Hans Asperger (1906–1980) first designated a group
of children with distinct psychological characteristics as
‘autistic psychopaths’ in 1938, several years before Leo
Kanner’s famous 1943 paper on autism. In 1944, Asperger
published a comprehensive study on the topic (submitted to
Vienna University in 1942 as his postdoctoral thesis), which
would only find international acknowledgement in the 1980s. From
then on, the eponym ‘Asperger’s syndrome’ increasingly gained
currency in recognition of his outstanding contribution to the
conceptualization of the condition. At the time, the fact that
Asperger had spent pivotal years of his career in Nazi Vienna
caused some controversy regarding his potential ties to National
Socialism and its race hygiene policies. Documentary evidence
was scarce, however, and over time a narrative of Asperger as an
active opponent of National Socialism took hold. The main goal
of this paper is to re-evaluate this narrative, which is based
to a large extent on statements made by Asperger himself and on
a small segment of his published work.
Methods
Drawing on a vast array of contemporary
publications and previously unexplored archival documents
(including Asperger’s personnel files and the clinical
assessments he wrote on his patients), this paper offers a
critical examination of Asperger’s life, politics, and career
before and during the Nazi period in Austria.
Results
Asperger managed to accommodate himself to the
Nazi regime and was rewarded for his affirmations of loyalty
with career opportunities. He joined several organizations
affiliated with the NSDAP (although not the Nazi party itself),
publicly legitimized race hygiene policies including forced
sterilizations and, on several occasions, actively cooperated
with the child ‘euthanasia’ program. The language he employed to
diagnose his patients was often remarkably harsh (even in
comparison with assessments written by the staff at Vienna’s
notorious Spiegelgrund ‘euthanasia’ institution), belying the
notion that he tried to protect the children under his care by
embellishing their diagnoses.
Conclusion
The narrative of Asperger as a principled opponent
of National Socialism and a courageous defender of his patients
against Nazi ‘euthanasia’ and other race hygiene measures does
not hold up in the face of the historical evidence. What emerges
is a much more problematic role played by this pioneer of autism
research. Future use of the eponym should reflect the troubling
context of its origins in Nazi-era Vienna.
Hinweise
The original version of this article was revised: the body
text of the article had a few incorrectly mentioned sentences and
information items.
Despite the international prominence of Hans Asperger
(Fig. 1) as one of the
pioneers in the history of autism and as the namesake of Asperger’s
syndrome, factual knowledge about his life and career is limited.
This is surprising given that his successful career in
Nazi-controlled Vienna raises questions concerning his potential
political or professional involvement with National Socialism. The
existing literature on the topic has tended to downplay or overlook
any such involvement, or even to postulate that Asperger took a
position of active resistance. With few exceptions, however, these
judgments are based on a limited number of sources—a few passages
from Asperger’s Nazi-era publications, particularly a 1938 lecture
containing the first references to “autistic psychopaths”
[1] and his 1944
postdoctoral thesis [2],1 and statements by Asperger himself or by persons close
to him from after 1945 (most importantly, a 1974 radio interview
[3]).
×
The goals of this paper, based on comprehensive
archival research, are to provide an account of Asperger’s life and
career during National Socialism and to submit prevailing narratives
to the test of historical evidence. The picture that emerges is that
of a man who managed to further his career under the Nazi regime,
despite his apparent political and ideological distance from it.
This was not least due to opportunities created by the political
upheaval after Austria’s Anschluss (annexation) to Germany in 1938, including
the expulsion of Jewish physicians from the profession. (On the
expulsion of Jews from the university clinic, which began before
1938, see [4] and
below). As I will demonstrate, this career was made possible by
Asperger’s political concessions to the Nazi ideology and involved a
certain degree of collaboration with the race hygiene apparatus,
including the Nazis’ child “euthanasia” program.
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The analysis of patient case files written by Asperger
and his colleagues from 1928 to 1944—a crucial set of documents
mistakenly assumed to have been destroyed in World War II—sheds new
light on the fate of Asperger’s patients during the Nazi period (on
Asperger’s case files, see the “Asperger’s
Jewish patients” to “Asperger’s diagnoses compared to those at
Spiegelgrund” sections).
A review of the existing literature on Asperger’s life
and career shows the current fault lines in the narrative of his
Nazi-era trajectory. Lorna Wing’s seminal paper from 1981 which
popularized the term “Asperger’s syndrome” made no reference to the
historical context of Asperger’s work [5]. Similarly, Uta Frith’s 1991 book chapter
“Asperger and his syndrome” barely mentioned National Socialism in
the few pages dedicated to Asperger’s professional and personal life
in Vienna during the 1930s and 1940s. Based on her reading of
Asperger’s 1944 article on “autistic psychopaths,” she stated that
“Asperger clearly cared about these children, who in most people’s
eyes were simply obnoxious brats” ([6]: 7). Her text established what has become the
most common view of Asperger’s behavior during the Nazi period,
namely that he defended his patients against the Nazi regime at
great personal risk: “Far from despising the misfits, he devoted
himself to their cause—and this at a time when allegiance to misfits
was nothing less than dangerous.” She defended Asperger against
accusations of “allegiance to Nazi ideology” that had been raised
because of his early commitment to the German Youth Movement
([6]: 10). Eric
Schopler, one of Asperger’s fiercest critics, was one of those who
explicitly drew this connection, but apparently had no evidence to
back his accusations.2 When Frith published an annotated translation of
Asperger’s 1944 paper, her sole comment on its origin in Nazi-era
Vienna was that it contained only one reference to “fascist ideology
at a time when it would have been opportune to make many more such
references” ([7]:
86).3
Brita Schirmer published the first paper explicitly
addressing Asperger’s role during National Socialism [8]; her stance is already
indicated in the subtitle: “Hans Asperger’s defense of the ‘autistic
psychopaths’ against Nazi eugenics.” Her argument was based on
Asperger’s 1938 paper “The mentally abnormal child” [1] from which she drew
conclusions similar to Uta Frith’s. A 2003 paper by Helmut Gröger,
also in German, examined possible influences of Nazi race ideology
on Asperger’s published work. Citing no less than 23 of Asperger’s
publications in the years from 1937 to 1974, Gröger concluded that
Asperger generally “avoided topics touching race ideology” and
maintained a “critical, differentiated attitude” ([9]: 204, 206).4 In line with the other authors cited here, Gröger
credited Asperger with advocating on behalf of his patients,
defending their value as human beings, and calling for loving care
for each of them ([9]:
204–5, 210).
Interestingly, Gröger mentioned—without discussing the
implications—that Asperger’s name “appears” in the files of a
3-year-old girl with mental deficiencies who was sent to the child
“euthanasia” clinic Am Spiegelgrund in Vienna ([9]: 209). As I demonstrate in the
“Limits of ‘educability’: Asperger and
the Spiegelgrund ‘euthanasia’ facility” section,
Herta Schreiber, the girl in question, was in fact transferred to
the Spiegelgrund facility on Asperger’s authority and died there
2 months later.
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From 2005, cracks started to appear in the
predominantly apologetic narrative of Asperger’s role during
National Socialism. Michael Hubenstorf, in an extensive book chapter
on the history of Vienna University’s Pediatric Clinic where
Asperger worked, presented a host of previously unknown aspects of
Asperger’s career. The close ties between the pediatric clinic and
the “euthanasia” facility Am Spiegelgrund, including connections
between Asperger and Spiegelgrund’s director Erwin Jekelius
(1905–1952, Fig. 2), are of
particular importance in the context of this paper ([4]: 171–4). Hubenstorf also
documented the relationship between Asperger and his mentor Franz
Hamburger, a fervent Nazi ideologue ([4]: 93, 118–9, 126–35, 191–3; see the
“‘The best service to our Volk’: Asperger and Nazi race
hygiene” to “Asperger’s
diagnoses compared to those at Spiegelgrund”
sections). Based among other sources on Hubenstorf’s work, on
personal documents, and on her own memories, Maria Asperger Felder
published a nuanced portrait of her father, not shying away from his
possible involvement in National Socialism—without, however, adding
significant new facts [10]. Citing Schirmer [8], Daniel Kondziella in a 2009
paper on 30 neurological eponyms associated with the Nazi era
included Asperger among the “physicians with ambivalent roles”
because he had “been accused on uncertain grounds of harboring
sympathy for Nazi politics” (while he had also “cautiously defended
mentally disabled children”) ([11]: 59).
×
Some preliminary results of my own research were
presented at a 2010 symposium marking the 30th anniversary of
Asperger’s death and published in the conference proceedings
([12]; see also
[13]: 201, 206,
217). In the same volume, Helmut Gröger argued along the lines of
his above-cited 2003 article [14], while Roxane Sousek hinted at problematic
aspects of Asperger’s activities ([15]: 19). Ina Friedmann in her recent work on the
topic also refrained from presenting an idealized picture of
Asperger and the Austrian school of Heilpädagogik (therapeutic
pedagogy) [16‐18].
While evidence for problematic aspects of Asperger’s
career have thus begun to emerge in German-language publications,
authors in the English-speaking world often continued to perpetuate
a predominantly apologetic narrative based on the limited range of
sources available to them. In 2007, a letter to the editors in one
of the leading autism journals claimed that Asperger “tried to
protect these children from being sent to concentration camps during
World War II,” a statement that is confusing at best, since child
“euthanasia” had nothing to do with concentration camps
([19]:
2020).5
Adam Feinstein’s 2010 book on the history of autism
illustrated the increasing gap between the English- and
German-language literature. The author qualified the affirmative
references to Nazi ideology in some of Asperger’s papers as a
deliberate tactic to deceive “the Nazis” about his true intentions,
namely to protect his patients. A cornerstone of his argument is
Asperger’s claim that he had faced arrest by the Gestapo for his
stance against Nazi race hygiene policies ([20]: 15–18). Steve Silberman’s
2015 book NeuroTribes, written
for a general audience, also pushed the narrative of Asperger as an
Oskar Schindler-like protector of children with autism. One of
Asperger’s alleged strategies was that he “intentionally highlighted
his ‘most promising’ cases to deflect the wrath of the Nazis”
([21]: 216). As far
as Asperger’s conduct during National Socialism is concerned,
Silberman’s argument (and the evidence presented) is very similar to
Adam Feinstein’s and some of the other texts already mentioned
([21]: 108–9,
128–9, 137–8). The “‘The best service to
our Volk’: Asperger and Nazi
race hygiene” section is dedicated to a discussion
of these and similar claims.
One of Silberman’s original findings regards the
question of Asperger’s and Kanner’s respective roles in the
“discovery” of autism. Georg Frankl (1897–1976), a close
collaborator of Asperger’s, left Vienna for the USA in 1937, going
on to work with Leo Kanner ([21]: especially 167–8, 180). This information
revived earlier suspicions that Kanner had known about Asperger’s
work before his own publications on the topic, based on the fact
that Asperger had already mentioned autistic psychopathy in a 1938
publication [1], years
before his more widely known postdoctoral thesis [2], and that the Austrian-born
Kanner had access to German-language medical publications
[22, 23].6
The latest addition to a growing body of literature on
the subject, John Donvan and Caren Zucker’s In a Different Key is the first English-language
publication to break with the narrative of Asperger as an active
opponent to Nazi race hygiene and to introduce critical, hitherto
unknown elements into the debate on his Nazi-era trajectory. This
shift is mainly based on sources that I shared with the authors,
which are presented in detail below ([24]: 316–41).7
Although the precise nature of Asperger’s relationship
to National Socialism has been the elephant in the room for some
time now, the necessary questions have so far evidently either not
been asked at all, or they have been answered on the basis of a
too limited number of sources. In what follows, I will present a
more multifaceted picture both of Asperger’s Nazi-era career and of
the historical context of the inception of autism, based on an
extensive body of sources, many of which are presented here for the
first time.
Methods
This paper is based on a qualitative analysis of
documents relating to Hans Asperger’s life, work, and political
orientation from archives in Austria and (to a lesser degree)
Germany, and of his own publications, most of which have not
previously been examined with regard to the questions raised here.
The documentary sources include, among others, Asperger’s personnel
files, political assessments by Nazi authorities, and medical case
records from various institutions, most importantly from the child
“euthanasia” clinic Am Spiegelgrund and Asperger’s Heilpädagogik
ward. Despite claims to the contrary ([21]: 140, [25]: 37, [26]: 22), these records were not
destroyed in the war. Apart from a gap between 1945 and 1969, the
files (which go back as far as 1912) are today kept in the Municipal
and Provincial Archives of Vienna.8 They pertain to those children admitted as inpatients;
the documentation on the much larger number of children examined at
the outpatient clinic is lost. From the critical years of 1938 to
1944, 1012 case files survive. Between 1940 and 1944, 62.7% of
patients admitted were boys and 37.3% girls. Apart from a number of
recurring elements (such as admission forms), the files vary in
content and scope. It cannot be ruled out that single documents or
whole files have been lost or purged. These records are analyzed
here for the first time.
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Results and discussion
Asperger’s career before 1938
In 1911, Erwin Lazar (1877–1932) established the
Heilpädagogische Station
(Therapeutic Pedagogy Ward) at the Vienna University Children’s
Clinic (part of the city’s general hospital), which had achieved
international renown under its director Clemens von Pirquet
(1874–1929) ([27]:
320, [28]:
161).9 Lazar regarded Heilpädagogik as a direct descendant
of psychiatry, although the classic psychiatric illnesses such
as psychoses were rarely diagnosed in the children he treated.
Instead, he diagnosed the vast majority of his patients with
“psychopathy” or mental “imbalance.” Most of the ward’s
patients—in 1925, he mentioned a figure of 5000 annually—were
diagnosed at the outpatient clinic. Only a relatively small
number—complicated cases or cases of special clinical
interest—was admitted over longer periods. Many children were
referred by welfare institutions, the police, or the courts.
Under Lazar, Heilpädagogik took inspiration from a variety of
concepts, including Cesare Lombroso’s criminal biology, Ernst
Kretschmer’s constitutional types, and Sigmund Freud’s
psychoanalysis [28].
Asperger joined the children’s clinic in May 1931
under Pirquet’s successor Franz Hamburger (1874–1954). In 1932,
he started working at the clinic’s Heilpädagogik ward as an
“auxiliary physician” (Hilfsarzt). In May 1935, he took charge of the
ward and reached the position of an assistant.10 Asperger had not obtained his specialist doctor
qualification in pediatrics and had published only a single work
in Heilpädagogik (on bed-wetting) [29].11 This raises the question why Asperger’s colleague
Georg Frankl was not promoted to the position—Frankl was 9 years
older and had been working at the ward since 1927.12 Two years after Asperger’s promotion, Frankl
emigrated to the USA, where he joined Leo Kanner at Johns
Hopkins ([21]:
122).13 Another highly qualified Jewish employee, the
psychologist Anni Weiss (1897–1991), who later married Frankl,
had already left Austria in 1935 ([21]: 122).14
Austrian universities were sites of virulent
anti-Jewish agitation at the time (see [30]), which almost certainly
was a factor in their decision to leave. Jewish doctors faced
increasing difficulties in securing university positions, with
some clinics and departments practically closed to Jews
([31]: 312).
With Hamburger’s appointment as chair in 1930, the children’s
clinic became a flagship of anti-Jewish policies long before the
Nazi takeover ([4]:
69, 112). Regarding Anni Weiss and Valerie Bruck (1894–1961),
Asperger’s immediate predecessor as head of the Heilpädagogik
ward, hostility towards working women also played a role: The
Austrofascist regime (1933–1938) sought to push women out of the
labor market, a stance shared by Nazi ideologues such as
Hamburger ([16]:
181).15
After Pirquet’s sudden death in 1929, Hamburger
introduced sweeping changes at the clinic. Pirquet’s former
collaborators, many of them Jewish, were replaced. The political
orientation of Hamburger’s assistants is illustrated by the fact
that of those who attained the highest academic qualification
(Habilitation), all but
one were dismissed in 1945 as Nazis—the exception being Hans
Asperger ([27]:
320).16 Among Hamburger’s recruits was Erwin Jekelius, who
later became responsible for the deaths of thousands of
psychiatric patients and mentally disabled children. He remained
at the clinic from August 1933 to February 1936, spending part
of this time at the Heilpädagogik ward.17 Another result of Hamburger’s influence was a sharp
decline in scientific standards and output ([4]: 87–94, 104,
117–8).
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Hamburger and Jekelius were not the only fervent
Nazis with whom Asperger had close professional contact during
his early career. In 1932, he co-authored a paper with Erwin
Risak (1899–1968), who had been his colleague at the
university’s III. Medical Clinic for a few weeks in 1931
[32].18 Under Franz Chvostek junior (1864–1944), this clinic
became known as a hotbed of Pan-German nationalist and Nazi
agitation. Risak became an assistant to Hans Eppinger junior
(1879–1946), director of the I. Medical Clinic, who was later
involved in the Dachau seawater experiments.19 Following the Anschluss, Risak became one of the
figureheads of the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in the Vienna Medical
Faculty, along with figures such as Hamburger, the anatomist
Eduard Pernkopf (1888–1955), and others ([4]: 129).
Whatever the specific motivations for Hamburger’s
decision to appoint Asperger as the head of the Heilpädagogik
ward in 1935, Asperger’s promotion was aided by the anti-Jewish
and misogynist tendencies then dominating Austria’s social and
political life. Although Asperger did not join the Nazis, due to
his Pan-Germanic, völkisch
orientation, he shared considerable ideological common ground
with Hamburger and his network, allowing him to blend in without
apparent frictions. When anti-Jewish persecution became state
policy after the Anschluss, 65% of Viennese physicians were
classed as Jewish according to the Nuremberg Laws, including 77
pediatricians (70% of the specialists in this field). Tellingly,
in 1938, not one Jewish pediatrician who had attained a
Habilitation was working
in Hamburger’s clinic ([4]: 71–3, 112).20
Asperger had the unreserved support of Franz
Hamburger, even if he did not belong to his mentor’s circle of
underground Nazi activists. At a young age, and in an
environment marked by political strife and a difficult labor
market, he rose to Austria’s most prominent position in the
expanding field of Heilpädagogik, which would soon be forced to
find its place within the new order of the Nazi state.
Asperger’s political background before 1938
In order to understand how Asperger positioned
himself vis-à-vis the Nazi regime after March 1938, it is first
necessary to examine his political orientation during his
formative years, when there was still a spectrum of political
options to choose from. This will help explain why Asperger in
1938 found enough common ground with National Socialism to
establish himself as a credible fellow traveler in the eyes of
the party, without directly embracing National Socialism.
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In Asperger’s own words, his formative experience
within the polarized political landscape of interwar Austria was
membership in the so-called Bund
Neuland, a Catholic youth organization focused on
outdoor activities, with roots in the predominantly völkisch-nationalist Wandervogel and the German Youth
Movement ([4]:
192–3). In 1914, 92% of the Wandervogel chapters (in Germany and
Austria) had no Jewish members, due mostly to formal anti-Jewish
regulations ([33]:
92–4).
Founded in 1921, the Austria-based Bund was a
split-off from the Christian-German Student Union (CDSB) but
stressed its affinities with the German Youth Movement as
represented by the “Meißner formula,” which Asperger cited in
1974 as a guiding principle in his life [3].21 After World War I, the CDSB had become rife with
aggressive anti-Jewish propaganda, including calls to boycott
Jewish businesses ([33]: 175–81), tendencies which the Bund
shared.
The Bund’s intellectual influence was greater than
its approximately 2000 strong membership would suggest
([34]:
92).22 It defined itself as Christian, Catholic, and
Pan-German, and in sharp opposition to everything perceived as
Marxist-leftist, liberal, or modern, which included
parliamentary democracy.23 There was a degree of political diversity, and the
Bund is sometimes classed as a “socially progressive” Catholic
organization because some members supported social reforms in
order to bring workers into the fold of the Church
([35]: 46).
Nevertheless, in its fundamental principles, the Bund stood
close to the fascist and authoritarian currents of the time
([36]: 835). A
draft program from 1931 confirmed its opposition to the
democratic state “in its current form” and stated that “the
equivalence between Volk and
state leads necessarily to the ideal of the Greater German
Reich” (cited in [34]: 99).
