Hans Asperger ‘helped Nazis kill disabled children’

Hans Asperger, the Austrian paediatrician whose name describes a form of autism, may have helped Nazis murder disabled children.

Adolf Hitler aimed to get rid of all disabled people.

Hans Asperger, the Austrian pediatrician whose name describes a form of autism, actively assisted in the murder of disabled children by the Nazis, according to two sets of new research.

The claims have led to calls for his name to be removed from the syndrome his work first described in 1944. Asperger died in 1980.

Documents uncovered by Herwig Czech, an Austrian medical historian, suggest Asperger not only ingratiated himself with the Nazi regime but also participated in its euthanasia program.

Asperger, who was not a member of the Nazi Party, is said to have ­referred profoundly disabled children to the notorious Am Spiegelgrund clinic in Vienna, where they were put to death through overdoses of drugs.

Mr Czech, of the Medical University of Vienna, trawled through documents including personnel files and patient records. “These findings are the result of many years of careful research in the archives,” he said. “What emerges is that Asperger sought to accommodate himself to the Nazi regime and was rewarded with career opportunities.”

Hans Asperger described a form of autism.

The allegations are reported in the journal Molecular Autism. Simon Baron-Cohen of Cambridge University, one of the coeditors, said: “We are aware that the article will be controversial. We believe that it deserves to be published in order to expose the truth about how a medical doctor who was seen as only having made valuable contributions to the field of paediatrics and child psychiatry, was guilty of actively assisting the Nazis in their abhorrent eugenics and euthanasia policies.”

A different view was presented by Anthony Bailey, at the University of British Columbia, in Canada, who said the accusations should be seen in context. “Virtually all doctors in Germany at that time were members of the Nazi Party and there was almost no opposition to the euthanasia programs for the mentally ill and handicapped, except from one or two heads of asylums and a very small number of Catholic bishops,” Mr Bailey said.

Edith Sheffer, a senior fellow at the Institute of European Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, also accuses Asperger of Nazi crimes in her book Asperger’s Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna. “As Asperger sought promotion to associate professor, his writings about the diagnosis grew harsher,” she said. “Some laud Asperger’s language about the ‘special abilities’ of children on the ‘most favourable’ end of his autistic ‘range’, speculating that he applied his diagnosis to protect them from Nazi eugenics — a kind of psychiatric Schindler’s list. But this was in keeping with the selective benevolence of Nazi psychiatry; Asperger also warned that ‘less favourable cases’ would ‘roam the streets’ as adults, ‘grotesque and dilapidated’. Words such as these could be a death sentence in the Third Reich.”

Carol Povey, from the National Autistic Society, said: “We expect these findings to spark a big conversation among the 700,000 autistic people in the UK and their family members, particularly those who identify with the term Asperger. Obviously no one with a diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome should feel in any way tainted by this very troubling history.”

The term Asperger’s syndrome was introduced by the British psychiatrist Lorna Wing in 1981.

The Times