spectrum website.
But Sheffer hopes the disclosures will indeed close the book on Asperger’s work.
“We should stop saying ‘Asperger,’ ” she said. “It’s one way to honor the children killed in his name as well as those still labeled with it.”