During the 1930s, important sections of the Bund
were infiltrated by Hitler Youth groups and members of other
Nazi organizations ([34]: 95, 193, [37]). In 1935/1936, press reports estimated
that 20% of Neuland members were (illegal) Nazis ([38]: 70–1). The
authoritative account of its history states that the
“predominant majority in the Bund was oriented towards
Pan-Germanism, supported Austria’s unification with Germany, and
was at best indifferent vis-à-vis National Socialism,” despite
the fact that the official policy was to identify and exclude
Hitler Youth cells within the organization ([36]: 586–7). The most
striking example for the Bund’s infiltration is its leader Anton
Böhm (1904–1998), who joined the NSDAP in 1933 and remained an
“illegal” party member until the Anschluss in 1938, even serving
as an informant to the Austrian Nazis’ intelligence services and
the Gestapo in Munich ([34]: 103, 189–95).24 Arguably, the Bund constituted one of Nazism’s most
important intellectual bridgeheads in the powerful Austrian
Catholic milieu during the crucial years leading up to the
Anschluss ([34]:
100–1).
In 1933, Böhm published a programmatic comment on
the political situation following the Nazi takeover in Germany,
referring also to the persecution of the Jewish population:
“There can be no doubt that the strong Jewish influence in
Germany has had baleful consequences. Therefore, the anti-Jewish
measures in Germany are justified as acts of national
self-defense” ([39]: 106–7).
Over the following years, the Bund published a
number of articles supporting the anti-Jewish persecutions in
Nazi Germany [40].25 The Bund’s official mouthpiece also denounced the
Viennese “Jewish press” as a corrosive influence in Austrian
public life, attacked Jews as an alien element within the
Catholic-German Austrian population, and warned against the
dangers of “racial” and religious intermarriage ([41‐43]: 20–1, [44]: 215).
While the Bund’s periodical welcomed the German
Nazis’ anti-Jewish policies, its stance towards National
Socialism as a whole was more complex. Although the Bund shared
the Nazis’ contempt for parliamentary democracy and all forms of
cultural and intellectual modernism, as well as their
glorification of the German Volk as the basis for cultural regeneration,
they nevertheless regarded the NSDAP with the same suspicion as
they did all other political parties. Catholicism remained the
central point of reference, and the NSDAP was mainly judged
according to its policies towards the Church. In 1933, Böhm
signaled that the organization would support the Nazis’
“national revolution” in Germany provided that Hitler would
choose to strengthen the anti-capitalist tendencies of his
movement and, more importantly, grant the Catholic Church and
Christianity generally its due place in the German Reich
[45]. In the
following issue, Böhm openly called for the integration of the
Nazis into the Austrian government ([39]: 110).
Within the organization, which was far from
ideologically homogenous, Asperger belonged to a group called
the Fahrende Scholaren
(Wandering Scholars), part of the Bund’s decidedly völkisch and right-wing faction. He
was associated with the inner circle of “organic romanticists”
around Michael Pfliegler (1891–1972), a Catholic priest and
founding member of the Bund, and its leader Anton Böhm
([33]: 207–8,
342; [34]:
63–5).26
After the Anschluss, at least some of the Bund’s
former members joined anti-Nazi networks, notably in Innsbruck
and Lower Austria ([35]: 46). Resistance activities, which
included an assembly of 300 youths in Vienna on the night of the
German invasion, were primarily the work of the younger
generation. By contrast, the older generation to which Asperger
belonged tended to seek immediate accommodation with Nazism
([36]: 586–8,
839). This is evident in Asperger’s path after 1938, as he
joined a number of Nazi organizations (although not the NSDAP)
and sought to accommodate himself with the new regime.
Bund Neuland was the most important but not the
only political influence in Asperger’s life. The physicians
within the Bund delegated him to the St. Lukas guild, which
promoted medical ethics along Catholic principles. Regarding
eugenics, its position was ambivalent; it opposed some tenets of
Nazi race hygiene such as forced sterilizations while developing
its own eugenic program within the bounds of Catholicism
([46]:
106–16).27
According to a questionnaire dated 1940, Asperger
was also a member of the Verein
Deutscher Ärzte in Österreich (Association of
German Doctors in Austria, Fig. 3).28 “German” in this context refers to a Pan-German
orientation, excluding Jewish doctors. The Verein Deutscher Ärzte emerged from
a 1904 federation between the anti-Jewish Verein Wiener Ärzte and various
Pan-German medical associations in Austria ([4]: 78). In the 1920s and
again after the Nazi takeover in Germany, the organization
called to limit the number of Jewish students ([47]: 90). A considerable
portion of leading (non-Jewish) Viennese doctors, including the
former head of the pediatric clinic Clemens Pirquet, belonged to
the association—an indication of how widespread anti-Jewish
sentiment was in Viennese medical circles ([4]: 78).
×
In the same questionnaire, Asperger mentioned
another membership indicating his affinity to the Pan-German
nationalist wing, despite his Catholic orientation. In 1932, he
joined the Deutscher Schulverein
Südmark (German School Association for the
Southern Border Region), which sought to strengthen German
cultural influence abroad with the help of German-speaking
minorities. Many of the Schulverein’s members were close to the Austrian
Großdeutsche Volkspartei
(Greater German People’s Party), which in 1933 formed an
alliance with the Austrian Nazi Party.29
Despite these associations, there is no indication
that Asperger actively sympathized with the Nazi movement prior
to 1938, unlike many of his colleagues. Rather, the evidence
points to an ambivalent attitude. Potential obstacles to his
supporting National Socialism were his religious convictions,
his humanist background, and his elitist, cultivated habitus.
Furthermore, following the ban of the Austrian Nazi Party in
1933, the movement remained attractive only to a core of
ideologically hardened supporters, whereas for mere sympathizers
or opportunists, the risks of adherence far outweighed potential
advantages. Nevertheless, Asperger’s record of organizational
affiliations over the years prior to 1938 suggests that there
was more common ideological ground than has previously been
acknowledged. Asperger’s political socialization in Neuland
likely blinded him to National Socialism’s destructive character
due to an affinity with core ideological elements (see
[36]:
848–9).30 In 1974, Asperger himself put it this way: “[Then]
the National Socialist time arrived, whereupon it was clear from
my previous life that one could well go along with many let’s
say quote unquote ‘national’ things, but not with the inhuman
[ones]” [3].31
In post-World War II Austria, “national” as a
political label invariably referred to Pan-Germanism and is to
this day used by right-wing groups as a euphemism to avoid overt
association with (neo-) Nazism. In other words, Asperger in 1974
distanced himself from the Unmenschlichkeiten (inhumanities) of National
Socialism, but not from its Pan-German program, which in 1938
had led to the annexation of Austria and later to World War II.
Asperger’s ambivalent attitude towards National Socialism was
already palpable in a diary entry from April 1934 (when he spent
some time in Nazi Germany), which evinced both skeptical
distance and a certain fascination: “How a whole people marches
in one direction, fanatical, with narrowed vision, certainly,
but with enthusiasm and dedication, with enormous discipline and
formidable vigor. Only soldiers, soldierly thinking—ethos—German
paganism.”32
Political trajectory after the Anschluss in 1938
The established narrative concerning Asperger’s
relationship to National Socialism after 1938 is that Asperger
actively opposed the regime, or at least kept his distance,
under considerable professional and personal risk. In 1993,
Lorna Wing argued that as a devout Catholic, he could not have
been a Nazi ([24]:
330). This argument is misleading, however, given the overlap
discussed above between Catholicism and the völkisch extreme right represented
by organizations such as the Bund Neuland.
The strongest claim to the effect that Asperger was
an active opponent of the Nazis and that he risked his life
defending the children in his care is based on an episode
reported in Adam Feinstein’s book on the pioneers of autism
research. Allegedly, the Gestapo twice came to the clinic to
arrest Asperger, either because of his 1938 talk [1] or because he had refused
to “hand [patients] over to officials” ([20]: 17–8). The only known
source for this claim is Asperger himself, who mentioned the
incident in 1962 at his inauguration as the Vienna chair of
pediatrics [48] and
in the above-cited 1974 interview:
It is totally inhuman—as we saw with
dreadful consequences—when people accept the concept of
a worthless life. […] As I was never willing to accept
this concept—in other words, to notify the [Public]
Health Office of the mentally deficient—this was a truly
dangerous situation for me. I must give great credit to
my mentor Hamburger, because although he was a convinced
National Socialist, he saved me twice from the Gestapo
with strong, personal commitment. He knew my attitude
but he protected me with his whole being, and for that I
have the greatest appreciation [3].33
This is the only recorded instance I could find in
which Asperger publicly mentioned Nazi “euthanasia”—despite the
fact that this was such an incisive event for his field and its
patients.34 According to this account, the Gestapo was after
Asperger because he refused to report patients with certain
deficiencies to Vienna’s Public Health Office. It is true that
doctors were increasingly obliged to report patients to the
authorities in defiance of patient/physician confidentiality.
Regarding race hygiene policies, the two most important
instances were the compulsory reporting of patients as mandated
by the sterilization law and of children with mental
deficiencies who were slated for “euthanasia.”35 Based on the available evidence, it is impossible to
determine whether Asperger in some cases abstained from
reporting children who met the criteria for child “euthanasia.”
However, it is documented that he personally referred a number
of children to the Spiegelgrund “euthanasia” facility
(“Limits of ‘educability’:
Asperger and the Spiegelgrund ‘euthanasia’
facility” and “Asperger’s diagnoses compared to those at
Spiegelgrund” sections).
Other facts speak against Asperger’s self-portrayal
as a man persecuted by the Gestapo for his resistance to Nazi
race hygiene, who had to flee into military service to avoid
further problems. On several occasions, he published approving
comments on race hygiene measures such as forced sterilizations
(see [49]: 353; for
further examples, see the “‘The best
service to our Volk’:
Asperger and Nazi race hygiene” section), and
as is discussed further below, the Nazi hierarchy saw him as
someone willing to go along with race hygiene policies. In July
1940, the deputy Gauleiter of Vienna wrote to Asperger’s
superior and protector Franz Hamburger that the party had “no
objections whatsoever” against his assistant.36 The Vienna Gestapo, when asked for a political
assessment of Asperger, answered in November 1940 that they had
nothing on him.37 This contradicts claims that Asperger’s early
publications after the Anschluss, including those most
frequently cited as proof for his public opposition to Nazi
policies, were perceived by the regime as expressions of
political opposition.
Initially, before Asperger had a chance to prove
his willingness to adjust to the new political order, the NSDAP
was unsure about his loyalty. Immediately following the
Anschluss, a preliminary investigation was initiated to decide
whether the “Decree for the Reorganization of the Austrian
Professional Civil Service” of 31 May 1938, which stipulated the
dismissal of Jewish and politically undesirable officials
([50]: 235),
applied to Asperger. In June 1939, the official charged with
implementing the decree, Otto Wächter (1901–1949), decided to
close the file because Asperger was ‘politically acceptable’
from the National Socialist standpoint.38 According to the Vienna NSDAP Personnel Office,
Asperger was “unobjectionable with respect to his character and
politics.” His Catholic orientation was considered a minus, but
this was mitigated by the fact that he had not been actively
involved with the Christian Social Party or the Austrofascist
regime. Crucially, the assessment concluded that Asperger “was
in conformity with the National Socialist racial and
sterilization laws” (Fig. 4).39
×
This investigation in all likelihood constituted
the basis for Asperger’s claim, made 24 years later, that he had
faced persecution by the Gestapo. Hamburger was certainly in a
position to decisively influence the outcome of such a
procedure, by vouching for his protégé’s willingness to
cooperate with the regime—a less dramatic but much more
plausible version than the alleged arrest, for which no
documentary evidence exists. This explanation also correlates
with Asperger’s 1974 account that Hamburger saved him “from the
Gestapo” rather than “from being arrested by the Gestapo,” as he
put it in 1962. If the latter story were true, it would be
difficult to explain why Asperger (to the best of my knowledge)
did not publicly mention it until 17 years after the war,
although it would have benefitted both him and
Hamburger.40 In all, this investigation is the only documented
instance of political trouble for Asperger; the sources
otherwise reflect a spotless record of political accommodation
with National Socialism.
In this context, a crucial question concerns
Asperger’s role in a truly heroic episode involving the
pediatrician Josef Feldner (1887–1973), who over many years
volunteered on the Heilpädagogik ward. In September 1942, he
took in Hansi Busztin (1925–1996), a Jewish patient of his, and
hid him until the end of the war. Unusually, Busztin lived a
relatively open life, with regular visits to the public library
and the opera; he estimated that around 100 people knew about
him, many of whom provided support [51]. In a memoir written in
the 1980s, Busztin referred to “a group of opponents of National
Socialism” on the Heilpädagogik ward, “nearly all of whom knew”
about him and “helped his later adoptive father in various
situations.”41 Did Asperger belong to this circle of supporters?
Busztin does not mention Asperger—and, interestingly, Asperger
did not mention the episode even in instances where he was
trying to establish his anti-Nazi credentials [3, 48] or in his 1975 obituary
for Feldner [52].
Remarks published by Asperger in 1962 on the occasion of
Feldner’s 75th birthday suggest, however, that he at least knew
about Feldner’s activities, but did not play an active role in
them:
It is clear that such a spirit had to be
diametrically opposed to National Socialism. He acted
accordingly. What he said and did during those years
often made his friends’ hair stand on end. There are
episodes—confrontations with the Gestapo, the hiding
over years of a Jewish student whose family had been
exterminated—which could have been taken from an
adventure novel [53].
This episode could help explain why Asperger
joined the military in March 1943.42 In the 1974 interview already mentioned, he claimed
to have volunteered to escape reprisals from the Gestapo because
he had refused to cooperate with Nazi race hygiene policies
[3]. While this
is contradicted by the favorable assessments he continued to
receive from Nazi officials (for example during the vetting for
his Habilitation), the cited evidence and the timeline of events
suggest a direct connection—namely, that he wanted to get away
from the Vienna clinic in case Busztin were discovered.
One of the main arguments for Asperger’s
ostensible distance to National Socialism is the fact that he
never joined the NSDAP.43 Given the high proportion of party members among
non-Jewish physicians, this is certainly significant. This does
not mean, however, that Asperger kept a principled distance from
the NSDAP apparatus. In fact, he sought membership in several
organizations affiliated with the NSDAP. According to a 1940
questionnaire, Asperger joined the Deutsche Arbeitsfront (German Labor Front, DAF)
in April 1938, the Nationalsozialistische Volkswohlfahrt (National
Socialist People’s Welfare Organization, NSV) in May 1938, and
(as a candidate; see below) the Nationalsozialistischer Deutscher Ärztebund
(National Socialist German Physicians’ League, NSDÄB) in June
1938. He also mentioned that he had committed himself to working
for the Hitler Youth.44
The DAF and the NSV were mass organizations often
used to demonstrate loyalty to the regime while avoiding the
ideological commitment of NSDAP or SS membership. The NSDÄB was
a different matter, however. It saw itself as the ideological
spearhead of the Nazi Party within the medical profession, as an
advisor to the NSDAP “in all questions regarding public health
and race biology” and as a recruitment pool for medical
positions in the party apparatus. While full membership was
restricted to NSDAP members, other health professionals who
supported the goals of the NSDÄB could obtain the status of
candidates, as did Asperger [54].45
These memberships should be seen against the
backdrop of the heavy Nazi influence at the clinic (see
[4]: 120–1).
Most likely, Asperger took these decisions in order to protect
and further his career. By foregoing NSDAP membership, he chose
a middle path between keeping his distance to the regime and
outright alignment.
It is important to note that Asperger had all the
political protection he needed through his mentor Franz
Hamburger. Given the hierarchical structure of Austrian
universities and the strong position of clinic chiefs, Hamburger
was in a position to make or break Asperger’s career even under
less complicated political circumstances. The political capital
Asperger enjoyed thanks to Hamburger’s unwavering patronage was
much stronger than anything he could have achieved on his own.
Hamburger was one of the NSDAP’s figureheads within the Vienna
medical school and had considerable clout within the Nazi
medical establishment both in Vienna and—thanks to his position
as president of the German Association of Pediatrics—in Germany
generally ([4]: 129,
134). After the Anschluss, when the ban on the NSDAP was lifted,
Hamburger could openly declare his allegiance to Adolf Hitler
([4]: 126). In a
programmatic speech in 1939 (“National Socialism and Medicine,”)
he revealed how central Nazi ideology was to his approach to
medicine: “A teacher of obstetrics, a teacher of pediatrics,
internal medicine, or neurology has to be a true National
Socialist. He has to be completely permeated with the
foundations of National Socialist life and health leadership”
([55]: 142).
Asperger, without being a convinced National Socialist, clearly
managed in Hamburger’s view to conform somehow to this highly
ideological model of a physician.
As mentioned above, NSDAP functionaries on several
occasions wrote confidential assessments of Asperger’s political
orientation. Although they are the best sources available
regarding Asperger’s attitude towards National Socialism and his
standing in the eyes of the regime, these documents have not
previously been examined. In all, they demonstrate how after an
initial phase of distrust the party authorities came to see
Asperger in an increasingly positive light. On 4 January 1939,
for example, Asperger’s Ortsgruppenleiter (Local Party Group Leader) put
the following on record: “no merits for the [Nazi] movement,”
“attitude towards the NSDAP before the Anschluss indifferent,”
“does not participate in public political life,” and “political
orientation of the family Christian-Social”. It was noted
positively that he had not taken any stance against the Nazi
takeover in Austria. The Kreisleiter (District Party Leader) added to the
same document: “his readiness to engage is only partially
existent, because as a former Christian-Social he is quite
indifferent.”46
Less than 2 years later, Asperger’s political
evaluations had changed in tone, even if his past affiliation
with the Christian-Social camp was still held against him. One
of several similar documents from his NSDAP personnel file reads
as follows:
In response to your enquiry from 25
October 1940 I declare that Dr. Asperger is a faithful
Catholic, but without supporting the political
tendencies of Catholicism. Although he was a member of
the Catholic association ‘Neuland’, he had no common
interests with the politicians of the [former Austrian]
system. Regarding questions of the racial and
sterilization laws he conforms to National Socialist
ideas. With respect to his character and in political
terms he is considered unobjectionable.47
Another high-ranking Nazi official’s evaluation
from roughly the same time is similar in tone:
Dr. Asperger hails from Catholic circles
and his orientation during the period of the [previous
Austrian] system was strictly Catholic. He was a member
of the Catholic organization ‘Neuland’ and of the
physicians’ association ‘Lukas Guild’. He has never
taken active steps of any kind against National
Socialists, although it would have been easy for him to
procure incriminating evidence at the Pediatric Clinic,
which was staffed exclusively with Nazi physicians. In
terms of his character, Dr. A. receives favorable
descriptions.48
Due to his political past, the party hierarchy
treated Asperger with a certain reservation. This changed over
time, however, as he was increasingly regarded as politically
reliable, and no obstacles to his career resulted. This
development culminated in Asperger obtaining his Habilitation in
1943, the academic qualification necessary to become a lecturer
(and, eventually, a professor). According to the Nazi doctrine,
medicine should be based both on science and the ideology of
National Socialism. Therefore, Asperger had to both submit a
postdoctoral thesis (his work on “autistic psychopaths”) and
pass political vetting by the Nationalsozialistischer Deutscher Dozentenbund
(National Socialist German Lecturers League)—which raised no
objections (Fig. 5).49 Additionally, since he had not obtained the title of
Facharzt (medical
specialist) in pediatrics, the NSDAP Gauärzteführer (Physicians’ Leader) of Vienna,
Otto Planner-Plann (1893–1975), had to certify that he had the
necessary qualifications. This is another indicator that
Asperger enjoyed the trust of the highest ranks of the Nazi
medical establishment in Vienna.50
×
After the Anschluss, Asperger tried to prove his
loyalty to the new regime in various ways. In public lectures
(which were later published), he argued in favor of his
discipline’s mission within the Nazi state and declared his
allegiance to the tenets of Nazi medicine (see the “‘The best service to our Volk’: Asperger and Nazi race
hygiene” section). Indeed, Asperger went so
far in these attempts that his collaborator, Josef Feldner, had
to reign him in lest he risk his credibility: “Your lecture: the
introduction is good as it is (maybe just a little bit too Nazi
for your reputation). E.g., I would drop the thanks to the
Führer. … I write what I have in mind, forcing myself to blow
Hitler’s horn a little. Maybe you can make something of
it.”51 Asperger’s case files also demonstrate how he tried
to prove his loyalty. Beginning in 1938, he took to signing his
diagnostic reports with “Heil Hitler”—a merely symbolic, but
revealing gesture.52
Asperger’s Jewish patients
The question of Jewish patients on Asperger’s ward
has not been raised in the literature so far, despite the fact
that their fate is relevant for a number of reasons. How they
were diagnosed and what decisions about their future were taken
at the clinic had an important impact on their chances of
survival. The files on the Jewish children also provide insights
regarding Asperger’s actions under National Socialism and on his
general attitude towards Jews.
