Ruminations

Asperger's Unfortunate Connections

"Asperger managed to accommodate himself to the Nazi regime and was rewarded for his affirmations of loyalty with career opportunities."
"The [child euthanasia] program served the Nazi goal of eugenically engineering a genetically ‘pure’ society through ‘racial hygiene’ and the elimination of lives deemed a ‘burden’ and ‘not worthy of life’."
Herwig Czech, medical historian, published paper

"There were at least 42,000 camps across German-occupied Europe: 980 concentration camps, 1,150 Jewish ghettos, 500 forced brothels, 1,000 camps for prisoners of war, and 30,000 slave labor camps, in addition to unknown thousands of transit centers and lethal medical facilities. Millions were involved in their staffing. Each place required administrators, guards, maintenance crews, cooks, insurers, truck drivers, food sellers and suppliers. Each required people in the community to look the other way."
"In contrast to mechanized images of the Holocaust, child-killing involved personal deliberation of individual cases. This was intimate, done by the very doctors and nurses who cared for the children’s daily needs. Asperger and his colleagues had a godlike autonomy to determine a child’s worthiness to exist. They were not following a clear rulebook, but deciding life and death on a case-by-case basis — talking to the children directly, meeting their parents and studying them closely over time. Far from his postwar reputation as a resister, Asperger worked within a system of mass killing as a conscious participant, very much tied to his world and to its horrors."
Edith Sheffer, Senior Fellow, Institute of European Studies, University of California, Berkeley, author Asperger’s Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna

"As an organization, we do not want to be aligned with someone associated with the Nazi regime. At the same time, we support a community that is resistant to change and have to take this into consideration."
Asperger's Society of Ontario

"[Future use of the term 'Asperger'] is a discussion that must incorporate the views of autistic people."
Simon Baron-Cohen, editor, Molecular Autism

Hans Asperger, Austrian pediatrician at the University Pediatric Clinic, Vienna, about 1940 Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stoc

An Austrian pediatrician by the name of Hans Asperger studied and treated children who exhibited symptoms of mental abnormality. His clinical observations identified these children as functionally 'disabled'. He enlisted and offered his expertise in the 1940s Third Reich purification scheme to rid society of any it judged to be "genetically inferior". He became a functionary of the Nazi regime by referring disabled children to the Am Spiegelgrund clinic in Vienna.

There, hundreds of children were murdered, poisoned in a program that was labelled Aktion T4. Historian Herwig Czech documented Dr. Asperger's collaboration with the Nazi regime, publishing his findings in the journal Molecular Autism. His article outlined Hans Asperger's connection to German WW-2 era National Socialism, linked to "race hygiene". In addition, historian Edith Sheffer provided even more details in her newly published book, Asperger's Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna.

In both published accounts, the experience of two children, Herta Schreiber and Elizabeth Schreiber, children unrelated to one another, were identified as having been signed over to the extermination program, his personal comments distinguishing them as 'unbearable burdens'. This professional man of science who viewed children on the autism spectrum who are classified as "mildly affected" relative to the most autism-impacted, signed their death warrants with little trouble to his conscience.

The present day revelations about the actions and responsibilities in mass murder undertaken by the Nazi regime in cleansing societies of malfunctioning members as useless drags on the public weal has placed the name 'Asperber's' in huge disrepute. No one relishes having a medical condition named after a fascist totalitarian scientist who happened to have an identified condition named after him.

In 2013 the diagnosis of Asperger's syndrome was removed as a stand-alone condition from medical books, and placed within the autism spectrum. As it is, those representing the best interests of people identified as suffering from Asperger's and advocating for their interests, have been struggling with a public perception of such people as being pathologically disturbed and potentially dangerous.

Whereas in reality people with Asperger's syndrome are often victims in society, not its predators and criminals. Mental illness is far likelier to produce vulnerabilities taken advantage of by others, than disturbed people acting out as perpetrators of criminal activity. Autism Spectrum Disorder has a branch devoted to Asperger's and these are basically people experiencing difficulties in adjusting to the social mainstream.

That individuals must countenance awkward public attention brought to bear through misunderstanding of the condition is one thing; adding to it an inglorious history with a connection to the health professional who first identified the symptoms and named the condition as one of mental inferiority and had the honour of it being named after him, is quite a lot to bear.