SHAMED AUTISM DOCTOR PLAYS GOD
Child advocate Asperger also sent frail kids in Nazi Germany to their deaths
Edith Sheffer has written a book that defies easy categorisation — an appropriate, if perhaps inadvertent, response to her fascinating and terrible subject matter. In Asperger’s Children: The Origins
of Autism in Nazi Vienna, she shows how the Third Reich’s obsession with categories and labels was inextricable from its murderousness; what at first seems to be a book about Dr Hans Asperger and the children he treated ends up tracing the sprawling documentary record of a monstrous machine.
It wasn’t long ago that the autism community considered Asperger a hero, a Nazi-era pediatrician who championed neurodiversity and the special talents of his “high-functioning” patients in order to save their lives. In 2015, Steve Silberman’s best-selling NeuroTribes depicted Asperger as a courageous figure who emphasised his patients’ potential usefulness to the Nazi war effort. According to that narrative, Asperger’s diagnosis saved children from the regime’s eugenicists, amounting to a kind of Schindler’s list.
Barely six months after the publication of Silberman’s book, the Asperger story took a hairpin turn: John Donvan and Caren Zucker published In a Different
Key, citing work by the Austrian scholar Herwig Czech, who found documents in Vienna’s municipal archives that “left the hero narrative in tatters.”
Sheffer’s book revolves around Asperger and the Austrian medical system of the 1930s and 1940s. The author’s stake is personal as well as professional. A historian of Germany and Central Europe, she also has an autistic son.
Her previous book, Burned
Bridge, examined how Cold War divisions in a German town were not so much imposed on ordinary people as they were actively — and sometimes enthusiastically — propagated by them. Asperger’s Children similarly explores how people deal with their political environment through their daily routines. “Caught in the swirl of life,” Sheffer writes, “one might conform, resist and even commit harm all in the same afternoon.” For most of Asperger’s Children, however, the author seems interested less in a complex biographical portrait as suggested here than an indictment, as she methodically marshalls her evidence and lays out her argument.
She acknowledges Asperger’s “wellknown support for children with disabilities” and the “two-sided nature to his actions,” but the overall sense you get is that Sheffer judges Asperger’s ambivalence woefully insufficient.
His life, in her telling, begins with his career at the Children’s Hospital in Vienna. Just 25, he was hired in 1931 by Franz Hamburger, an anti-Semite with an “antiscientific attitude” who had been purging liberals and Jews from the faculty ranks. In addition to Asperger, Hamburger hired Erwin Jekelius, who would later become the director of Steinhof Psychiatric Institute and then Spiegelgrund, Steinhof’s youth ward, where children deemed physically or mentally “irredeemable” would be sent to their deaths.
“Asperger participated in Vienna’s child-killing system on multiple levels,” she writes. After Hitler annexed Austria in March 1938, Asperger helped direct the Motorised Mother Advising programme, which purported to dispense care to mothers and children but also served to extend the surveillance powers of the Nazi regime. Staffers “noted children they considered to be disabled or genetically tainted,” Sheffer writes, recording cases of “hereditary feeblemindedness.”
When the Reich decreed the child euthanasia programme in 1939, doctors like Asperger assumed extraordinary powers to decide the fates of the children under their care. Certain statements of his read like pleas for tolerance and mercy from an intolerant and merciless regime.
But there were children he nevertheless decided shouldn’t be helped. He observed “inferiority of almost all organs” in a child who was eventually sent to Spiegelgrund; examining another child, a 2-year-old girl, he concluded that “permanent placement at Spiegelgrund is absolutely necessary.” The girl died two months later.
As Sheffer makes clear, Asperger would have known that such decisions were probable death sentences. At least 789 children died at Spiegelgrund during the Third Reich, most of them from pneumonia, typically brought on by the barbiturates, mixed with sugar or cocoa, and fed to the children with the express purpose of killing them. Sheffer says that Asperger was involved in the transfer of at least 44 children from his clinic to Spiegelgrund. Those are just the documented cases she found; the actual total is most likely higher.
Sheffer has built an impressive case, though questions remain. Did Asperger’s pleas on behalf of at least some of his patients save their lives? Or by emphasising the potential for “social integration” into the Volk, was he consigning those who didn’t fit into that privileged category to their deaths?
“It can be misleading to classify people too neatly,” Sheffer writes, trying to explain where historians draw the lines of culpability. It’s a fitting conclusion to a book that raises unsettling questions about who someone was, and what he did.