Jewish children were proportionately
under-represented among the ward’s patients even before they
were successively excluded from public medical institutions
after 1938. Perhaps the strong Nazi influence that pervaded the
clinic after Hamburger’s takeover in 1930 deterred Jewish
parents from seeking the clinic’s services—although the case
records of Jewish children from the decade before the Anschluss
(16 in total), except for isolated instances of stereotyping,
show no evidence of anti-Jewish bias.53
At the time of the Nazi takeover in Austria, two
13-year-old Jewish boys, Alfred S. and Walter Brucker, were
patients at the ward. Alfred’s file contains no evidence that he
was treated in any way differently from the other children.
Admitted because of a scuffle at school, Asperger diagnosed the
boy as an “autistic psychopath” on 22 March 1938. He found
Alfred’s intellectual capabilities “above average in some
respects” and recommended placing him with Jewish foster parents
rather than returning him to his non-Jewish foster mother (whom
Alfred liked). At the time, approximately 8000 children had been
entrusted to foster families by Vienna’s youth welfare services.
A number of these children—like Alfred—were Jews living with
non-Jewish families. When the Nazis took over the city
administration, this came to be regarded as a problem, and
Jewish foster children were separated from their caretakers and
segregated in Jewish orphanages, which for many became death
traps during the Holocaust. Whatever his specific motivation
might have been, in recommending Alfred’s placement specifically
with Jewish foster parents, Asperger anticipated the Nazis’
official policy of segregation which took shape in the following
years ([56]: 90,
101).54 At a time when Jews were subjected to humiliation
and violence in the streets and anti-Semitism became official
policy, the decision to highlight the boy’s Jewish
background—for which no medical or pedagogical reasons were
given—seems questionable. A safer alternative would have been to
avoid any reference to Alfred’s biological family, although in
retrospect, it is impossible to say whether this would have made
a difference. The diagnostic report itself is rather benevolent
in tone; Asperger considered Alfred capable of functioning among
adults, who would feel less provoked by his behavior than
children. Ultimately, Asperger’s recommendation was not
followed, and Alfred was transferred to a Jewish orphanage. His
fate is unknown.55
Walter Brucker was admitted to the clinic on 14
March 1938, the day following the Anschluss, because of extreme
agitation. His record allows a rare insight into daily life on
Asperger’s ward during these critical days. On 15 March, amidst
cheering youngsters, Walter had to listen to a triumphant speech
by Hitler. Despite the fact that as a Jew Walter had every
reason to panic, his fearful reaction was held against him. The
entry of that day (not in Asperger’s handwriting) stated that
Walter “is much more disagreeable than three weeks ago, when he
was [last] here. During Hitler’s speech, he put his head into
his hands on the table and stared into a void. He was very
agitated; when a child broke out in cheers he opened his eyes
wide and turned pale.” Asperger’s diagnosis all but ignored the
boy’s precarious situation and framed his mental troubles as
follows: “severe psychopathy, with a particular sensitivity and
paranoid irritability.” Asperger thus pathologized and
de-politicized the boy’s reactions to the anti-Jewish
persecution then pervading the city; based on the same logic, in
a formulation that was perhaps meant as an act of generosity, he
stressed that Walter could not be held fully responsible for his
sometimes aggressive reactions. In his diagnosis, Asperger
omitted the fact that Walter was Jewish and that his life was
under threat from the Nazi regime. Although this is in line with
Asperger’s general tendency to attribute mental troubles to
“constitution” rather than environmental factors, in this
particular case, it is possible that he was also trying not to
highlight the boy’s Jewish background (in contrast to his
actions in Alfred’s case). As it turns out, Walter indeed had
every reason to be fearful. He died on 26 February 1945 as a
slave laborer of “Projekt Riese,” the construction in Lower
Silesia of underground facilities that included Hitler’s new
headquarters [57].
As far as the written record is concerned, there
is no indication that Asperger was guided by personal animosity
towards Jews, but there is a notable absence of empathy for
their plight under Nazi rule.56 The report he wrote in November 1940 on 11-year-old
Ivo P. supports this interpretation. He stressed that the boy
was “not constitutionally dissocial,” and that he had good
potential, provided that he would be held under permanent
supervision in an institutional setting. Almost as an
afterthought, he added: “The only problem is that the boy is a
Mischling of the first
degree” (Nazi jargon meaning that he had one Jewish parent)—a
piece of information that under the circumstances was extremely
dangerous for the boy.57
Racial stereotyping became—not surprisingly—more
frequent following the Anschluss. Marie Klein, admitted as a
9-year-old in late 1939, was described by one of Asperger’s
assistants as a “normally developed, slightly underweight girl
of Jewish appearance.” Asperger himself remarked that her manner
of speaking stood “in contrast to her quite Jewish character”
and noted on the cover sheet of her record that she was a
“Mischling.” According to her file, Marie had never caused any
trouble until she and her mother—who was a Catholic of Jewish
descent—were forced out of their apartment in August
1938.58 They had to move to an asylum run by the Catholic
relief organization “Caritas Socialis” for Catholics of Jewish
descent and children classified as “non-Aryan.”59 From then on, Marie began to suffer from violent
fits, which led to her admittance first to the psychiatric
clinic and then to Asperger’s ward. When she spoke of the
violent abuse she had suffered at the asylum, this was taken as
an indication of her dishonesty rather than an explanation for
the changes in her behavior.60 Two years after her transfer from the Heilpädagogik
ward to a children’s home in February 1940, Marie Klein was
deported to the Wlodawa ghetto, 11 km north of the Sobibor
extermination camp. The precise time of her death is unknown,
but in summer 1942, there was an “Aktion” specifically targeting
Jewish children between 10 and 14 years of age (Marie would have
been 12 by then), who were separated from their parents and
killed in the gas chambers at Sobibor [58, 59].
Lizzy Hofbauer, a 12-year-old Jewish girl, was
admitted in 1939 because of severe mental troubles: “Two days
before admittance she acted as if insane, talked of anti-Jewish
persecution, was in great fear, asked herself is she was
confused or insane. She thought a Jewish acquaintance had died
from hanging, but could be convinced that this was not true.”
Asperger interpreted these signs of distress as symptoms of
schizophrenia and wrote the following: “For her age and race
conspicuously retarded sexual development.”61 These comments suggest that Asperger had at least
partly internalized the sexualized anti-Jewish stereotypes
circulating at the time.
This leads to the broader question whether
Asperger held anti-Semitic views. Apart from the case files
quoted above, there is scant direct evidence. On the one hand,
hostility towards Jews and their alleged corrupting influence
was a common ideological denominator of the groups Asperger
associated with. Until the end of his life, as far as his public
statements are concerned, he never distanced himself from the
racialized anti-Semitism that pervaded Austrian and German
political life during the twentieth century nor did he comment
on the destruction this had brought down on the Jews of Europe
during the Holocaust.62 On the other hand, Asperger worked closely with
Jewish colleagues such as Anni Weiss and Georg Frankl before the
Anschluss—a relationship that due to the tightly knit community
at the Heilpädagogik ward went beyond the purely professional
and was renewed after the war ([10]: 102–4, 109). Like many aspects of
Asperger’s life, his relationship to Jews was fraught with
ambivalence—and further complicated by the fact that his early
career profited from the removal of so many Jewish colleagues,
including those he called his friends.
“The best service to our Volk”: Asperger and Nazi race hygiene
Although Asperger published at least a dozen
papers during the Nazi period, the existing (especially
English-language) literature focuses almost exclusively on two
of these: “The Mentally Abnormal Child” from 1938 and “The
Autistic Psychopaths in Childhood” from 1944 [1, 2]. In the following, I will
broaden this narrow scope and present an analysis based on the
full range of Asperger’s published statements on politics, race
hygiene, and the role of Heilpädagogik in society. I will show
that Asperger on several occasions supported tenets of Nazi race
hygiene and medicine, contributing to their
legitimization.
Among Asperger’s Nazi-era publications, the 1938
paper stands out for several reasons. Published 5 years before
Leo Kanner’s famous 1943 article on autism, it contains the
first account in the scientific literature of “autistic
psychopathy” as a not previously described syndrome. As the
written version of a lecture held less than 7 months after the
Anschluss, it also reveals how Asperger positioned himself
vis-à-vis the new rulers as someone who could be trusted to
adapt to the new political situation. Crucially, Asperger opened
with an endorsement of National Socialism’s anti-individualistic
and totalitarian approach to medicine and health:
We stand in the midst of a massive
reorganization of our intellectual and spiritual life,
which has seized all areas of this life—not least in
medicine. The central idea of the new Reich—that the
whole is more than its parts, and that the Volk is more important than
the individual—had to bring about fundamental changes in
our whole attitude, since this regards the nation’s most
precious asset, its health ([1]:1314).
Before the initiation of “euthanasia” killings in
1939, the most serious consequence of these ideas was the Law
for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring of July
1933, under which 220,000 individuals had already been forcibly
sterilized in Germany by the beginning of 1938 ([60]: 233).63 Asperger’s audience of physicians were well aware of
these policies, which had been widely debated in medical
circles, so they must have understood what he meant by the
following exhortation to cooperate with the regime’s
sterilization policies:
You know by what means one strives to
prevent the transmission of diseased hereditary
material—many cases that belong here are hereditary
disorders—and to promote hereditary health. We
physicians have to take on the tasks that accrue to us
in this area with full responsibility ([1]:1314).
Asperger repeated this motive of “responsible
cooperation” with Nazi race hygiene in later writings. We will
see shortly what these tasks entailed and how he handled them in
the context of his own work. In his lecture, he went on to
specify how the sterilization law should be implemented with
regard to those children who had “features opposed in nearly
every way” to the high-functioning autistic type described for
the first time in the paper:
These children are intellectually below
average (including to the degree of
feeble-mindedness)—whereby with intelligence we mean
abstract intelligence—whereas practical reason, in short
everything that has to do with instinct, including the
practical usefulness and the values of character, are
much better developed in relative terms. These cases are
important—or at least they will be as soon as the Law
for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring
comes into force here. If the physician has to take a
decision in such a case, he will not be allowed to do so
based solely on a questionnaire or the intelligence
quotient. Rather, he will base it primarily on his
knowledge of the child’s personality, taking into
account all of the child’s skills in addition to
abstract intelligence ([1]:1317).
This passage has been quoted as evidence that
Asperger tried to publicly protect his patients from forced
sterilizations ([8]:
464; more cautiously [9]: 206–7). This call for restraint is all
the more significant given the pending investigation into
Asperger’s political reliability (closed in June 1939, see
above). Why did these comments then not hurt his standing in the
eyes of the Nazi hierarchy, which came to the conclusion that he
was in conformity with Nazi race hygiene policies?
It should be noted that calling for a “holistic”
approach to children’s personalities was not unusual as such—it
was in fact characteristic of the approach at the Heilpädagogik
ward since Lazar’s days. In the ideological context of
post-Anschluss Vienna, putting Gemüt (“soul” or “character”) and “practical
intelligence” over “abstract intelligence,” far from being out
of line, corresponded with the Nazis’ overall disdain for
analytical thought, which they connoted as “Jewish.” Indeed, the
official legal commentary on the sterilization law defined
“feeble-mindedness” along similar lines ([61]: 119). The notion of
Lebensbewährung
(“probation in life”), which the sterilization courts applied in
cases with unclear heredity, also underlines how race hygiene
policy was guided by a “holistic” approach to intelligence
([62]: 124). In
1940, practical skills and “performance” became the decisive
criteria in decisions on race hygiene measures.64
It is important to note that Asperger focused on
skills, where others were primarily concerned with defects.
Overall, however, assessing “hereditary value” according to a
range of criteria rather than intelligence alone could cut both
ways for the patients; those classified as “autistic
psychopaths” may well have scored better on intelligence alone.
While Asperger’s 1938 speech should not be misconstrued as a
fundamental critique of race hygiene, it is an example of how he
managed to formulate certain concerns without violating the
boundaries of the politically acceptable.
Another of Asperger’s publications (from 1939)
captured in a nutshell the central tenets of Nazi medicine,
including its typically euphemistic language, as in “restrictive
measures”:
In the new Germany, we physicians have
assumed an abundance of new responsibilities in addition
to our old ones. To the task of helping the individual
patient is added the great obligation to promote the
health of the Volk,
which is more than the welfare of the individual. I do
not need to elaborate on the enormous dedicated work
being performed in terms of positive, supporting
measures. But we all know that we also have to carry out
restrictive measures. Just as the physician often has to
make painful incisions during the treatment of
individuals, we also have to perform incisions on the
national body [Volkskörper], out of a sense of great
responsibility: We must ensure that the diseased who
would transmit their diseases to remote generations, to
the detriment of the individual and of the Volk, are stopped from
transmitting their diseased hereditary material
([63]:943).
The potential impact of the Nazi race hygiene
paradigm on Asperger’s work was to a large extent determined by
the role inheritance was thought to play in the transmission of
personality traits and mental disorders. In this regard,
Asperger stressed the benefits of optimal environmental
conditions (such as those present at his clinic) even when
hereditary makeup (what he referred to as “constitution”) was
defective:
Therefore we are called more than others
to contribute decisively to what is probably the most
important area of research on human heredity, namely the
questions concerning the inheritance of mental traits
and mental abnormalities. We must also lead the way in
the practical tasks of eugenics, especially with regards
to the problems relating to the Law for the Prevention
of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring—and not just the
physicians, but also the special school teachers we work
with. But we also have […] opportunities few others have
to study the decisive question: ‘What influence do
optimal environmental conditions have on hereditarily
burdened individuals, what can “education in spite of
inheritance” achieve, is pedagogic work with individuals
outside the norm worth the trouble?’ ([49]:353)
Although many race hygienists were more dogmatic
in terms of a one-sided genetic determinism, Nazi ideology was
not monolithic. Asperger’s flexible approach was not only
compatible with hardline measures such as forced sterilizations
(as this passage illustrates), it was also in line with other
powerful currents such as the Hitler Youth’s paradigm of
pedagogy and leadership or the mainstream of Nazified
Heilpädagogik ([64]: 161–6, 178–92).65
In his 1944 paper on autism, Asperger reiterated
his belief that an individual’s possibilities of mental
development were primarily determined by their genetic makeup;
thus, Heilpädagogik could only hope to achieve improvements
within these predetermined parameters: “It has been firmly
established that psychopathological states are anchored in the
human constitution and are therefore inheritable; yet it has
also been established that it is vain to hope to find a clear,
simple mechanism of inheritance” ([2]: 135). While this view has stood the test
of time with regard to specific disorders such as autism, it was
seriously misguided in other cases, for example, when Asperger
diagnosed children as young as five in terms reminiscent of
Lambroso’s “born prostitutes” or “born criminals.” In cases of
sexual abuse, he often tended to blame the victims, based on the
notion of constitutionally determined patterns of behavior which
supposedly encouraged (or “seduced”) the perpetrators.66
A key element in the established narrative of
Asperger as a principled opponent of Nazi policies derives from
his repeated appeals to treat troubled children with the utmost
dedication to help them overcome their challenges ([20]: 17, [21]: 127–9). A number of
Asperger’s publications indeed convey an attitude of sympathy
towards his patients, and on several occasions, he pleaded for
tolerance and attention towards them. One of the most
significant passages in this regard is contained in his 1944
paper on autism:
We think that such individuals have their
own place in the organism of the social community, which
they fully occupy, some of them maybe in ways nobody
else could. […] Such individuals show more than others
what capacities for development and adaptation even
abnormal personalities dispose of. Often, in the course
of development, possibilities for social integration
arise which one would not have expected before. […] This
fact determines our attitude and our value judgment
towards difficult individuals of this and other kinds
and gives us the right and the obligation to stand up
for them with the whole force of our personality
([2]:135).
This is in line with his 1938 speech, in which he
also expressed his determination to side with his
patients:
But let me discuss this problem today not
from the standpoint of the Volk as a totality—in this case one
would have to primarily focus on the Law for the
Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring—but from
the standpoint of the abnormal children. How much can we
accomplish for these children shall be the question
([1]:1314).
Again the question is whether this approach put
Asperger at odds with the regime or even made him vulnerable to
reprisals, which is a central claim in the narrative of his
resistance to the Nazis. The evidence, however, does not support
this. Indeed, the fact alone that Asperger’s statements
continued to be published in journals controlled by Nazi
loyalists shows that they were not perceived as critical of the
regime. Furthermore, Asperger’s career advanced unhindered
during this period. Repeatedly vetted for promotion, he received
positive assessments regarding his political reliability, as
discussed in the “Political trajectory
after the Anschluss in 1938” section.
Most importantly, it is a misunderstanding that
therapeutic support for “abnormal” children had no place in the
Nazi state, determined as it was to exterminate mentally
disabled individuals. Due to increasing labor shortages, it
became a political and military imperative to rehabilitate as
many potential workers as possible, even those considered of
inferior hereditary quality. In the context of “euthanasia,” the
extermination of “incurable” patients—after attempts to improve
their condition had failed—coincided with an increased interest
in “active therapy.” The dichotomy of murder and therapy is
exemplified in the introduction of electroconvulsive therapy,
which was promoted by “T4,” the organization responsible for the
gassing of tens of thousands of patients, to reduce the residual
group of “incurable” patients [65].67 In this light, Asperger’s pleas to spare no effort
in educating and guiding “difficult” children were not
necessarily a challenge to Nazi pedagogy and race hygiene;
rather, this was easily compatible with the Nazi state’s aim to
control, discipline, and organize children and youths deemed
“worthy” of belonging to the Volksgemeinschaft (“people’s community”). This
was stressed by Asperger himself, who repeatedly insisted on the
productive role Heilpädagogik could play within the new Nazi
order, including in his 1938 speech:
And if we help them [the abnormal
children] with all our dedication, we also render the
best service to our Volk; not only by avoiding that they
burden the Volksgemeinschaft with their dissocial
and criminal acts, but also by trying to ensure that
they fulfill their duties as productive individuals in
the living organism of the Volk ([1]:1314).
Indeed, even the most virulent Nazis among
Asperger’s colleagues endorsed therapy for those seen as
potential assets to the state. This includes Asperger’s mentor
Franz Hamburger and also applies to Erwin Jekelius, a youth
psychiatrist trained at Hamburger’s clinic, who in 1940 became
the main organizer of the “T4” killing operation in Vienna. He
made sure that local authorities and hospitals cooperated and
that the operation ran smoothly. From June 1940 to the end of
1941, Jekelius directed the child killing facility Am
Spiegelgrund, where hundreds of disabled children were
murdered.68
Jekelius had received part of his training at the
Therapeutic Pedagogy Ward under Asperger’s direction, where he
was employed from August 1933 to February 1936 ([10]: 102, 118). The two men
maintained professional contacts during the Nazi period. In
1941, when Jekelius became the first chairman of the newly
established Viennese Association for Therapeutic Pedagogy,
Asperger represented the Pediatric Clinic along with Hamburger
([4]: 172–3). At
Vienna’s Main Health Office, where Jekelius directed a unit in
charge of “the mentally ill, psychopaths, and addicts”—a
position that he used as a cover for his activities for
“T4”—Asperger on 1 October 1940 began to work (part-time) as a
medical specialist and evaluator of children with mental
“irregularities” (Auffälligkeiten). One document in Asperger’s
personnel file suggests that in this capacity, he was attached
to Jekelius’ unit, while others place him in a different unit of
the same department, a discrepancy possibly due to disruptions
in the city administration during this period.69 In any case, the fact that Asperger was named as a
member of Jekelius’ staff suggests that he obtained the position
on Jekelius’ recommendation or at least with his consent. Due to
a lack of sources, the exact nature of Asperger’s work for the
city in this context (and of his collaboration with Jekelius)
remains unclear—with the crucial exception of the screening of
more than 200 children in a mental institution in Gugging near
Vienna, many of whom were sent to die at Jekelius’ Spiegelgrund
institution (see the “Limits of
‘educability’: Asperger and the Spiegelgrund ‘euthanasia’
facility” section).
