In this issue of Molecular Autism, we publish an article by Herwig Czech, a historian of medicine at the Medical University of Vienna. His carefully researched article concludes that the pediatrician Hans Asperger, after whom the subgroup of Asperger syndrome was named, and who worked in the University of Vienna Pediatric Clinic during the Second World War, not only collaborated with the Nazis but actively contributed to the Nazi eugenics program by referring profoundly disabled children to the Am Spiegelgrund clinic located elsewhere in Vienna. This was a clinic that he knew participated in the Third Reich\u2019s child euthanasia program, where children were killed as part of the Nazi goal of eugenically engineering a genetically \u201cpure\u201d society through \u201cracial hygiene\u201d and the elimination of lives deemed a \u201cburden\u201d and \u201cnot worthy of life.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Many of the world\u2019s horrors have been possible only because people rationalized \u201cgoing along\u201d or that they personally weren\u2019t committing the worst crimes. Just doing the job. Plenty of excuses.<\/p>\n
Asperger watched as Jewish colleagues fled. He knew why. He didn\u2019t turn down promotions or protest loudly at these expulsions of talented doctors. He took advantage of the misfortunes of others. As the moral guides of the clinic left, Asperger revealed himself as morally lacking, at best.<\/p>\n
We write this Editorial for two reasons. First, to assert the importance of this kind of scholarship and its relevance to this Journal, which aims to publish excellent research into autism of any kind, whether the research focuses on the molecular, neurological, psychological, clinical, or in this case social aspects. Second, to underline our support of this article for exploring in meticulous detail how a medical doctor, Hans Asperger, who for a long time was seen as only having made valuable contributions to the field of pediatrics and child psychiatry, was, as Herwig Czech\u2019s newly unearthed evidence shows, also guilty of actively assisting the Nazis in their abhorrent eugenics and euthanasia policies. We are persuaded by Herwig Czech\u2019s important article that Asperger was not just doing his best to survive in intolerable conditions but was also complicit with his Nazi superiors in targeting society\u2019s most vulnerable people.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I encourage anyone who has read\u00a0NeuroTribes<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0<\/em>to read Edith Sheffer\u2019s new book, Asperger\u2019s Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna.\u00a0<\/strong><\/em>As we continue to learn more about Asperger, I personally argue for removing his name from anything and everything, except history books \u2014 because we must preserve this history.<\/p>\nWe will not repeat the evidence and main findings of Herwig Czech\u2019s article here but will note that the conclusion concur with a new book on this topic, published in 2018, by Edith Sheffer, and entitled Asperger\u2019s Children: The origins of autism in Nazi Vienna<\/strong><\/em>. Like Czech, Sheffer compellingly makes the case that Asperger willingly became a cog in the Nazi killing machine, referring children both directly and indirectly to Am Spiegelgrund. This was the clinic where children who were deemed genetically incapable of social conformity, or who had physical or psychological \u2018defects\u2019 that were deemed undesirable and assumed to be genetically determined, were killed through starvation and lethal injections, and whose deaths were recorded as due to pneumonia.<\/p><\/blockquote>\nI don\u2019t doubt Asperger, who flourished in what was called \u201cRed Vienna\u201d as a socialist and then as a National Socialist, thought he was doing what was best for humanity in weeding out children less capable than others. He \u201csaved\u201d savants and little professors, but I doubt he did this for those children as individuals. He did what he did for the \u201cgreater good\u201d of a purified society.<\/p>\n
Sheffer argues that Asperger may have been sympathetic to the Nazi goal of eliminating any children who could not fit in with the Volk, that is, fascist collectivism and the creation of a homogeneous Aryan people. In 1938, the Dean of the Medical School removed more than half of its faculty, predominantly Jewish doctors. In contrast, at the age of 28 Hans Asperger had enjoyed premature promotion to be Director of the Curative Education Clinic<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
As I mentioned earlier, Asperger benefited from the misfortunes of others, and that to me suggests his lack of loyalty and compassion for his colleagues. If you do not respect colleagues enough to help them and defend them, people who considered you a friend, then something is lacking in your character.<\/p>\n
Sheffer, following Steve Silberman and John Elder Robison, also mentions the fact that Georg Frankl, a staff physician at the clinic, and the psychologist Anni Weiss, had already published on cases similar to those later described as \u201cautistic psychopaths\u201d before Asperger. Because Frankl and Weiss were Jewish, they were forced to leave Austria and went to the US, where they married shortly after their arrival. As Asperger’s understanding of autism surely drew on their work and observations, and later helped inspire Lorna Wing to define the scope of the autism spectrum, Frankl and Weiss deserve credit for contributing to the modern understanding of autism.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
This is an important discussion. We have had this discussion regarding other doctors associated with abuses of women, children, and, especially, those doctors associated with Nazi concentration camps.<\/p>\n
The degree of Asperger\u2019s involvement in the targeting of Vienna\u2019s most vulnerable children has remained an open and vexing question in autism research for a long time. Some readers will remind us that many of Asperger\u2019s mentors and colleagues were more public and vociferous of their support of Nazi racial ideology than he was. Some may identify mitigating circumstances in the possibility that he sacrificed some children to save others. Some may situate the subject matter of this article as just another example of the bioethical challenges posed by eponymous medical syndromes discovered by physicians, or scientists taking advantage of helpless children subjected to the Nazi treatment of those deemed unfit to live. We believe that the value of Czech\u2019s scholarship is that it establishes the necessary evidentiary framework for future discussion.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
We must not ignore the past. We should also not honor a participant in one of the greatest horrors of the last century.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Eugenics worry me, which is why I dislike selective abortions and movements within some national healthcare systems to pay for such terminations of likely or potentially disabled individuals. And, at least in a few nations of Europe, disabled people have terminated their lives \u2014 legally, under assisted suicide laws \u2014…<\/p>\n
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