Doctor’s work tied to Nazi eugenics ‘killing centre’

LINDSEY BEVER His medical assessment was grim. The child, not yet 3, showed signs of mental and physical impairment after an illness that caused inflammation in the brain, he said.

“Severe personality disorder,” Austrian pediatrician and child psychologist Hans Asperger wrote in a diagnostic report in summer 1941. “Most severe motoric retardation; erethic idiocy; seizures.”

An old black-and-white photo showed the small girl, identified as Herta Schreiber, with her hair buzzed, crying and staring into the camera.

“At home the child must be an unbearable burden to the mother, who has to care for five healthy children,” Asperger wrote in his report.

He concluded that permanent placement at Am Spiegelgrund — the notorious reformatory and psychiatric clinic where nearly 800 children were killed under Nazi rule — seemed “absolutely necessary.”

On Sept. 2, 1941, only a day after her third birthday, Herta died of pneumonia, “the most common cause of death at Spiegelgrund, which was routinely induced by the administration of barbiturates over a longer period of time,” according to an academic paper published recently in the medical journal Molecular Autism. The report comes during National Autism Awareness Month and just in time for Adolf Hitler’s birthday.

The author, medical historian Herwig Czech, argued that Asperger — a pioneer in the study of autism and related disorders — ingratiated him- self with the Nazi regime and “actively cooperated” with the Nazi eugenics program by helping to send severely disabled children to Spiegelgrund, which was known as “a concealed killing centre.”

“We see someone who could have easily avoided this work altogether but seemingly participated without qualms,” Czech said about Asperger in a phone interview with the Washington Post.

Asperger became famous for his work in the mental-health community and is credited with diagnosing a condition that would later be named after him — Asperger Syndrome, a highfunctioning form of autism.

Some historians have speculated throughout the years that the doctor had been a defender of mentally disabled children, seeking to shield them from a regime that forcibly sterilized hundreds of thousands of people who were believed to have mental illnesses and other related conditions.

Over the past decade, Czech, a historian at the Medical University of Vienna, said he has been searching through archives, reading Asperger’s personnel files and patient records, to determine whether the pediatrician had tried to protect children’s lives or help send them to their deaths.

Czech said in the study that Asperger was part of a commission to classify 200 children in a psychiatric hospital according to their potential for future development. That committee, Czech said, earmarked 35 children as hopeless cases, labelling them as “uneducable” and “unemployable” — which he must have known would be a death sentence.

Some children earmarked as hopeless cases died by lethal injection. Others died from poisonous gas. However, it’s unclear what happened to those 35 children, according to the study.

Furthermore, Czech said, there are two documented cases in which Asperger himself sent severely disabled children to Spiegelgrund.

Czech wrote: “The narrative of Asperger as a principled opponent of National Socialism and a courageous defender of his patients against Nazi ‘euthanasia’ and other race hygiene measures does not hold up in the face of the historical evidence. What emerges is a much more problematic role played by this pioneer of autism research. Future use of the eponym should reflect the troubling context of its origins in Nazi-era Vienna.”

Czech said he discovered that Asperger tried to “prove his loyalty” to the regime.

In public lectures, Asperger spoke of “race hygiene,” and concluded his diagnostic reports with the words “Heil Hitler,” Czech wrote.

“Asperger managed to accommodate himself to the Nazi regime and was rewarded for his affirmations of loyalty with career opportunities,” it said.

Evans told the Washington Post that comparatively, Asperger “was not a Nazi criminal” but was ultimately “like so many others at the time who tried to preserve their careers by going along with Nazism.”

“The enduring mystery is why an overwhelming majority did not pay any attention to the Hippocratic oath, which requires them not to kill,” he said.

There are two documented cases in which Asperger himself sent severely disabled children to Spiegelgrund.