Erwin Jekelius represents Nazi medicine in its
most inhumane extremes: a fanatical Nazi and a murderer
responsible for the deaths of thousands of patients. Had
Asperger deviated from the party line, Jekelius would certainly
have reined him in. Instead, this is what Jekelius had to say
about Asperger and his therapeutic approach:
At this opportunity, I would like to
remind you of the substantial lecture on therapeutic
pedagogy which our Dr. Asperger gave last year in this
same place. He explained in a vivid and convincing way
that especially in the Third Reich, with an abundance of
new tasks and a lack of manpower, one cannot relinquish
those who ‘stand at the margin’. He mentioned impressive
examples of former patients at the Heilpädagogik ward
who proved themselves brilliantly on the internal and
external front during the great struggle for the final
liberation of our German people. And more than one
former ‘problem child’ who today bears the Iron Cross
for valiant behavior before the enemy would probably
have gone to the dogs had one not taught him according
to therapeutic pedagogic principles how to defeat the
inner enemy ([66]:386).
To be sure, when their writings are set side by
side, there is an enormous divide between the two men in tone.
This is also apparent in the following passage, in which
Jekelius states what should be done with children not deemed
treatable with Heilpädagogik: “The idiot is sent to an asylum,
and the anti-social to a concentration camp for minors”
([66]:
385).70 This is far harsher language than Asperger ever
used, who instead emphasized empathy for “abnormal” children.
But as Jekelius’ approving nod to Asperger indicates, even he
agreed on the role of Heilpädagogik in rehabilitating troubled
children in order to turn them into productive members of the
German body politic.
This utilitarian approach, broadly accepted as the
raison d’être of Heilpädagogik, is a leitmotif throughout
Asperger’s writings during the Nazi period and beyond:
I wanted to emphasize this from the
beginning, when I talk today about our Aesculapian
obligation specifically towards the psychologically
abnormal individual, as I see this obligation. […] The
question is: is the task of caring for intellectually or
personally abnormal individuals worth our full
commitment? […] The mentioned facts show us well enough
that we often have to be very careful with the
disdainful verdict of ‘inferior value’ and potential
consequences that might follow from it. […] But if we
care for these people—and be it with painful commitment
and willing to make sacrifices—we will be able to take
at least part of them to a point where they will not be
a burden and danger to the national community, but its
productive members ([63]:944).
In the 1941 paper referred to by Jekelius,
Asperger defined the relationship between his own professional
credo and the Nazi state’s pedagogic program in even more
explicit terms:
Our time has brought revolutionary changes
in the field of education: Whereas in earlier times a
number of philosophical, political, and religious
orientations stipulated their pedagogic goals and
consequently were in competition with each other, today
National Socialism has established its pedagogic goal
and demands that it be the only valid one. As much as
this development is to be approved, we nevertheless have
to stress: This one goal, the integration into the
National Socialist state, can only be achieved with
these children by using different means. […] From
innumerable reports and visits, also from letters from
the front, from soldiers’ visits we know how many of our
former children, including very difficult cases,
entirely fulfill their duties in their professions, in
the armed forces, and in the [Nazi] party, not a few
among them in eminent positions. This is how we know
that the success of our work is worth the effort
[67].71
This paper was originally presented in September
1940 at a prominent pediatric conference in Vienna. Asperger was
one of only three speakers from Vienna. The keynote speaker was
Reich Health Leader Leonardo Conti (1900–1945).72 While this helps explain Asperger’s references to
the war effort and the party, it also demonstrates that he was
deemed trustworthy enough to represent his field in such a
prominent forum and that the positions he adopted were by no
means considered unacceptable or even controversial by the Nazi
hierarchy. On the same occasion, Werner Villinger (1887–1961),
the founding father of youth psychiatry in Nazi Germany and an
expert evaluator for the “T4” killing campaign, expressed the
dichotomy between “education” and “elimination”: “Only where
this [successful educational attempts] proves to be impossible,
a weeding out needs to take place, with permanent internment in
a work colony of sorts” ([68]: 1161).73 The complex and sometimes contradictory attitude
towards children with disabilities or other challenges is
underlined by the fact that the Hitler Youth had special
formations for the blind and the deaf ([64]: 166–75). Overall, as we
have seen, it was not in dispute that Heilpädagogik had an
important role to play in helping alleviate the acute shortage
of manpower that threatened Nazi Germany’s war effort.
The decisive question that remained was what
should happen to the residual group of children whose
disabilities were so impairing that efforts towards
rehabilitation could not be justified under the utilitarian
approach dominant at the time, and also professed by Asperger.
While Jekelius explicitly mentioned “concentration camps” (for
the rebellious) and “asylums” as a last resort (omitting the
extermination of disabled children then taking place under his
direction), Asperger chose to remain silent on this matter. This
has critical implications, not least with regard to the
relatively small subset of his patients whom he labeled as
“autistic psychopaths.”74 Some authors argue that Asperger put the spotlight
on children at what is often called the “high-functioning” end
of the spectrum, interpreting this as a tactic to protect all
children with autistic traits from race hygiene measures (e.g.,
[21]: 129,
216). This argument is problematic for several reasons.
First, the idea that Asperger tried to protect
autistic children from Nazi race hygiene cannot be easily
reconciled with the fact that he dedicated a section of his 1944
paper to the hereditary basis of the condition, insisting that
“any explanation based on exogenous factors is absurd”. While
this position anticipated later advances in autism research, the
question arises whether under the circumstances it was prudent
to put such an emphasis on heredity. Had protecting his autistic
patients been his primary goal, he could have taken a more
flexible position, one less likely to draw the attention of race
hygienists to his patients ([2]: 128–32).
Second, his prognoses for the “autistic
psychopaths” were far from universally optimistic. In his 1938
paper “The Mentally Abnormal Child,” he presented two boys. One
boy was “intelligent far beyond his age” but suffered from
mental and physical “oversensitivities” (no link to autism). The
other represented the first case of an “autistic psychopath” in
medical literature. Like the first boy, he exhibited “a contrast
between pathological and in some ways valuable traits,” but as
Asperger insisted, he suffered from a “profound disorder of the
personality.” In this article, Asperger did not highlight the
potential of “autistic psychopaths” but rather contrasted them
unfavorably with other, less impaired patients. Even if the boy
Asperger chose as an example of “autistic psychopathy” clearly
belonged to the “high-functioning” group, Asperger emphasized
that the condition varied greatly in terms of “social prognosis”
and “worthiness.” While he deemed some of the “autistic
psychopaths” capable of “great intellectual achievements,” in
other cases, “autistic originality” was deemed “bizarre,
eccentric, and useless”, with “fluid transitions towards
schizophrenia” whose “main characteristic is also autism, the
loss of any contact with the surroundings” [1]. The four boys featuring
in his better known 1944 paper also varied considerably
regarding the degree of their impairments, belying the notion
that he focused on the most promising cases in order to present
“autistic psychopathy” in a mostly favorable light. Fritz had
(for his age) outstanding abilities in mathematics, but was
incapable of attending regular school, having passed the first
three school years by homeschooling. Harro’s autistic symptoms
were less severe, but despite his good intellectual potential,
he also had great difficulties concentrating and learning in the
traditional school setting. The best hope for “autistic
psychopaths,” according to Asperger, was to find a way to
compensate for the lack of “instinctive social adaptation” via
the intellect. The problem was, however, that the “autistic
character” also occurred in the “intellectually lesser able, and
even in the severely feeble-minded” ([2]: 85–103). In the case of
Ernst, Asperger expressed “doubt whether he was particularly
smart or feeble-minded” (he struggled to keep up even in special
school). But, as Asperger insisted, there were “numerous clearly
feeble-minded children who also exhibited the unmistakable
features of the autistic psychopath” ([2]: 108). These latter cases,
according to Asperger, were often very similar to conditions
caused by organic brain damage such as birth trauma. He
illustrated this with the fourth case in his study, Hellmuth,
whom he described not as an “autistic psychopath” but as an
“autistic automaton” ([2]: 110–1).
One could argue that even though Asperger
mentioned children with impairments so severe as to exclude them
from any useful place in society, he nevertheless embellished
the overall picture of “autistic psychopathy” as far as his
scholarly standards would allow him. Indeed, he insisted that
only a small number of “autistic psychopaths,” those
additionally burdened with a “clear mental inferiority,” were
incapable of at least some degree of social integration.
Nevertheless, the argument that Asperger focused on the
better-functioning cases in order to protect all of his patients
(presumably, by deflecting attention from the less
well-functioning) is questionable given that Asperger by no
means withheld from his readers the severe impairments of some
of the boys.
Third, there is a fundamental flaw in the
assumption that highlighting the potential of some of his
patients would benefit all of them. The children at the lower
end of the spectrum did not benefit from the potential ascribed
to those on the higher end, even if they shared the overall
diagnosis of “autistic psychopathy.” Their fate did not depend
on the diagnostic label but on the individual assessment of
their skills or disabilities. If anything, the utilitarian
argument of “social worth” employed by Asperger (and by many of
his colleagues) increased the danger to those children who could
not fulfill these expectations. Focusing on the higher
functioning children did nothing to lift the boat for all of
them; those on the lower end still risked being left to drown.
Often, Heilpädagogik’s function in this context was to decide
where to draw the line.
The preference for children who could be expected
to respond positively to pedagogical intervention and the
exclusion of the “hopeless” was a feature of Heilpädagogik from
its inception in early twentieth-century Austria. It is
important to keep in mind that the mission of Asperger’s
Heilpädagogik ward was primarily to deal with “difficult”
children who caused problems that their caregivers were unable
to confront without professional help.75 Children with severe mental disabilities were
considered to fall outside the remit of Heilpädagogik since they
promised no tangible progress. At the 1935 founding meeting of
the Austrian Society of Heilpädagogik, Theodor Heller
(1869–1938), one of its most influential figures, stated:
“Curative pedagogy, however, will only attend to the educable
elements and must hardly burden itself with the care for
idiots.” The “uneducable” should be cared for in special
institutions on humanitarian grounds, by contrast to the
rationally and economically justified efforts of Heilpädagogik
for the “educable” ([69]: 8–9).76 During the Nazi period, Bildungsunfähigkeit (uneducability) became the
key criterion in the child “euthanasia” program [70].
Highlighting the potential of some patients should
not then be mistaken for the defense of all children with
disabilities. Rather, it served to point out the usefulness of
Heilpädagogik to society. Also, Asperger did not adopt this
strategy in reaction to the Nazi takeover in Austria. A 1937
paper (with the same title he would use in 1938) already used
similar arguments in support of Heilpädagogik’s mission
[71]. It is not
hard to see why in the post-Anschluss climate Asperger felt it
necessary to explain what he and his discipline had to offer to
the new political regime, by stressing his allegiance to the
fundamental principles of National Socialism and by adapting
earlier arguments of Heilpädagogik’s utilitarian mission to the
new political realities.
Overall, Asperger’s pleas to devote the best
possible care to “abnormal” children did not place him outside
the mainstream of Heilpädagogik and the nascent discipline of
youth psychiatry under National Socialism. The papers presented
to the first conference of the newly founded German Society for
Child Psychiatry and Heilpädagogik, held in Vienna in September
1940, also reveal that Asperger’s positions clearly aligned with
the opinions considered legitimate at such a representative
forum. Although some of the speakers emphasized Heilpädagogik’s
role in implementing mechanisms of race hygienic selection, the
positive aspects of helping children reach their potential
(within the limits set by their inherited constitution) also had
a prominent place. If Asperger’s writings on his patients stood
out because of their warmer tone, nothing, however, of what he
said was out of line with the officially sanctioned discourse
([72]; for
details, see also [73]).77
The adaptation of the Viennese brand of
Heilpädagogik to the new political order and its race hygiene
paradigm was facilitated by the fact that, since 1930, Hamburger
had purged the influence of currents such as psychoanalysis and
established the predominance of a purely biologistic paradigm
based on the importance of inherited “constitutional” defects
[74,
75]. Asperger,
who had begun his career under Hamburger, shared many of these
views, including a staunch opposition to psychoanalysis
[76].
Heilpädagogik, then, was not only compatible with
the Nazi state’s goal of building a national community (while
excluding “unworthy” and “racially alien” elements); there was
even an increased demand for experts willing to draw the line
between those who could be expected to become useful members of
this community and those who should be cast aside ([73]: 184). This increased
demand, together with the exclusion of Jewish doctors,78 led to additional career opportunities for Asperger,
for example, his appointment as an expert witness in May 1938 to
the Vienna Juvenile Court.79 As mentioned, in October 1940, he additionally
acquired a part-time position at the Public Health Office as the
city’s medical specialist for “abnormal children,” a function
related to Vienna’s special school system.80 In this capacity, he routinely wrote expert opinions
which are hard to reconcile with his 1974 claim not to have
reported patients to this office [3]. According to Hamburger, Asperger’s expert
opinions were regarded as the “highest authority” not only by
the youth welfare office and the youth court but also by the
National Socialist Welfare Organization (NSV).81
Public health offices in Nazi Germany
systematically collected information for a “hereditary index”
(Erbkartei) of the whole
population, designed to direct race hygiene measures against
those deemed of inferior hereditary quality.82 Staff at the Spiegelgrund “euthanasia” facility
routinely reported patients in this context.83 The records from Asperger’s ward, by contrast,
contain only a small number of such documents.84 This would indicate that Asperger was indeed
reluctant to report his patients for the “hereditary
index”—provided that the records have not been purged of
incriminating documents, which cannot be ruled out, since they
were kept at the clinic where Asperger was director from 1946 to
1949 and again from 1962 until his retirement in 1977
[77]. In some
cases, however, he demonstrably cooperated in such matters. At
least seven patient files from his ward contain correspondence
with the Public Health Office’s Department for Hereditary and
Racial Care (Erb- und
Rassenpflege), in four cases signed by Asperger
personally. There is no indication as to why the department
responsible for the “hereditary index” was involved in these
cases but not in so many other similar ones.85
A sample of 30 patients admitted both to
Asperger’s ward and to Spiegelgrund allows for a comparison of
how children were diagnosed at the two institutions. In the next
section, we will see what this comparison reveals about
Asperger’s diagnostic approach, not least with regard to his
often-claimed “pedagogical optimism” (details on the sample are
also offered there). Regarding references to heredity and race
hygiene, the result is the following: In 14 of the 30 cases, the
files contain reports suggesting a hereditary factor in the
child’s condition. In two of these cases, both Asperger and the
Spiegelgrund staff suggested a hereditary etiology. In two other
cases, Asperger included a reference to heredity in his report,
but the Spiegelgrund staff did not. In ten of the cases,
however, only the Spiegelgrund doctors referred to heredity. In
the four cases in which Asperger referred to a hereditary
factor, he did so by using the term “degenerative” (for example
ascribing to the children a “degenerative constitution” or
“degenerative personality”), without however suggesting any
eugenic measures such as sterilization.86 The doctors at Spiegelgrund were clearly more
inclined to refer to heredity, either directly as an alleged
etiological factor or indirectly by including negative
information on the child’s Sippe (kin).
Neither the Spiegelgrund files nor the case
records from Asperger’s own ward contain evidence that he ever
reported one of his patients to the Public Health Office for the
purpose of sterilization.87
These findings support Asperger’s claim of
non-cooperation with the sterilization program, though here,
too, we must allow for the possibility of files having been
purged. This raises the question whether this non-cooperation by
omission should be considered a form of resistance. It is
important to note that the sterilization program in Nazi Austria
was never implemented on a scale comparable to Nazi Germany
between 1934 and 1939 and that children were not its primary
targets. In Vienna, the Hereditary Health Court decreed a total
of 1515 sterilization cases. Although in one case a child as
young as 13 was ordered to be sterilized, 83% of victims were
older than 20 ([78]: 97, 144).88 Failure to comply with the sterilization law was
widespread at the time, and there are no indications that this
carried personal risks such as persecution by the Gestapo
([78]: 115). In
1942, the Public Health Office complained to the director of the
general hospital (to which Hamburger’s pediatric clinic
belonged) that the hospital’s clinics often failed to report
patients with hereditary conditions ([78]: 116). Also, for those
of Asperger’s patients who were admitted to the clinic, this
responsibility fell on Hamburger as the director, shielding
Asperger from—in any event unlikely—consequences.89
Crucially, only one of the surviving patient
records from Asperger’s ward contains an explicit reference to
the sterilization law; the documents are in accordance with
Asperger’s publicly stated position on sterilization, calling
for ‘responsible implementation.’ In 1940, Asperger wrote a
diagnostic opinion on Therese B., a 16-year-old former patient
whose father wanted to have her sterilized because of alleged
promiscuity. Asperger diagnosed her with psychopathy and “traits
of nymphomania,” but pointed out that strictly speaking, she did
not fall within the purview of the sterilization law, since her
behavior had in all likelihood been caused by an earlier
encephalitis, and not by a hereditary defect.90
More problematic is a report on a 15-year-old
deaf-mute boy which Asperger addressed to the Health Office’s
Department of Hereditary and Racial Care in March 1942. Under
the category “kin,” Asperger listed various cases of
deaf-muteness among Ernst’s relatives.91 Although Asperger did not explicitly refer to
sterilization, the information provided meant that the addressee
would have to initiate a sterilization procedure on the grounds
that the condition appeared to be hereditary.92 Asperger could have omitted this information without
any risk, but in this case (as in those he referred to
Spiegelgrund, analyzed in the next section), it seems that he
was willing to cooperate as long as he did not have to take
direct responsibility for the consequences.
There is one case in which documents suggest that
Asperger may have helped shield a patient from possible
persecution. In the fall of 1939, he examined Aurel I., the
14-year-old son of a civil servant, who showed “behavioral
peculiarities.” In his report, Asperger wrote that the boy would
suffer mental and physical damage if placed among a group of
children, which resulted in his exemption from school. His
family then moved him to the countryside, where he spent the war
in the care of relatives. In a 1962 letter, his sister credited
Asperger with having saved Aurel from “castration” and possibly
worse.93 Asperger wrote his report just days before the
sterilization law was introduced in Austria, an event that was
widely publicized [79]. In 2009, a Cologne art dealer (who had
bought Aurel’s estate of drawings and papers) wrote to
Asperger’s daughter speculating that Aurel, who after the war
was diagnosed with schizophrenia, might have shown autistic
traits when examined by Asperger.94 Ultimately, it is impossible to say with certainty
what happened in 1939, and to what extent the dramatic elements
of the story are a product of the years that passed before the
quoted letters were written.
What emerges from the available sources is that
Asperger’s approach to the forced sterilization program was
ambivalent. On the one hand, as mentioned, he publicly signaled
his fundamental agreement with the policy while calling for its
cautious and “responsible” implementation—which is consistent
with his overall strategy to demonstrate his willingness to
cooperate with the regime without taking hardline positions on
race hygiene. At the same time, based on his ward’s patient
records, it appears that he abstained from reporting children
for sterilization—a stance that does not seem to have put him at
odds with the Nazi authorities, given the circumscribed
implementation of the sterilization law in Austria. By the time
the first procedures under the sterilization law were carried
out in Austria in the fall of 1940, the prevention of
“hereditarily diseased offspring” could rely on another, more
radical method; with the establishment of Am Spiegelgrund in
July 1940, the child “euthanasia” program had a dedicated
killing facility in Vienna. Even if the vast majority of
Asperger’s patients did not suffer from the degree of mental
disability that the program was designed to eradicate, a number
of them were killed at Spiegelgrund. His role in this context is
the topic of the next section.
