Last updated on November 26, 2023
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 — legally, under assisted suicide laws — citing “quality of life” as their reason. This scares me because many of us are made to feel less than good about living.
There are now books and scholarly articles appearing on the Nazi sympathies of Hans Asperger. These findings suggest not merely “going along to survive” nor do they suggest Asperger was trying to save some children by making difficult choices. Instead, his journals and contemporary notes suggest Asperger did agree, at least to some extent, with the notion that some children were best removed from the genetic pool.
Understand that the Progressive Movement in the United States had many of the same ideals, and Socialist Parties around the world suggest that society was better off without the cognitively and physically impaired. There were common and even popular ideas that led many nations to sterilize or euthanize undesirables, and not only Nazi Germany and Nazi-occupied nations. It was a movement based on science, a rational and logical outgrowth of the socialist ideal that all people must contribute something to the whole.
The notion was some conditions were likely inherited. Because true socialists and the National Socialists supported nationalized health care, they also considered removing undesirables a savings of capital (resources, not only money).
Today’s social democrats and socialists often ignore the ugly shared interest in eugenics with dictators.
I find the revelations about Asperger troubling. But, I am reminded that no less then George Bernard Shaw also advocated for eugenics. So did many, many intellectuals.
The following is from Molecular Autism, and editorial explaining why we should consider Asperger’s past as well as his contributions to research.
Did Hans Asperger actively assist the Nazi euthanasia program?
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’s child euthanasia program, where children were killed as part of 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.”
Many of the world’s horrors have been possible only because people rationalized “going along” or that they personally weren’t committing the worst crimes. Just doing the job. Plenty of excuses.
Asperger watched as Jewish colleagues fled. He knew why. He didn’t 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.
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’s newly unearthed evidence shows, also guilty of actively assisting the Nazis in their abhorrent eugenics and euthanasia policies. We are persuaded by Herwig Czech’s 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’s most vulnerable people.
I encourage anyone who has read NeuroTribes to read Edith Sheffer’s new book, Asperger’s Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna. As we continue to learn more about Asperger, I personally argue for removing his name from anything and everything, except history books — because we must preserve this history.
We will not repeat the evidence and main findings of Herwig Czech’s 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’s Children: The origins of autism in Nazi Vienna. 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 ‘defects’ 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.
I don’t doubt Asperger, who flourished in what was called “Red Vienna” 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 “saved” savants and little professors, but I doubt he did this for those children as individuals. He did what he did for the “greater good” of a purified society.
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
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.
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 “autistic psychopaths” 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.
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.
The degree of Asperger’s involvement in the targeting of Vienna’s 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’s 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’s scholarship is that it establishes the necessary evidentiary framework for future discussion.
We must not ignore the past. We should also not honor a participant in one of the greatest horrors of the last century.