Limits of “educability”: Asperger and the Spiegelgrund
“euthanasia” facility
In his wartime publications, Asperger appears as
someone who declared his willingness to cooperate with the Nazi
state, propagated—albeit less enthusiastically than
others—elements of Nazi race hygiene, and tried to argue that
his discipline had an important role to play within the new
political order. His main argument was the ability of
Heilpädagogik to turn troubled, difficult, or “abnormal”
children into useful members of society. His professed
pedagogical optimism reached its limits, however, in children
with greater degrees of mental disability. Although in his ward
he usually dealt with more promising cases, in the course of his
manifold activities as an expert for “abnormal” children, he was
also confronted with children for whom the Nazi state had little
more in mind than discreet medicalized extermination. In this
regard, as we will see, his record was mixed.
Am Spiegelgrund was founded in July 1940 on the
premises of Vienna’s Steinhof psychiatric hospital, after
approximately 3200 patients had already been sent to the T4
killing facility in Hartheim [80]. The new facility was headed by Erwin
Jekelius, Asperger’s former colleague at the university clinic.
During Jekelius’ tenure at Spiegelgrund, the facility became a
collecting point for children who did not conform to the
regime’s criteria of “hereditary worthiness” and “racial
purity.” From 1940 to 1945, nearly 800 children perished at the
institution; many of them murdered by poisoning and other
methods [81].
On 27 June 1941, 2 months before her third
birthday, Asperger examined a girl at his clinic named Herta
Schreiber (Fig. 6). The
youngest of nine children, Herta showed signs of disturbed
mental and physical development ever since she had fallen ill
with encephalitis a few months before. Asperger’s diagnostic
report on Herta reads as follows:
×
Severe personality disorder
(post-encephalitic?): most severe motoric retardation;
erethic idiocy; seizures. At home the child must be an
unbearable burden to the mother, who has to care for
five healthy children. Permanent placement at
Spiegelgrund seems absolutely necessary.95 (Fig. 7)
×
Herta was admitted to Spiegelgrund on 1 July 1941.
On 8 August, Jekelius reported her to the Reich Committee for
the Scientific Registration of Serious Hereditary and Congenital
Illnesses, the secret organization behind child “euthanasia.” In
the form he sent to Berlin, Jekelius pointed out that Herta had
no chance of recovery but that her condition would not curtail
her life expectancy—an unacceptable combination in the eyes of
the euthanasia “experts” (Fig. 8). On 2 September, a day after her third
birthday, Herta died of pneumonia, the most common cause of
death at Spiegelgrund, which was routinely induced by the
administration of barbiturates over a longer period of
time.96
×
A note in Herta’s Spiegelgrund file indicates that
her mother not only knew what fate awaited her child at the
facility but that she accepted or even expected it:
Mother asks to be notified if the
condition of the child should get worse. The husband
should not be informed, he would be too upset. She says
in tears that she can see for herself that the child is
mentally not well. If she cannot be helped, it would be
better if she died. She would not have anything in this
world, she would only be ridiculed by others. As the
mother of so many other children she would not want that
for her, so it would be better if she died.97 (Fig. 9)
×
In the context of Nazi-ruled Vienna, it seems that
Herta’s mother, with a husband at war and six children to take
care of—one of them with a severe mental disability—had reached
a point where the possibility of having that responsibility
taken off her shoulders would seem like a relief, even if it
meant knowingly surrendering her daughter to death. In a society
permeated by contempt for “unworthy life,” the social stigma of
mental disability must have been acute—and the fear of ridicule
is indeed the main argument in the quoted document. From Herta’s
religious denomination gottgläubig (theistic), it can be inferred that
the family had left the Catholic Church under the influence of
the Nazis’ opposition to organized religion, a practice that was
usually followed only by a radical minority of Nazi sympathizers
([82]: 281–3).
To this, we have to add a lack of institutional support since
more and more homes for disabled children were dissolved and
rededicated as institutions for the “healthy” and “valuable”
children.
What took place between Herta’s mother and
Asperger before the latter decided to transfer Herta to
Spiegelgrund? Did they openly discuss the possibility of
“euthanasia”? If so, did she turn to Asperger with her mind
already made up, or was it he who offered this as a “solution”
to her? Or did he decide independently what he thought best,
based on the information she provided? From the available
documents, we cannot know with certainty. All we have to go by
is Asperger’s short note on Herta in which he calls for her
“permanent placement” at Spiegelgrund—whether this was a
conscious euphemism for murder or not, it is clear that he did
not expect Herta to return.
This case is revealing not least with respect to
Asperger’s therapeutic credo. As previously mentioned, he
repeatedly called for giving people with mental anomalies the
best available care in order to develop their potential as far
as possible. However, he never addressed the question of what
should happen in cases without hope of improvement. The children
Asperger advocated for were those who promised some future
benefit to society. We must not confuse them with the group
labeled bildungsunfähig
(uneducable), which was targeted for murder in the child
“euthanasia” program. In Herta Schreiber’s case, Asperger did
not expect any future improvement, rendering further efforts
futile. His diagnosis (albeit with a question mark) was
“post-encephalitic status.” In 1944, he published an article on
this topic, in which he wrote: “All the work done at our ward is
carried forward by a strong pedagogic optimism […]. But in the
case of these post-encephalitic personalities, we too have to
say that one in most cases has to largely capitulate”
([83]:
116).98 The transfer of Herta Schreiber to the Spiegelgrund
facility looks like such a capitulation.
Perhaps it is no coincidence that another girl who
was recommended for transferal to Spiegelgrund by Asperger
suffered from similar symptoms, also attributed to an earlier
infection. According to Asperger’s evaluation, the case of
5-year-old Elisabeth Schreiber (no apparent relation to Herta)
bears other similarities as well:
Erethic imbecility, probably on a
post-encephalitic basis. Salivation, ‘encephalitic’
affects, negativism, considerable language deficit (is
now slowly starting to speak), with relatively better
comprehension. In the family, the child is without a
doubt a hardly bearable burden, especially under their
crowded living conditions, and due to her aggressions
she endangers the small siblings. Therefore it is
understandable that the mother pushes for
institutionalization. Spiegelgrund would be the best
possibility.99 (Fig. 10)
×
According to Asperger’s notes, it seems that
Elisabeth’s mother was also unable or unwilling to take care of
her, but there was no explicit reference to the possibility of
her death. What can be said with a degree of certainty is that
she sought institutional care for her daughter and that Asperger
recommended transferal to the killing facility. However,
Elisabeth was not immediately transferred to Spiegelgrund,
probably because there was no bed available. Instead, she was
sent to another institution for children with mental defects,
where she stayed for a few months. In March 1942, she was
transferred to Spiegelgrund. One of the nurses wrote that she
was friendly and affectionate but that she spoke only one word:
“Mama.” She died of pneumonia—like Herta and so many other
children at Spiegelgrund—on 30 September 1942, shortly before
her sixth birthday.100
Was Asperger aware that Elisabeth would have
almost no chance of survival at Spiegelgrund, that he was
sending Herta to her death? Is it possible that he meant
“permanent placement” just in its literal meaning, or do we have
to consider it a euphemism for murder (comparable to “special
treatment,” “final solution,” or less obliquely, “euthanasia”)?
Significantly, the extermination of the mentally ill was never
explicitly referred to in written documents, at least not
outside the smallest circles of the initiated. For example,
Hitler’s 1939 “authorization” providing cover for the
extermination of 70,000 people in gas chambers only mentioned
the intention to “accord a merciful death” in individual,
carefully selected cases ([84]: 114). In documents not protected as
state secrets, it would have been a grave breach to even mention
the possibility of killing patients. Asperger’s expression, used
in reference to a secret killing facility, could hardly be
understood as anything other than a recommendation for
“euthanasia”—provided that he knew what was going on
there.
While the “euthanasia” killings at Spiegelgrund
(as elsewhere) were officially a secret, and parents were
routinely deceived about the true nature of the institution and
the fate awaiting their children, rumors nevertheless abounded,
and Asperger was in an exceptional position to know the truth.
After his arrest in 1945, Ernst Illing (1904–1946), Jekelius’
successor as Spiegelgrund’s director, gave the following
statement:
I point out that my clinic [Spiegelgrund]
was always overcrowded, since other clinics […],
including the University Pediatric Clinic,
transferred—or wanted to transfer—such hopeless cases,
evidently because they believed that in my clinic
euthanasia was possible on account of the mentioned
circular, while they were not allowed to practice
euthanasia. I am absolutely convinced that the directors
of the mentioned institutions were aware of euthanasia
and the mentioned circulars.101
Illing had every reason to diminish his own
responsibility, but there is further evidence for the close ties
between Spiegelgrund and the university clinic. As mentioned
before, Spiegelgrund’s founding director Jekelius had trained
under Hamburger and Asperger; Jekelius and Asperger were
colleagues at the Vienna Public Health Office, and all three men
played a leading role in the establishment of the Viennese
Association for Heilpädagogik in 1941, part of a broader attempt
to strengthen curative pedagogy’s profile in Nazi Germany as a
medical discipline in accordance with race hygiene
([4]: 172–3). In
line with Illing’s testimony, children were routinely sent from
the pediatric clinic to Spiegelgrund ([13]: 203). A number of them
were subjected to tuberculosis vaccine experiments by Asperger’s
colleague Elmar Türk. After the experiments, the children were
sent to Spiegelgrund, where they were murdered so that the
vaccine results could be compared with the pathological
findings. Staff at the pediatric clinic were not only aware of
what happened at Spiegelgrund but exploited the research
opportunities created by the murders [85].
Furthermore, knowledge of the mass murders
euphemized as “euthanasia” was not limited to insiders; it was
in fact widespread among the Viennese population. During the
so-called “T4” killing campaign, patients’ relatives staged
public protests in front of the Steinhof psychiatric hospital in
Vienna. They could not prevent approximately 3200 Steinhof
patients from being transported to the gas chamber at Hartheim,
but they took a courageous stance against the regime’s campaign
of murder.102 Rumors were so widespread that the Viennese edition
of the Völkischer
Beobachter—the Nazi Party’s daily newspaper—was
compelled to deny the killings. The article mentioned lethal
injections and even gas chambers, which shows how specific the
public’s knowledge was ([86]: 7). Anny Wödl, a Viennese nurse, had no
doubt that the transfer of her son Alfred to Spiegelgrund,
enforced in early 1941 despite her resolute resistance, would
mean his death ([87]: 298). Even abroad, the killings at
Spiegelgrund became known. In the fall of 1941, the Royal Air
Force dropped leaflets mentioning both the Steinhof hospital and
Jekelius’ name in connection with the systematic murder of
patients.103
In light of this evidence, it seems extremely
implausible that Asperger—a longtime colleague of Erwin Jekelius
and a well-connected player in his professional field—was
unaware of the activities at Spiegelgrund. When he reflected on
the Nazi period in 1974, Asperger did not mention the child
“euthanasia” program directly but claimed that he had from the
outset refused to accept the Nazis’ concept of “unworthy life”
or to participate in race hygiene measures, implicitly
acknowledging that he was aware of its ramifications
[3].
In the cases of Herta and Elisabeth, were there
alternatives to sending them to Spiegelgrund? Could he have
saved their lives? Under the circumstances, and given the
parents’ lack of support, ensuring the long-term survival of the
two children would certainly have been difficult. Facilities for
children with severe disabilities continued to exist (both
public and religious), but they were under pressure to hand over
those among their patients deemed “unworthy” of support.
Nevertheless, Asperger was under no obligation to send children
directly to the killing facility, even if they suffered from
severe disabilities. He could, without any risk to himself, have
transferred them elsewhere, and in a number of other cases, he
did just that.
Among the children who died at Spiegelgrund, there
were at least four others apart from Herta and Elisabeth who had
previously been examined by Asperger, two of them while the
Spiegelgrund “euthanasia” facility was already in operation.
Their conditions were so severe that the “euthanasia” apparatus
ultimately caught up with them, although Asperger initially had
them transferred to other institutions.104 Why did he send Herta and Elisabeth to Spiegelgrund,
but not Richard and Ulrike? While Asperger’s diagnostic report
on Richard (who was diagnosed at Spiegelgrund with “mongolism”)
is not included in the surviving records, Ulrike’s file contains
a report in which Asperger described her as “mentally extremely
retarded, severely autistic,” and as a “severe burden” at home.
Over the course of a year, he had observed a process of
“cerebral decay” which led him to recommend a home for mentally
disabled children.105 There is insufficient evidence to determine with
certainty why he decided one way or the other, although in the
cases of Herta and (less clearly) Elisabeth, the attitude of the
parents may have played a role. The evidence in these two cases
suggests that at least under the given circumstances he accepted
the killing of disabled children as a last resort. This needs to
be kept in mind when assessing Asperger’s role in a wave of
transferals to Spiegelgrund which resulted in the deaths of a
considerable number of children.
In November 1941, the authorities in Niederdonau
(the province surrounding Vienna) noticed that patients in the
children’s ward at the Gugging psychiatric hospital were not
attending school, despite not having been excused.106 An expert committee was consequently convened to
evaluate the children with regard to their “educability.”
Children evaluated as “educable neither in a special school nor
within a psychiatric institution” were to be “delivered to the
operation of Dr. Jekelius as soon as possible.”107 This formulation implies that the recipients of the
document would know who Dr. Jekelius was and that the children
deemed “uneducable” by the committee should be killed.
Due to overlapping jurisdictions (the Gugging
hospital was on Viennese territory and property of the city, but
leased to the Niederdonau administration), the committee
consisted of seven members from both provinces. Asperger was
asked to join in his role as medical advisor for Vienna’s
special school system. He was the only expert on Heilpädagogik
on the panel and the only clinician with scientific credentials
(the only other physician was the director of the Gugging mental
institution, the psychiatrist Josef Schicker, 1879–1949).
After 106 children had been transported in March
and May 1941 to the killing center in Hartheim, at the end of
that year, 220 patients remained on the ward. In the
commission’s report, dated 16 February 1942, all children of
school age were classified into various categories, with 35 (9
girls and 26 boys) labeled as “uneducable” and “unemployable,”
the keywords for “euthanasia.” The report does not include their
names, rendering it impossible to establish with certainty what
happened to them individually.108 However, there is evidence for a number of later
transferals from Gugging to Spiegelgrund with fatal
outcomes.109
On 20 May 1942, 3 months after the commission
convened in Gugging, nine boys were transferred to Spiegelgrund.
All of them were dead within a few months. By the end of that
year, another 20 children (9 girls and 11 boys) followed, only
to meet the same fate. During 1943, 12 children (8 boys and 4
girls) were taken to Spiegelgrund, none of whom
survived.110 The death rate of 100% indicates that these children
were sent to Spiegelgrund to die. The time-lapse between the
commission’s visit and some of the transferals is most likely
due to the fact that Spiegelgrund was routinely running over
capacity; it is also possible that in some cases, further
observation was considered necessary.
The commission relied on suggestions prepared by
Schicker but examined the children individually and took a
decision in each case. Among a group of 50 children whom the
director deemed unfit for school and wanted to keep in Gugging,
the committee found 18 who in their opinion warranted further
pedagogical efforts. However, regarding the 35 children placed
in the lowest category by Schicker, the commission confirmed his
verdict in every case: “The school-age children who are
uneducable, incapable of any development or occupation
[nicht bildungs- und entwicklungs-
bzw. beschäftigungsfähig] were examined and it
was determined that in none of these cases noteworthy education
results could be expected.”111 By changing the diagnosis for 18 children of the
first group, the commission improved their chances of being sent
to a special school rather than remaining at the mental
hospital, which means that they faced a lesser risk of being
selected for killing. Even so, 20 children of the original 50
ended up as “euthanasia” victims at Spiegelgrund, in addition to
the 35 children whose classification as hopeless cases slated
for “euthanasia” had been confirmed by the panel. In all, 59 of
158 children evaluated by the commission died at Spiegelgrund
before the end of the war, a death rate of 37.3%.112
Was the commission in a position to save at least
some of the children had they wanted to? Due to the limited
sources available, this question cannot be answered
conclusively. What can be shown, however, is that at least in
some cases their families wanted to take them into their care
but were not permitted to do so by the authorities. Engelbert
Deimbacher was a patient at the children’s ward when the
commission visited. He was deaf-mute from his birth in 1929. His
case file mentions hydrocephaly and severe mental disability.
Although he could not attend school, there was hope he might be
able to improve his physical abilities to perform simple tasks.
He was described as lively and sociable. Engelbert’s file
contains three letters from his father asking him to be released
into his care, the last of which was received on 15 February
1942, 3 days before the commission’s visit. The requests were
denied on all three occasions, the last under the pretext that
further examinations were necessary. On 20 May 1942, Engelbert
was transferred to Spiegelgrund, where he died on 8
November.113 In the case of Georgine Schwab (born 1934), her
grandmother repeatedly pleaded for her release, again to no
avail.114 The files contain numerous similar examples, proving
that these children were neither unwanted nor unloved.115
In this case, it seems that Asperger was a
well-functioning cog in a deadly machine. Even if the ultimate
responsibility for the deaths of these children fell on
Schicker, Gugging’s director, who signed off on the transferals,
and on the Spiegelgrund staff, the episode shows that the
authorities trusted Asperger to lend his expertise to the
selection of children for elimination.
Asperger’s diagnoses compared to those at
Spiegelgrund
In his publications, Asperger projected an image
of himself as benevolent, optimistic, and affectionate towards
the children in his care—a characterization echoed in the
biographical literature. While there is little doubt that he was
passionate about his work and genuinely cared about many of his
patients, in the context of this paper, we must ask whether this
positive attitude extended to those children who did not offer
hopes of future development or who defied attempts to educate or
discipline them. Based on the narrative promoted by
Asperger himself and others who took his cue, one would expect
to find considerable differences between his reports on troubled
children and those written by colleagues committed to the idea
of “unworthy” lives and their exclusion from the body
politic.
The records of 46 children who were examined both
by Asperger at his Heilpädagogik Ward and at Spiegelgrund allow
this to be put to the test; of these 46 children, 6 died at the
“euthanasia” facility; their cases, including those of Herta and
Elisabeth Schreiber, are discussed above. The following analysis
focuses on the remaining 40 children (12 girls, 28 boys), who
survived Spiegelgrund and were later transferred to other
institutions or discharged.116 In ten of these cases, Asperger explicitly called
for transferal to Spiegelgrund, and in four, he recommended an
“institution under curative pedagogic leadership,” which also
points to the Spiegelgrund.117 Although other instances—especially the Youth
Welfare Administration—were also involved in determining what
would happen to the children, Asperger was the leading expert in
the field, and his diagnostic reports and recommendations were
often decisive.
Unlike with Herta and Elisabeth Schreiber, in the
14 cases in question, there is no indication that Asperger
expected the children he recommended for transferal to
Spiegelgrund (explicitly or by suggestion) to be killed there.
Although the Spiegelgrund facility was established to implement
the child “euthanasia” program, it also carried out long-term
observation of children with developmental or other problems,
housed infants with less severe disabilities, and also served as
a disciplinary facility for the youth welfare system
[81]. The
conditions of these 14 children appear not to have been so
severe as to make them targets for extermination, although
sending them to Spiegelgrund nevertheless put them at
considerable risk. According to the survivors’ testimony,
children were routinely subjected to violence, including
medicalized forms of torture, and the older ones lived in fear
of being killed.118
The sample of 40 Spiegelgrund survivors previously
examined by Asperger includes 30 cases with sufficient
documentation to allow a comparison between Asperger’s
evaluations and those of his colleagues who were directly
involved in the murder of disabled children (the cases excluded
from the direct comparison due to insufficient documentation
include Friedrich K., who fit the profile of “autistic
psychopathy”119). Is there any evidence in these files that Asperger
attempted to draw a positive picture of the children in order to
minimize the risk they faced from the Nazis’ race hygiene
policies? To be sure, the direct comparison raises certain
problems: The assessments varied in length and depth, they did
not adhere to common diagnostic standards, and sometimes
considerable time passed between them so that the children’s
conditions could have evolved in the meantime, for better or for
worse. Despite these limitations, the files represent a unique
opportunity to assess Asperger’s work as a diagnostician within
the institutional and methodological context of his time and
place. Spiegelgrund, established not only for child “euthanasia”
but also for dealing with “difficult” or “asocial” children,
epitomizes the implementation of race hygiene in pediatrics,
youth psychiatry, and youth welfare. The senior staff at
Spiegelgrund (who were the authors or signatories of the medical
reports analyzed here) were committed Nazis and race hygienists.
Against this background, any systematic bias Asperger might have
had in favor of his patients would have to be visible in this
sample. And yet, out of these 30 cases, there are only 2 in
which Asperger appears to judge the children less harshly than
his peers at Spiegelgrund. In 16 or just over half of the cases,
Asperger and the diagnosticians at Spiegelgrund came to
comparable conclusions. In the remaining 12, Asperger took a
more negative and in some instances an outright disparaging view
of his patients.
Gerald St. is the second boy in the sample who
besides the aforementioned Friedrich K. was described, among
other labels, as “autistic.” Asperger saw him in July 1941, when
he was 28 months old. He diagnosed him with “intellectual
retardation” and a “disturbed personality,” and more
specifically with a “restriction of personal contact, abrupt
impulses, increased and inadequate affects, and stereotypical
movements.” In the context of a “normal children’s community,”
he considered the boy an “unbearable burden” and therefore
recommended either private care or transferal to
Spiegelgrund.120 Gerald was admitted to Spiegelgrund 8 months later,
via two other institutions. The first psychological assessment
at Spiegelgrund came to similar conclusions: “intellectually
retarded, especially with regard to language,” “impulsiveness,”
and “tendency to tantrums.” “It is very difficult to establish
contact, the child just talks in a spontaneous and autistic
manner.” The overall diagnosis was “neuropathy.”121 A year later, Heinrich Gross (1915–2005), one of the
most notorious Austrian “euthanasia” perpetrators, came to a
much more optimistic result and recommended Gerald’s release
into the care of his grandparents as Gerald, although still
behind in his overall development, had caught up regarding his
mental abilities. Gross now described the boy as emotionally
responsive, cheerful, and excitable.122 This is an example of Asperger’s reputed
“pedagogical optimism” ringing hollow in the face of what he
actually wrote in his patients’ files.
Gerald was initially described in similar terms by
Asperger and at Spiegelgrund. Leo A., by contrast, is a typical
example of the 12 out of 30 cases in which Asperger appears
harsher than his peers. Born in April 1936 to a single mother,
Leo was placed in foster care immediately after his birth. At
age four, Leo was an intelligent but difficult child. He
suffered from fits of rage and was accused of cruelty towards
animals. In November 1940, he was sent to Asperger’s ward for
observation and diagnosis. In his assessment, Asperger qualified
Leo as a “very difficult, psychopathic boy of a kind which is
not frequent among small children.” Although he was “in some
respects intellectually ahead of his age,” Asperger pointed out
the boy’s “heightened impulsiveness” and his “acts of malice
carried out with great skill.” Asperger’s recommendation
contains an expression he often used to characterize his ideal
style of education: What the boy needed was the “very sovereign
guidance” (sehr überlegene Führung) that only an institution
following the principles of Heilpädagogik (such as Spiegelgrund)
could provide.123 Leo was sent to Spiegelgrund 4 months later, after a
stay with his aunt. After 4 months of observation, Erwin
Jekelius and Heinrich Gross signed their own assessments: Leo
was “very well developed in every respect and very intelligent.”
He was found to be solitary and withdrawn in the company of
other children and easily irritated, but he caused no
difficulties. While not very helpful towards other children, no
signs of a lack of empathy (Gemütsarmut) had been observed. Jekelius’ and
Gross’ recommendation was to return the boy to his father since
they thought that the difficulties leading to his
hospitalization had been caused by his environment in foster
care. Asperger’s diagnosis of “psychopathy”—with its implication
of a constitutional, potentially lifelong condition—had no merit
in the eyes of his former collaborator Jekelius.124
In this as in other cases, Asperger’s belief in
the etiological preponderance of innate constitutional factors
(or, alternatively, organic brain damage) led him to negative
verdicts on his patients, which could easily turn into
self-fulfilling prophecies.
Asperger’s report on another 4-year-old, Karl E.
(like Leo a foster child), is similarly harsh and devoid of any
discernible positive bias when measured against the diagnoses
produced at Spiegelgrund. Asperger characterized him as “a
psychopathic infant who causes considerable pedagogic
difficulties: marked irritability […], a tendency towards
negativistic reactions and acts of malice, demanding character.”
He recommended transferal to a closed institution as the only
viable possibility for the boy, conceding that in this case, the
boy had potential thanks to his intelligence.125 After several months of observation at Spiegelgrund,
Jekelius concluded that “contrary to the assessment at the
pediatric clinic, the diagnosis of psychopathy could not be
confirmed.” The boy’s behavior was not outside the normal range:
He was “very intelligent” and “solved with ease” the questions
and puzzles put to him by the psychologist.126
The case of 16-year-old Johann K. illustrates
Asperger’s tendency to downplay the importance of the children’s
circumstances (including instances of mistreatment and abuse)
and to explain difficulties they may have experienced (or caused
to caregivers) with alleged constitutional deficiencies.
Asperger called Johann a “semi-imbecile,” although he conceded
that his achievements at school were not that bad considering he
had missed years of school because of bone tuberculosis.
Asperger saw the main problem in the boy’s “severe irritability
and lack of inhibition in every respect (severe aggressions,
sexual over-excitability, prodigality, laziness).” Provided that
he was placed under “very sovereign, inexorable guidance,”
Asperger thought it possible that Johann could be used for
unskilled labor. Left with his parents or grandparents, Asperger
considered the boy a “danger to his environment” who would
without a doubt end up “in total neglect.” He recommended
removing the boy from his family and referring him to a closed
institution.127 For unknown reasons, Johann was not sent to the
institution recommended by Asperger, but to Spiegelgrund. Ernst
Illing, Jekelius’ successor, concurred with Asperger that the
boy’s intellectual development was lacking. By contrast to
Asperger, Illing pointed to an alleged “hereditary burden” based
on his mother’s moral conduct and raised the possibility of
sterilization. And yet, Illing’s assessment of Johann’s
character remained more optimistic than Asperger’s: In his view,
the main problem had been a lack of “pedagogic encouragement”;
despite his difficult childhood, the boy suffered from “no major
abnormalities,” apart from a lack of initiative that Illing
attributed to his lengthy hospital stays. He also saw no need
for institutional care, recommending instead placement with a
foster family in one of the “rural suburbs of Vienna.”128
Another example of Asperger’s tendency to downplay
the consequences of neglect or abuse are his comments on two
sisters of 7 and 5 years, whom he saw in February 1941 because
their mother had difficulties with them. He wrote that Charlotte
(the younger one) was “more severely degenerative than her
sister,” “intellectually clearly retarded,” and “always ready
for serious mischief,” The mother, whom he characterized as “not
very intelligent and mentally slightly strange,” was in his view
not able to cope with the two girls, requiring their immediate
placement in a closed institution.129 Illing’s conclusion on Charlotte, by contrast,
stressed that she had spent the first years of her life in
institutions and in foster families and that her mother had
severely neglected her when she took custody. Where Asperger had
seen signs of “degeneration,” Illing squarely attributed
Charlotte’s difficulties (and her slight “mental retardation”)
to the neglect she had experienced, although he also pointed to
alleged hereditary deficiencies in her family.130
As mentioned, of these 30 cases, there are only 2
in which Asperger appears to have taken a more positive position
than his peers at Spiegelgrund: In November 1938, he saw
6-year-old Johann T., whom he described as “an erethic,
feeble-minded boy who recognizes no danger and who, unless
constantly supervised, due to his restless drivenness endangers
himself and his surroundings.” Asperger recommended
institutionalization at the Biedermannsdorf reformatory near
Vienna (Spiegelgrund had not been established yet).131 At Biedermannsdorf, as in similar institutions,
children were routinely subjected to emotional, physical, and
sexual violence from their peers and from staff [88]. It is hardly surprising
then that Johann did not make much progress over the next years.
In May 1941, Jekelius diagnosed the boy as “uneducable” and an
“imbecile” and demanded his transferal to Spiegelgrund. Despite
the dangerous diagnosis, Johann survived the “euthanasia”
facility, though his later fate remains unknown.132 Asperger’s diagnosis in this case appears more
lenient and optimistic, but it is possible that Johann’s state
deteriorated during the 30 months between the two diagnoses,
especially in light of the adverse conditions at
Biedermannsdorf.
The second case is similarly inconclusive. In
October 1940, Asperger saw the 16-year-old Hildegard P. because
her promiscuous lifestyle had aroused the authority’s
suspicions. Despite describing her in unflattering terms (“not
many inhibitions in sexual regards,”) he recommended releasing
Hildegard into the care of her mother but placing her under
close surveillance by the National Socialist Welfare
Organization (NSV).133 Seven weeks later, Jekelius decided to
institutionalize Hildegard on the grounds of her “sexual
depravation.” Although there are many examples in which Asperger
had no qualms committing girls to closed institutions on similar
grounds, in this case, he showed more leniency. For Hildegard,
it meant the difference between freedom and confinement to a
reformatory.134
The cases analyzed here demonstrate that Asperger
did not refrain from diagnoses such as “feeble-mindedness,”
which could entail serious dangers in the context of a youth
welfare system dominated by an eliminatory ideology towards the
weakest members of society. In one regard, however, Asperger did
show a certain restraint. As outlined in a previous section,
while the Spiegelgrund staff routinely included information on
the patients’ and their families’ “hereditary qualities” and
sometimes even raised the possibility of (forcible)
sterilization, Asperger in most cases avoided such
references.
Apart from this qualification, the sample yields
no evidence that Asperger proved more benevolent towards his
patients than his peers at Spiegelgrund when labeling children
with diagnoses that could have an enormous impact on their
future—quite the opposite. Like many of his colleagues, Asperger
had a marked tendency to separate children from their
families—which he often considered dysfunctional—and to commit
them to closed institutions. Of course, many children were
exposed to violence or neglect at home, and institutional
education in principle could have been a means of protecting
them. All too often, however, it seems that Asperger preferred
the pedagogical environment of a hierarchical institution over
the home provided by parents he considered neurotic, incapable,
or merely too “weak” in dealing with their child. In practice,
though perhaps despite his best intentions, this meant that he
regularly sent minors to institutions ripe with abuse and
violence [89].
In 1941, Asperger sent a 15-year-old boy to a
“labor education camp for work-shy youth” in Bavaria because he
hoped that strict discipline and forced labor would help
alleviate his severe hypochondriac symptoms.135 Although this case is in some respects unusual, it
illustrates how authoritarian Asperger’s approach could be. The
case records kept by his clinic are full of examples revealing
how he considered strict discipline and “sovereign guidance”
(überlegene Führung, a
signature phrase in his written reports) the answer to many of
his patients’ (and their caregivers’) troubles.136
Asperger in the post-war years
This is not the place to give a full account of
Asperger’s post-war career, which spanned more than three
decades, therefore I will limit myself to a few points that are
relevant in the context of this paper. Little is known about
Asperger’s life during the final 2 years of the war, which he
spent in the Wehrmacht. After 9 months of training and service
in Vienna and Brünn/Brno, he was sent to Croatia in December
1943 with the 392nd Infantry Division, deployed for “protection”
of the occupied territories in Yugoslavia and the fight against
“partisans.”137 The German forces’ tactics against irregular troops
in Yugoslavia included mass killings of civilians as hostages or
in reprisals, resulting in tens of thousands of deaths
([90]: 161).
Asperger briefly mentioned his war experiences in his 1974
interview:
[…] I was in the war, I was deployed in
Croatia in the anti-partisan war… I would not like to
miss any of these experiences. It is good that a man
knows how he behaves in mortal danger, with the bullets
whistling. It is also a proving ground. And a ground
where one has to care for others. It is also a great
gift from destiny that I never had to gun anybody down
[3].138
After the defeat of Nazi Germany, Asperger
returned to the Vienna University Pediatric Clinic. The
Heilpädagogik ward had sustained severe damage from a bomb
attack which also killed Viktorine Zak, Asperger’s closest
assistant [3]. On 1
September 1945, Asperger applied for the confirmation of the
Habilitation he had obtained in 1943—all such degrees awarded
during the Nazi period were made void upon liberation, pending
an inquiry into the candidate’s political background. As
mentioned, in 1938, Asperger had joined the National Socialist
Welfare Organization (NSV) and the German Labor Front (DAF) and
had applied for membership in the National Socialist German
Physicians’ League (NSDÄB).139 In contrast to party formations such as the SS or
Hitler Youth, these were considered “affiliated organizations”
of the Nazi Party, and not part of the NSDAP itself. This
distinction allowed Asperger to emerge with a clean slate under
the Austrian implementation of denazification since he had never
joined the NSDAP. He avoided the career interruptions that many
of his colleagues faced and retained his position as the head of
the Heilpädagogik ward.140 Additionally, from July 1946 to May 1949, he served
as provisional director of the pediatric clinic. In 1957, he
moved to Innsbruck, where he headed the local university
pediatric clinic until 1962 when he was formally appointed as
Chair of the Vienna Pediatric Clinic, the most prestigious
position in Austrian pediatrics.141
With respect to Austria’s Nazi past, judging from
his writings, Asperger formed part of the wall of silence
established during the first years after the war. He made a rare
reference to the Nazi period in his 1977 retirement speech from
the Vienna clinic, vaguely referring to the Germans’ “arrogance,
hubris, [and] cruel iniquities” which had “inexorably led to
war” and to “terrible suffering.” As in his 1974 interview
[3], he painted
the war in terms of his personal experiences as an existential
learning opportunity ([4]: 196, [91]: 217). According to some, Asperger in
1938 risked his life to speak out against the threat that race
hygiene ideology posed to the children in his care. In 1977,
while explicitly addressing the war in a speech summarizing his
intellectual legacy, he did not care to mention National
Socialism, its millions of victims, or even the hundreds of
children, some of them his patients, who had been killed
practically under his eyes.
Although later in his career he represented
pediatrics as a whole, Heilpädagogik remained his central
concern. At least in Austria, he dominated the field for
decades, curtailed only by competition from the emerging
discipline of youth psychiatry.142 Judging from his writings after 1945, the central
tenets of his thinking and his pedagogical approach remained
relatively unchanged. On a conceptual level, he saw his main
opponents in the representatives of psychoanalysis and related
theories focusing on dynamic psychological processes and
childhood experiences ([76]: 2–3, 272, and numerous other passages).
In principle, he also distanced himself from the genetic
determinism typical of Nazi race hygiene, at least to the extent
necessary to claim a space for his own discipline and its
therapeutic options ([76]: 55). Yet despite his often-stressed
“pedagogic optimism,” he believed that his patients were a
“selection of children with endogenous constitutional damages”
([76]: 79). It
is hardly surprising, then, that he would refer to his work as a
heroic and often hopeless fight against the terrible odds of
constitutional deficiencies of all kinds ([76]: 272–5). A typical
example of his approach is a 1952 paper on the “Psychopathology
of Young Criminals,” in which he named three groups of children
with constitutional or organic defects as particularly prone to
committing crimes: the so-called “unstable” (or “disorganized”)
type, those with encephalitis-induced brain damage, and the
“autistic, with disturbed instincts, especially those with
normal or above-average intelligence” ([92]: 31).
Despite his emphasis on heredity and constitution,
he mostly avoided explicit references to eugenics, which due to
its association with Nazi crimes had become discredited in
mainstream scientific discourse, at least in Austria and
Germany. In one passage of his textbook, he criticized the term
“unworthy of living” and stressed the need to dedicate the best
schools and the best teachers to the education of the mentally
disabled ([76]:
93). However, in a book with very few references overall, he
also quoted Otmar von Verschuer (1896–1969), one of the leading
race hygienists in Nazi Germany with ties to Josef Mengele
[93,
94], and
Johannes Lange (1891–1938), a contributor to the Nazis’ “Bible”
of race hygiene [95]), using their twin research to bolster his
views on the importance of heredity ([76]: 53–4, 140, 144, 207,
274). In his handbook on Heilpädagogik, Asperger also included
the following passage on the eugenic dangers of
“feeble-mindedness”:
Multiple studies, above all in Germany,
have shown that these families procreate in numbers
clearly above the average, especially in the cities.
[They] live without inhibitions, and rely without
scruples on public welfare to raise or help raise their
children. It is clear that this fact presents a very
serious eugenic problem, a solution to which is far
off—all the more, since the eugenic policies of the
recent past have turned out to be unacceptable from a
human standpoint ([76]:88).143
While eugenics appeared only of peripheral concern
to Asperger, the idea of an inherited “general inferiority of
the nervous system” as a common etiological basis for most
childhood disorders was of central importance to him
([76]: III,
1–3, 53–61, 272). In a number of passages, this is linked to the
concept of “degenerative stigmas”—small bodily anomalies, which
were supposed to indicate the “degenerative constitution” of
some of his patients ([76]: 84, 85, with a reference to Lombroso,
86–7, 125, 142, 194).
One troubling consequence arising from this
approach is how Asperger regarded the sexual abuse of children.
He was convinced that victims of sexual abuse shared a common
constitutional disposition and certain character traits such as
“shamelessness,” leading them to “attract” such experiences,
while children with “natural defensive forces” should be able to
“reject” them ([96]: 27).144 If a child suffered from trauma as a result of abuse
or rape, Asperger again took this as a sign of an inherent
constitutional weakness, since a “healthy personality” should be
able to “outgrow” even “brutal acts of sexual violation” without
suffering any damage in terms of psychological development
([96]: 24,
[76]: 58–60,
197, 262–3). In his textbook, the only examples offered on this
subject are cases in which the abuse was presented as a
fabrication of the child, reinforcing the impression that the
victims were always to blame—either because they were
phantasizing, if not outright lying, or because they had
“provoked” the deeds due to their constitutional predisposition
([76]: 233,
250–6).145
The case of 15-year-old Edith H. illustrates the
continuity of Asperger’s thinking on sexual abuse from the Nazi
to the post-war period. Edith was admitted to the Heilpädagogik
ward in April 1941 because she had been sexually abused by a
40-year-old man. In his report, Asperger called her
“under-developed with regard to intellect and character.” He
deplored that she lacked “moral sense” and did not show any
remorse about what had happened. He recommended placing her in
permanent welfare care (Fürsorgeerziehung), not just because of her
“severe sexual depravation” but also because of the moral danger
she allegedly posed to her environment. A few months later, in
accordance with Asperger’s recommendation, the court ordered her
forced admittance to Spiegelgrund. During her stay, according to
the physician Helene Jokl and Spiegelgrund’s director Erwin
Jekelius, she was friendly, helpful, and comradely, but also
lazy and susceptible to both positive and negative influences.
In contrast to Asperger, they considered her intelligence
average, but echoed his opinion on Edith’s “sexual depravity.”
They recommended sending her to Theresienfeld, a reformatory for
girls.146
In a similar vein, Asperger rejected the
possibility that constitutionally healthy children could suffer
from war-related trauma. Any observable symptoms were again
either due to some inborn constitutional defect or arose from
the desire to gain material advantages, such as pensions
([76]: 141,
194).147 The case of Max G. is an example of the impact this
narrow focus on a child’s alleged “constitution” could have on
their lives. In 1938, when Max was 6 years old, his family was
torn apart by the Nazis’ anti-Jewish policies. His Jewish father
was forced into a divorce and spent 5 years in a concentration
camp. With his mother, Max then moved to Znojmo, a town annexed
from Czechoslovakia after the 1938 Munich Agreement, from where
he was expelled along with the German-speaking population in
1945. At 14 years old, he was living in war-torn Vienna with his
father. In August 1946, Asperger wrote an expert opinion for the
Juvenile Criminal Court on Max, who was accused of a series of
thefts. Not a single word in his assessment referred to the fate
of the boy’s father or to the fact that as a “half-Jew” he had
himself been under threat of persecution for half his life.
While other documents in the file stressed that the boy had
finished school with good grades despite his difficult
situation, Asperger described him as “intellectually clearly
deficient.” Based on the boy’s apparent “overfamiliarity” and
“unreliability,” he diagnosed him as an “epileptoid psychopath,”
a condition he described as the opposite of “autistic
psychopathy” with respect to social behavior. In November 1946,
after Max was fired from an apprenticeship that was seen as his
last chance to prove his worth, based on Asperger’s diagnosis
and recommendation, the boy was sent to the Eggenburg
reformatory.148
As in other countries, the Austrian public has
over the last years been confronted with a wave of revelations
on the violence, abuse, and neglect pervading institutions set
up to protect children from precisely such conditions
[74,
97‐103]. The same is true for
children with disabilities, who were often kept in asylum-type
institutions where they were denied rehabilitation or therapy
and exposed to severe hospitalism [104, 105].149 In this context, a critical assessment of Asperger’s
brand of Heilpädagogik with its “pronounced dominance of
restrictive pedagogical concepts” ([74]: 613) is overdue.
Specifically, what needs to be investigated is how the ideas he
promoted of “hereditary constitutions” as the root of most
mental troubles, his bias against victims of sexual and other
abuse, his unwavering belief in the benefits of closed
educational institutions, and his emphasis on the authority of
the “genius educator”—the ideal of a towering father-figure that
he had created for himself—impacted the lives of thousands of
children who were often stigmatized with the label of
“constitutional defectiveness” on scientifically dubious grounds
and institutionalized.
Conclusions
The aim of this paper is to provide a factual basis
for the debate on Hans Asperger’s career in Vienna during the Nazi
period. The main conclusion is that the narrative of Asperger as a
principled opponent of National Socialism and a courageous defender
of his patients against Nazi “euthanasia” and other race hygiene
measures needs to be revised in light of the examined evidence. What
emerges is a much more problematic role played by this pioneer of
autism research and the namesake of Asperger’s syndrome. Kondziella,
in his 2009 paper on neurological eponyms with roots in the Nazi
period, ascribed an “ambivalent role” to Asperger, classifying him
as neither a “perpetrator” nor a “protestor” ([11]: 59). This broad
categorization150 must be re-evaluated now that we have a basis for a much
more detailed and evidence-based assessment of Asperger’s
problematic role during this dark time.
Asperger’s choices after Austria’s Anschluss to Nazi
Germany are best understood against the backdrop of his political
socialization during his early years in the Bund Neuland, an
organization combining both Catholic and Pan-German völkisch ideology. In the years before
March 1938, the Bund became a Trojan Horse for illegal Nazi
activists. While there is no evidence that Asperger actively
supported Nazism before 1938, there was a common ideological ground,
as he himself acknowledged after the war. The formative years he
spent in an organization that often acted as a bridge between
Catholic and Nazi circles help explain how Asperger could launch his
career at the Vienna Pediatric University Clinic in 1931, at a time
when its newly appointed director Franz Hamburger, a staunch Nazi,
began pushing out the clinic’s Jewish assistants and reorienting the
institution according to his worldview.
After the Anschluss, like many Austrians who had not
actively participated in the Nazi movement during the time it was
banned (1933–1938), Asperger tried to acquire political credentials
by joining a number of organizations affiliated with the Nazi Party.
Unlike his colleagues at the pediatric clinic, however, he did not
join the NSDAP or one of its paramilitary formations (such as the SA
or SS). This decision did not hurt his career; he could afford to
avoid the ideological commitment of party membership thanks to the
protection provided by his mentor Hamburger, one of the Nazi
figureheads in the Vienna Medical Faculty.
During the following years, repeated assessments of
Asperger’s political reliability show that the Nazi authorities saw
him in an increasingly positive light, including as someone willing
to go along with their ideas of race hygiene. As late as 1943/1944,
when seeking approval of his postdoctoral thesis (the text on
“autistic psychopaths” that later made him famous), he received the
Nazi hierarchy’s consent. Overall, during the years of the Nazi
regime, Asperger managed to extend his professional activities
beyond his university position, mostly within the Vienna municipal
administration and the juvenile court system. The exclusion of Jewish doctors, psychologists,
and pedagogues from their professions opened new opportunities for
those in the field who were not affected by anti-Jewish legislation
or political persecution. Apart from some initial reservations due
to his Catholic orientation, there is no evidence that the Nazi
authorities considered Asperger an opponent of their race hygiene
agenda (or to their policies more generally) or that he ever faced
reprisals such as the alleged attempts by the Gestapo to arrest him.
A plausible origin of this account is the fact that a long-time
associate of Asperger’s, Josef Feldner, saved a Jewish boy by hiding
him in his home. The way Asperger referred to this episode long
after the war suggests that Feldner’s heroic act and the risk of
discovery by the authorities made Asperger fear for himself, which
would explain his volunteering for military service.
Asperger’s own attitude towards Jews appears
ambiguous. As a member of Neuland, he at least tacitly accepted the
organization’s anti-Semitic tendencies expressed both in religious
and racist-völkisch terms. Case
records of his Jewish patients show that Asperger had an acute sense
of their religious and “racial” otherness and that anti-Semitic
stereotypes sometimes found their way into his diagnostic reports.
After the Nazi takeover in Austria, the way he pathologized some
children’s mental troubles, rather than acknowledging the reality of
the persecution they faced, suggests a certain indifference towards
their fate under the regime’s anti-Jewish policies. At the same
time, his relationships with Jewish colleagues indicate that he
separated the anti-Semitic prejudices pervading the social and
political spheres in which he was moving from his personal
relations—not an uncommon phenomenon in the history of
anti-Semitism.
After March 1938, in line with his acquisition of
political credentials by joining organizations affiliated with the
Nazi Party, he used lectures and publications to signal his
fundamental accordance with the Nazi state’s programs concerning
race hygiene and public health. At the same time, he called for the
necessary resources to take care of the troubled or “endangered”
children in need of Heilpädagogik’s support. Although these
statements deviated from the hard core of race hygiene ideology with
its inhuman devaluation of the “hereditarily inferior,” there is no
indication that they were perceived as critical of Nazi policies, as
some authors have claimed. Rather, Asperger’s ideas about
Heilpädagogik’s mission within the Nazi state, with his emphasis on
turning troubled children into useful members of the German body
politic, were shared in many circles at the time. Given that
Asperger used the same arguments after the war, there is no
indication that the utilitarian logic of social worth he used to
advocate for his patients—children considered difficult but who
sometimes had normal or even above-average intellectual
abilities—was merely a rhetorical strategy. Also, it would be a
misunderstanding to assume that the small subset of his patients he
diagnosed as “autistic psychopaths” benefited as a group from the
fact that he considered some of them of superior intelligence. Just
as with other diagnoses, everything depended on where they fell on
the spectrum of intellectual and other abilities.
The real litmus test for Heilpädagogik under National
Socialism was not how it treated the children with potential—in a
time of increasing labor shortage, it was hardly controversial that
they should be integrated into the “people’s community” and
contribute to the war effort—but those with disabilities so severe
that from a utilitarian standpoint all efforts seemed futile. Since
long before the Nazi period, Heilpädagogik had excluded children
with severe disabilities from its remit, leaving them to psychiatric
asylums or similar institutions. Overall, Heilpädagogik claimed to
be able to salvage those who could be salvaged and to know where to
draw the line.
Despite his advocacy, Asperger left the decisive
question unanswered: What should happen with those who could not be
helped by pedagogic, therapeutic, or medical means? Regarding these
so-called “uneducable” children—who faced the greatest threat from
the Nazis’ race hygiene policies—Asperger’s promises to turn his
patients into valuable members of the “national community” proved
futile.
With regard to such seemingly “hopeless cases” of
mental disability, the records of Herta and Elisabeth Schreiber
suggest that, at least under the circumstances, Asperger was willing
to accept the killing of children as a last resort. In Herta’s case,
it seems that the mother consented to Asperger’s decision to refer
her directly to Spiegelgrund. According to Elisabeth’s medical file,
her mother also pushed for institutionalization, although there is
no evidence that she knew what fate awaited her child.
Asperger’s involvement in the selection of victims for
the child “euthanasia” program includes an episode when, in 1942, he
was part of a commission tasked with the screening of more than 200
residents of a home for children with mental disabilities in Gugging
near Vienna. The commission’s mandate was to categorize the children
according to their intellectual abilities and prognoses and to
define a residual group of “uneducable” children who should be
killed at Spiegelgrund. Thirty-five children were placed in this
group and later died at the “euthanasia” facility. While Asperger
was not directly responsible for their deaths, this episode
nevertheless shows to what extent he cooperated with the regime’s
murderous policies. His role on the commission was linked to his
part-time employment at the City of Vienna’s Public Health Office,
an additional professional role he had voluntarily taken on in 1940.
Cooperation with the “euthanasia” program was by no means obligatory
since the operation was illegal even by the standards of Nazi
Germany.
The great majority of Asperger’s patients, however,
was not threatened by the child “euthanasia” program—they were not
mentally disabled, but simply considered “abnormal” or “difficult”
in some way. The diagnostic labels they received at Asperger’s
clinic, while not life-threatening, nevertheless carried heavy
consequences for them. Asperger’s and his colleagues’ opinions
determined to a large extent whether a child would be taken from
their family and put into foster care or even sent to a
reformatory—institutions that were rife with abuse. A comparison
between Asperger’s diagnostic practices and those of his peers at
Spiegelgrund (regarding, it should be noted, a group with more
severe difficulties than Asperger’s average patients) reveals that
Asperger’s reports on these children were in many cases harsher in
how he described their intellectual abilities, their character, and
their future potential than those written at Spiegelgrund. These
documents do not support Asperger’s self-professed “pedagogic
optimism” or his alleged benevolence towards his patients—quite the
opposite.
On the other hand, he appears to have been less
inclined to directly invoke the possibility of hereditary defects,
which could have justified interventions such as forced
sterilization. The case records from his ward contain very few
references to the sterilization program or other race hygiene
measures, suggesting that he was reluctant to report his patients to
the authorities for these specific purposes. However, the fact that
in some cases he did provide information to the authorities tasked
with the implementation of race hygiene suggests that he did not
fundamentally oppose these policies. This is also in line with his
public comments on the sterilization law, in which he argued for its
necessity, but called for “responsible implementation.” Overall, the
importance of this point should not be overstated because the
sterilization law in Austria was implemented much later, and on a
smaller scale than in Germany, many doctors and hospitals neglected
to report their patients without any consequences, and children were
not the main focus of the program. There is no evidence that
Asperger deviated from the official position of the Nazi state on
sterilization, which in this case had decided—at least in principle,
and more so in Austria than in Germany—to institute mechanisms of
due process for its implementation.
After the war, on the few occasions when Asperger
publicly commented on National Socialism, he vaguely criticized
“excesses” or moral failings, but did not address the reality of
persecution, violence, and destruction wrought by the Nazi regime,
especially against the Jewish population. In this unwillingness to
deal with the past, he was typical of large segments of Austrian
post-war society. In his professional field of Heilpädagogik, which
he came to dominate during the three decades after World War II,
this had detrimental consequences, as children from difficult
backgrounds continued to be labeled as “constitutionally defective”
and to be sent to closed educational institutions where abuse was
rampant [97,
98].
An overall appraisal of Asperger’s place in the
history of youth psychiatry and Heilpädagogik and as a pioneer of
autism research will have to go beyond the focus of this paper,
which despite the importance of the Nazi period for understanding
Asperger’s life and work cannot replace a long due biography.
Regarding Asperger’s contributions to autism research, there is no
evidence to consider them tainted by his problematic role during
National Socialism.151 They are, nevertheless, inseparable from the historical
context in which they were first formulated, and which I hope to
have shed some new light on. The fate of “Asperger’s syndrome” will
probably be determined by considerations other than the problematic
historical circumstances of its first description—these should not,
in any case, lead to its purge from the medical lexicon. Rather, it
should be seen as an opportunity to foster awareness of the
concept’s troubled origins.
Acknowledgements
My special thanks go to Prof. Ernst Berger, Prof. Wolfgang Neugebauer, Prof. William Seidelman, John Donvan, Caren Zucker, and
the three anonymous reviewers for Molecular Autism who read the draft manuscript and provided invaluable comments and helpful information. To John Donvan and
Caren Zucker, I am additionally indebted for reporting on my
research in their book In a Different Key: The Story of Autism. Roxane Sousek, Jan Tuczek, Marion Zingler, and Gertrude Czipke helped with the archival
research. Prof. Arnold Pollak (as director of the Vienna Pediatric
University Clinic) supported my research in its early stages and
provided me with the opportunity to present the first results to a
wider audience in 2010. James Harris, professor of developmental
neuropsychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine,
was very generous with his time in explaining to me the differences
between Hans Asperger’s “autistic psychopathy” and Leo Kanner’s
“early infantile autism,” although my conclusions regarding the
question of priority in the “discovery” of autism ultimately did not
make it into this paper.
I also thank the Vienna Municipal and Provincial Archives, as well as all the other archives that provided the source materials
used in this paper.
To Colin Phillips (Faculty of English, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan) and Tim Corbett, I am grateful for proofreading
the text.
Regarding the illustrations used in this article, Figs. 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10 are scans of archival materials held at the Municipal and Provincial Archives of Vienna, reproduced with
permission from the copyright holder. Figure 5 is held by the Vienna University Archives, which allow reproduction for scholarly purposes. In the
case of Fig. 2, efforts to trace the copyright holders have been unsuccessful, but the journal
and author would be happy to hear from them; all illustrations have
been used without financial interest.
Funding
Research for this article was supported with funding by the City of Vienna, Department for Culture and
Science, and for the section on the post-war period by the
National Fund of the Republic of Austria for Victims of National
Socialism and the Future Fund of the Republic of Austria.
Availability of data and materials
All the referenced archival documents are available at the public archives cited.
Author’s contributions
Herwig Czech is the sole author. The author read and approved the final manuscript.
Author’s information
Herwig Czech, PhD, Institutional address: Medical University of Vienna, Ethics, Collections and History of
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In 1998, Schopler used Asperger’s ties to the
German Youth Movement to suggest a bias in Asperger’s
original sample in order to undermine his work on autism
([106]:
387). The significance of the Youth Movement in shaping
Asperger’s political and ideological orientation is analyzed
in the “Asperger’s political background before 1938”
section; there is no verifiable connection to the
composition of Asperger’s patient population,
however.
Uta Frith’s translation deviates from the
original in at least two respects: She omitted the “general
and somewhat discursive” introduction and chose to bring
Asperger’s language “into line with current terminology,”
using “autism” and “autistic personality disorder” where
Asperger had written “autistic psychopaths” or just
“personality disorder” ([7]: 37). For example, in the description
of Hellmuth, Asperger’s “die ganze Persönlichkeitsstörung,
die hier besteht” in the translation becomes “his autism”
([7]: 67;
[2]: 111).
Frith also changed the title of the paper, replacing
“autistic psychopaths” with “autistic psychopathy.” These
semantic shifts are of little consequence for most readers,
but they compromise the reliability of the translation for a
historical analysis of the early evolution of the autism
concept, for which the influence of Eugen Bleuler's work on
Asperger was central.
One of the passages quoted by Gröger to support
the claim of Asperger’s “critical, differentiated attitude”
is ([2]: 128),
where Asperger asserts that autism does not follow a simple
hereditary pattern. For a critical discussion of this and
other arguments quoted in this literature review, see the
“The best service to our Volk: Asperger and Nazi race hygiene”
section, in which I analyze Asperger’s stance on race
hygiene.
The source cited as evidence, an online
publication by Colin Müller, accessed on 4 July 2006, is no
longer available. A text by Müller under the same title
available at http://autismus-kultur.de/autismus/geschichte/hans-asperger.html seems to have been changed, as it contains no
reference to Asperger’s alleged protection of children
(accessed 5 July 2017).
Johns Hopkins University Library holds the
journal in which Asperger published his 1938 paper, covering
the years 1888 to 1940 (and then again from 1947), https://catalyst.library.jhu.edu/catalog/bib_13574 (accessed 28 July 2016). The 1938 volume has
a notation on the back cover that the copy was indeed
received in 1938. Personal correspondence with Daniel Bell
(Welch Medical Library, Johns Hopkins University), 1 August
2016. For a defense of Kanner’s record, see [107]. For an
interesting (if in some elements speculative) discussion of
Frankl’s role in the history of autism, see [108].
I decided to share results of my work with the
authors after meeting with John Donvan in September 2014 in
Washington, D.C. He had contacted me after discovering my
work via reports in Austrian media [109]. To his credit,
Silberman quotes the new evidence against Asperger in the
recent editions of his book.
Municipal and Provincial Archives Vienna
(WStLA), 1.3.2.209.1.A47, Kinderklinik; Heilpädagogische
Station: Krankengeschichten. The files were found at the
pediatric clinic and transferred to the archive in 2004
[77].
In 1935, an American visitor described the
ward as “unique” and “the only one of its kind in
Europe.” He was struck above all by the methodological
and theoretical eclecticism and “an appreciable absence
of what are ordinarily regarded as rigid methods,
apparatus, statistics, formulae and slogans,” a “highly
subjective approach” which in his eyes set the clinic
apart from contemporary scientific standards
([110]: 266, 274). The paper was written
before Asperger took over the ward in May 1935, and it
provides a vivid description of the unusual methods that
were part of Lazar’s legacy.
The second one would appear in 1937
[71]
(not to be confused with the paper of the same title he
published in 1938, in which he first described a case of
“autistic psychopathy” [1]).
DÖW 6217, Liste von Gelehrten
österreichischen Ursprungs in den Vereinigten Staaten,
1958; ([22]: 87). Frankl obtained his medical
degree in 1922 and joined the Vienna Medical Chamber in
1924 (WStLA, 1.3.2.212.K1 Ärzte: Georg Frankl); it is
unknown what he did between 1922 and 1927. Frankl’s
publications show that he was an established scholar of
Heilpädagogik before Asperger (e.g., [111‐116]).
A list of scholars of Austrian origin
compiled after the war by Austrian authorities lists him
as “George Frankl, b. 1897; Child Psychiatrist, Kansas
Univ. Medical Center, Kansas City.” DÖW 6217, Liste von
Gelehrten österreichischen Ursprungs in den Vereinigten
Staaten, 1958.
“Anni Frankl, born 25 April 1897; Asst.
Prof. of Psychology; University of Kansas, Lawrence,
Kansas.” DÖW 6217, Liste von Gelehrten österreichischen
Ursprungs in den Vereinigten Staaten, 1958.
Asperger in his later years suggested that
he was a direct successor to Erwin Lazar, while in
reality, it was Bruck who introduced him to the
therapeutic pedagogy as it was practiced at the Viennese
clinic ([4]:
118–9).
Since he never joined the NSDAP, in 1945,
Asperger was considered politically “not incriminated”
by the Austrian authorities and not affected by
denazification measures. For details, see the “Asperger
in the post-war years” section.
Eppinger commited suicide in 1946,
presumably because he feared being indicted in Nuremberg
for his involvement in medical experiments at the Dachau
concentration camp [119]. Asperger rarely published with
co-authors; between 1930 and 1952, apart from Risak, he
collaborated with Josef Feldner (whom he considered his
teacher at the clinic) and three colleagues from the
circle of Hamburger’s assistants.
Much less is known about the group of
trainee doctors and assistants (before obtaining their
Habilitation), such as Frankl and Asperger. It is
unknown if any Jewish assistants remained after Frankl’s
departure in 1937.
Asperger joined the CDSB in 1921 or 1922:
Michael Hubenstorf, Hans Asperger–Biography (unpublished
manuscript). In his 1974 interview, Asperger described
how the Bund influenced his experience of puberty, which
also points to the early 1920s. Overall, his account of
the Bund was a-political.
Taras Borodajkewycz, whose anti-Semitic
remarks in 1965 triggered an affair regarding persistent
(neo-)Nazi sentiments in Austria, had been another
prominent Nazi-Catholic “bridge-builder” with close ties
to Neuland ([34]: 207–8).
One example, “Metropolitan civilization was
to 80% a Jewish product, and its power over Germany was
nearly absolute. This state of affairs had to be ended
in a quick and radical way.” ([120]: 93)
WStLA, 1.3.2.202, Personalakt Hans
Asperger, Fragebogen, 7 Oct. 1940. Another document
refers to Asperger’s membership in the Vaterländische
Front (Fatherland Front, since 1934), the single party
of the Austrofascist regime that governed Austria from
1933/34 to 1938. Since membership was obligatory for
public employees, however, this is not a reliable
indicator of political sympathies.
One of these common elements was
anti-Semitism, in its religious or racist version. The
few available documents on Asperger’s attitude towards
Jews (including Jewish patients) are analyzed in the
“Asperger’s Jewish
patients” section.
In German, the passage reads: “Die
nationalsozialistische Zeit kam, wobei es aus meinem
bisherigen Leben klar war, dass man wohl mit vielen
sagen wir nationalen in Anführungszeichen Dingen mitkam,
aber nicht mit den Unmenschlichkeiten.” Here as
elsewhere in this paper, the translation reflects
Asperger’s often convoluted and ambiguous style in order
to allow readers to form their own opinion.
Private Archive Maria Asperger Felder, Hans
Asperger, travel diary, spring 1934. Cited in
[10]:103. I asked Asperger Felder for any
relevant documents from her father (particularly, any
evidence for his alleged troubles with the regime), but
she declined, citing fears that Asperger’s statements
from the period might be misconstrued (personal
correspondence with the author, 29 January 2017).
The entire interview lasts 50 min,
3.5 of which are dedicated to the Nazi period and
World War II. The translation is quoted from
[20]:
18. The passage of his inaugural speech reads:
“The connection we had formed during numerous
‘peripatetic’ conversations was so strong that he
[Hamburger] felt impelled to save me twice from
being arrested by the Gestapo with personal
commitment and risking considerable danger to
himself, although he knew very well that my
ideological and political convictions ran counter
to his own. I will not forget this!”
([48]: 937; translation by the
author). As far as can be inferred from the
written record, Hamburger after 1945 never used
this alleged episode in his defense, although he
faced considerable pressure due to his Nazi past.
After Hamburg’s death in 1954, Asperger abstained
from writing an obituary for the man who
supposedly saved him twice. 1962 is the first
known mention of the alleged Gestapo episode and
the only one where Asperger explicitly speaks of
the possibility of arrest.
On 18 August 1939, the Reich Ministry of
the Interior ordered the compulsory registration of
“malformed etc. children.” Notifications were collected
by the public health offices and forwarded to the Reich
Committee tasked with the implementation of the child
“euthanasia” program: WStLA, 1.3.2.213.A1.155.150.30b,c,
RdErl.d.RMdI. IVb 3.088/39-1079/Mi, 18 August 1939.
Under the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily
Diseased Offspring of July 1933, specially created
Hereditary Health Courts could mandate sterilization in
case of one of the following diagnoses: congenital
feeblemindedness, schizophrenia, manic-depressive
disorders, hereditary epilepsy, Huntington’s chorea,
hereditary deafness or blindness, severe physical
deformations, and severe alcoholism [61].
WStLA, 1.3.2.202, Personalakt Hans
Asperger, Geheime Staatspolizei, Staatspolizeileitstelle
Wien to Personalamt Wiener Gemeindeverwaltung, 9
November 1940.
We would additionally have to explain why
Franz Hamburger also kept silent over an episode that
could have helped his reputation, which after the war
was badly damaged by his heavy Nazi involvement.
Wolfgang Neugebauer, one of the leading historians of
National Socialism in Austria, considers the Gestapo
episode a complete fabrication (personal correspondence
with the author, 2 December 2016).
Hansi Busztin, Eitelkeit, undated
[unpublished manuscript, mid to late 1980s]. Personal
correspondence with Anna Goldenberg (Hans Busztin’s
granddaughter), 22 January 2017.
In Vienna, 31.4% of those physicians
who remained after the exclusion of all Jews from the
profession joined the Nazi party, but only 17.6% were
also members of the Ärztebund. In all of Austria (no numbers
available for Vienna only), a further 8.5% became
Ärztebund candidates like Asperger: Hubenstorf M. Nazi
Doctors in Vienna (paper given at the conference
“Austrian Physicians and National Socialism,” Vienna, 16
April 2015).
ÖStA, AdR, Gauakt 36055 Hans Asperger,
Kreisleitung I. der NSDAP Wien to Ortsgruppenleiter,
Fragebogen zur politischen Beurteilung, 6 December 1938
(filled in and signed on 4 and 23 January 1939).
WStLA, 1.3.2.209.1.A47, Kinderklinik;
Heilpädagogische Station: Krankengeschichten 1938,
Alfred S.; 1.3.2.209.1.A57, Psychiatrie:
Krankengeschichten: Männer, Alfred S. According to
Austrian data protection laws, in many cases (such as
documents from public archives), full names can only be
published if the person in question is confirmed
dead.
WStLA, 1.3.2.209.1.A47, Kinderklinik;
Heilpädagogische Station: Krankengeschichten 1938, Ivo
P. As in many other cases after March 1938, Asperger
closed his report on Ivo with the salutation “Heil
Hitler.” Asperger exhibited a similar detachment in many
of his recommendations for the transferal of children to
Spiegelgrund, to which he referred as though to a normal
pedagogical institution, despite its function as a
killing facility. For an analysis of these transferals,
see the “Limits of ‘educability’: Asperger and the
Spiegelgrund ‘euthanasia’ facility” and “Asperger’s
diagnoses compared to those at Spiegelgrund” sections.
Ivo P. was not sent to a “normal” home, as Asperger had
recommended, but to an institution for “non-Aryan”
children. His trace in the youth welfare office’s
records ends in 1943: 1.3.2.207.A6, KÜST-Kartei, Ivo
P.
WStLA, 1.3.2.209.1.A47, Kinderklinik;
Heilpädagogische Station: Krankengeschichten 1939, Lizzy
Hofbauer. In February 1941, she was a patient at the
Vienna Jewish Hospital on the ward of Viktor Frankl
(1905–1997), who after the war would rise to worldwide
fame as the author of the best-selling book Man’s Search for Meaning
[121]
and as the creator of logotherapy and existential
analysis. Citing “lack of space,” Frankl wrote to Otto
Pötzl (1877–1962) to have Lizzy transferred to the
latter’s Psychiatric-Neurological University Clinic,
from where she was sent to Steinhof Psychiatric
Hospital. Ten days after Frankl’s letter, Lizzy was put
on a transport to the extermination center Hartheim near
Linz, run by the “T4” euthanasia program: WStLA,
1.3.2.209.1.A56, Krankengeschichte Lizzy Hofbauer;
WStLA, 1.3.2.209.2.B5, Standesprotokoll 1941. This case
stands in contrast to Frankl’s later claim that Pötzl
and himself had worked together to transfer Jewish
patients from Pötzl’s Psychiatric University Clinic to
the Jewish hospital in order to save them from
“euthanasia” ([122]: 60–1).
WStLA, 1.3.2.212.A7/7, “Richtlinien für
die Beurteilung der Erbgesundheit,” circular of the
Reich Minister of the Interior (18 July 1940)-IV b
1446/40-1072c.
The author also shows how educators
frequently tried to improve their professional standing
by stressing the potential of their own clientele, often
at the expense of other groups labeled as farther down
the value hierarchy (a strategy he calls “demarcation
towards below”). On the accommodation of Heilpädagogik
as a whole with the Nazi regime, see above.
WStLA, 1.3.2.209.1.A47, Kinderklinik;
Heilpädagogische Station: Krankengeschichten, e.g., case
histories Elfriede P. (1935), who according to Asperger
had shown a suspicious “interest” when sexually abused
at age 5, or Kurt K. (1936), whom Asperger labeled an
“unstable criminal” at the age of 12, see also the
“Asperger in the post-war years” section.
This view has recently been challenged on
the grounds that the adoption of electroconvulsive
therapy in Nazi Germany was in fact slower than
previously assumed [124, 125]. My argument in this context,
however, is based on the interest the “T4” organization
took in the issue, which is not in dispute.
In 1941, Jekelius fell out of favor with
Hitler because of an affair with his sister Paula
Hitler, who lived in Vienna. Jekelius was drafted into
the army and sent to the front. After the war, Jekelius
was arrested and put on trial by the Soviets. He died in
a Moscow prison in 1952. Ministry of State Security of
the USSR, Interrogation transcript with inmate Erwin
Jekelius, 9 July 1948 (copy and German translation in
DÖW 51401). For more details on Jekelius, see
[13].
The “Action T4” was stopped in August 1941 after
protests from victims’ relatives and the churches.
Nevertheless, in many psychiatric hospitals, patients
continued to be killed until 1945 by means of
starvation, neglect, and frequently also by more direct
means such as poisoning or electric shock [80, 126].
Jekelius did not explicitly mention the
“euthanasia” killings—their existence was a state
secret—but the meaning would have been clear to
professional insiders (for more on how the knowledge of
the killings spread among the population, see the
“Limits of ‘educability’: Asperger and the Spiegelgrund
‘euthanasia’ facility” section). In 1942, the
Spiegelgrund “euthanasia” clinic was renamed and for a
period had the term “curative pedagogy” in its official
designation—an indication that the discipline, far from
being under threat from the regime, at least for a time
was actually gaining ground; WStLA, 1.3.2.209.A1,
Anstaltenamt, Normalien des Anstaltenamtes der
Hauptabteilung V, A Nr. 500, 23 November 1942.
In this text, Asperger refers to
children “whose abnormity is not of a type that
would call for sterilization, who would socially
fail without our understanding and guiding
assistance, but who with this help are able to
occupy their place in the large organism of our
people.” [“Mein Augenmerk soll aber heute vor
allem auf die gerichtet sein, deren Abnormität
nicht von der Art ist, daß eine Sterilisierung in
Frage käme, die aber auch ohne unsere verstehende
und führende Hilfe sozial scheitern würden, mit
dieser Hilfe aber ihren Platz in dem großen
Organismus des Volkes ausfüllen können.”] These
children had little to do with those targeted for
child ‘euthanasia’ or forced sterilization. Other
examples for Asperger’s utilitarian argumentation
in favor of Heilpädagogik are to be found in
([63]:946) or ([2]:135). Arguing
that children with abnormalities needed special
assistance in order to become useful members of
society (including the military) was a common
strategy of professionals in Heilpädagogik and
related fields during National Socialism, see for
example ([64]:178–92).
WStLA, 1.3.2.213.A1.158.160.30,
Tagesordnung der vom 31. August bis 4. September 1940 in
Wien stattfindenden 47. Ordentlichen Tagung der
Deutschen Gesellschaft für Kinderheilkunde. Conti hanged
himself in 1945 in a prison cell in Nuremberg.
At the conference, the German Association
for Youth Psychiatry and Curative Pedagogy was
established, additional proof that the latter discipline
was not controversial in the eyes of the regime
[127].
For the proceedings of the 1940 Vienna conference, see
[72].
Between 1950 and 1986, 6459 children were
admitted to the Heilpädagogik ward; of these, 228 (3.5%)
were diagnosed with autistic spectrum disorders (74
“autistic psychopaths,” 83 cases of early infantile
autism, 71 cases with autistic features) ([128]: 293).
The patient registry of Asperger’s ward
contains information on close to 2700 children admitted
between 1935 and 1949. The most common reason for
admission was “education problems” (Erziehungsschwierigkeiten):
WStLA, 209.1.B1018 (prov.), Kinderklinik, Index
1921–1964.
Heller’s speech also contained powerful
arguments against the forced sterilization program that
was already underway in Germany. Due to his Jewish
background, Heller became an early victim of Nazi
persecution after the Anschluss. He died in December
1938, months after a suicide attempt he never recovered
from. His wife and daughter were later deported and
killed in Riga [129]. Dementia infantilis Heller (in English:
Heller’s syndrome, now better known as childhood
disintegrative disorder) was named after him.
In Vienna, 96 of approximately 110
pediatricians were considered Jewish according to Nazi
racial legislation and lost their livelihoods, their
homes, and in at least 12 cases their lives
([130]: 756).
WStLA, 1.3.2.202, Personalakt Hans
Asperger, Personalamt to Leiter Personalamt, 9 November
1940; Gemeindeverwaltung der Stadt Wien to Hans
Asperger, 12 November 1940. Asperger had worked
part-time for the city’s child welfare program in
addition to his position at the Pediatric University
Clinic since 1936.
UAW, MED PA 17, Personalakt Hans Asperger,
Prof. Franz Hamburger, Referaterstattung zur
Habilitationsarbeit des Dr. Hans Asperger, 28 December
1942. After 1938, the NSV took over numerous children’s
homes; racially or politically “undesirable” children
were removed from these institutions and concentrated in
facilities such as Spiegelgrund: WStLA, 1.3.2.212.A7,
Parville to Vellguth et al., 23 June 1941; Erlass
Vellguth, 5 July 1942.
In Vienna, information on more than
767,000 individuals was collected in this context. For
details on this so-called erbbiologische Bestandsaufnahme
(hereditary inventory), see [131].
WStLA, 1.3.2.209.1.A47, Kinderklinik;
Heilpädagogische Station: Krankengeschichten 1912–1944,
case histories Gertrude S., Hildegard S., Helmuth R.,
Theodor M., Eduard G. (1940 and 1941), Elfriede V.
(filed under 1932, documents from 1942), and Ernst T.
(filed under 1935, documents from 1942). The
Heilpädagogik ward mentioned to the Department of
Hereditary and Racial Hygiene that Ernst T.’s father was
Jewish, information that put the child in considerable
danger. His fate is unknown.
WStLA, 1.3.2.209.10, Nervenklinik für
Kinder, Krankengeschichten: überlebende Mädchen und
Knaben 1941–1945, Adolf R., Otto S., Karl S., Charlotte
H. The terms “degenerative” and “degeneration,” unlike
today, clearly referred to negative hereditary traits,
in the same sense as the now historic German term
Entartung, see
([132]: 786–7).
The 1699 surviving Vienna records of
initiated sterilization procedures show the following
age distribution: 13 years, 1 case; 14 years, 5;
15 years, 22; 16 years, 31; 17 years, 44; 18 years, 76
(WStLA, 2.3.15.A1.1-3, Namensindex, Claudia
Spring).
WStLA, 1.3.2.209.1.A47, Kinderklinik;
Heilpädagogische Station: Krankengeschichten 1912–1944,
case history Ernst M., 1930, Wiener Kinderklinik to
Hauptgesundheitsamt, Erb- und Rassenpflege, 2 March
1942.
DÖW 51983, Stadtschulrat für Wien to
Stephan I., 22 December 1939; Rosalia I. to Leo
Navratil, 7 January 1962; Susanne Zander to Maria
Asperger-Felder, 16 October 2009 (I thank Kathrin
Hippler for these documents).
WStLA, 1.3.2.209.10, Nervenklinik
für Kinder, Krankengeschichten: verstorbene
Mädchen und Knaben 1940–1945, Krankengeschichte
Herta Schreiber, Heilpädagogische Abteilung der
Universitäts-Kinderklinik Wien, Befund Herta
Schreiber, 27 June 1941, gez. Dr. Asperger.
Overall, files pertaining to 562 out of a total of
789 victims have been preserved.
WStLA, 1.3.2.209.10, Nervenklinik für
Kinder, Krankengeschichten: verstorbene Mädchen und
Knaben 1940–1945, Krankengeschichte Herta Schreiber.
Together with hundreds of body parts from other children
killed at Spiegelgrund, Herta’s brain was preserved and
used for research until decades after the war. The human
remains were buried in 2002 in Vienna (cf. [85]).
WStLA, 1.3.2.209.10, Nervenklinik
für Kinder, Krankengeschichten: verstorbene
Mädchen und Knaben 1940–1945, Krankengeschichte
Herta Schreiber, Einlagebogen, 13 July 1941, no
signature.
The infamous “euthanasia” propaganda film
Ich klage an (I
Accuse) in a subplot uses a girl with
encephalitis-induced brain damage to justify the killing
of mentally disabled children.
WStLA, 1.3.2.209.10, Nervenklinik
für Kinder, Krankengeschichten: verstorbene
Mädchen und Knaben 1940–1945, Krankengeschichte
Elisabeth Schreiber (born 9 October 1936),
Abschrift des Gutachtens der Univ. Kinderklinik
Wien, 27 October 1941, Dr. Asperger.
Ministerium für Staatssicherheit der
UdSSR, Verhörprotokoll des Inhaftierten Erwin Jekelius,
9 July 1948, Blatt 48/11f. (copy and translation in DÖW
51401), also ([134]: 208–9).
Not all the files are preserved, and the
surviving ones may not be complete. In a sample of 76
files concerning children who died at Spiegelgrund or,
in a few cases, at Gugging, 21 contain correspondence
with parents. In 6 of these (including the ones quoted
above), the parents had asked to take the children into
their care (NÖLA, Heil- und Pflegeanstalt Gugging,
Krankengeschichten der Kinderanstalt).
The 30 cases in the sample with detailed
documentation: WStLA, 1.3.2.209.10.A1 (Spiegelgrund),
Krankengeschichten: überlebende Knaben und Mädchen
1941–1945, Leo A., Karl E., Walter G., Arnold H., Alfred
H., Johann K., Franz K., Gottfried K., Rudolf N., Roman
R., Johann R., Adolf R., Josef R., Otto S., Karl S.,
Gerald St., Rudolf St., Richard S., Johann T., Leopold
V., Erich We., Erich Wi., Charlotte H., Edith H., Lucia
K., Edith M., Charlotte M., Hildegard P., Helene P.,
Charlotte R. The 10 cases excluded from the direct
comparison between Spiegelgrund and Asperger’s ward due
to insufficient documentation (but included in the
sample of 40): Anton R., Walter S., Erwin T., Mathilde
H., Herta P., Margarete Schw., Margarethe Sch.,
Friedrich K., Theodor P. and Robert Sch.; the last three
belong to WStLA, 1.3.2.209.1.A47, Kinderklinik;
Heilpädagogische Station: Krankengeschichten.
As mentioned, Spiegelgrund’s first
director had trained at the Heilpädagogik ward;
moreover, Spiegelgrund was the only institution in the
area that at least for a time in 1942 had the term
“Heilpädagogik” in its name ([13]: 201).
Friedrich K. was just under 8 years old
when in March 1942 Asperger diagnosed him with an
“autistic personality” and a “severe psychopathic
state”; according to Asperger, the boy was
“intellectually low-ranking” but sometimes “surprised
with good performances in some areas.” Due to his
“irresponsible” and unmotivated “compulsive activity”
and his “substantial mental abnormality,” Asperger
considered the Spiegelgrund institution the only
suitable option: WStLA, 1.3.2.209.1.A47, Kinderklinik;
Heilpädagogische Station: Krankengeschichten, 1942,
Friedrich K. The boy was transferred to Spiegelgrund in
May 1942 (via Kinderübernahmsstelle), where he stayed
for 10 months before being sent to the children’s home
Wimmersdorf: WStLA, 1.3.2.207.A6, index card Friedrich
K.
WStLA, 1.3.2.209.10.A1,
Krankengeschichten: überlebende Knaben und Mädchen
1941–1945, Gerald St., 1. Psychologisches Gutachten, 11
June 1942, signed Igor Caruso. After 1945, Caruso
(1914–1981) rose to prominence in Austria as the founder
of his own psychoanalytical school. His involvement at
Spiegelgrund became the subject of heated debate
following a 2008 publication in which the topic was
raised for the first time [136].
WStLA, 1.3.2.209.10.A1,
Krankengeschichten: überlebende Knaben und Mädchen
1941–1945, Gerald St., Ärztliches Gutachten, 22 July
1942, signed Heinrich Gross and Ernst Illing. After
1945, Heinrich Gross (1915–2005) became one of the most
prominent psychiatrists in Austria, partly thanks to the
scientific exploitation of the brain specimens obtained
from the children killed at Spiegelgrund ([85]:112–4).
WStLA, 1.3.2.209.10, Nervenklinik für
Kinder, Krankengeschichten: überlebende Mädchen und
Knaben 1941–1945, Leo A., Befund, 27 December 1940,
signed Asperger.
WStLA, 1.3.2.209.10, Nervenklinik für
Kinder, Krankengeschichten: überlebende Mädchen und
Knaben 1941–1945, Leo A., Befund und Gutachten, 23
September 1941, signed Heinrich Gross and Erwin
Jekelius. It should be noted that the boy returned both
to Spiegelgrund and the Heilpädagogik ward in 1942/1943,
but the documents pertaining to these stays (assessments
by Ernst Illing, Jekelius’s successor at Spiegelgrund,
and by one of Asperger’s colleagues) are not relevant
here.
WStLA, 1.3.2.209.10, Nervenklinik für
Kinder, Krankengeschichten: überlebende Mädchen und
Knaben 1941–1945, Karl E., Befund, 25 October 1940,
signed Asperger.
WStLA, 1.3.2.209.10, Nervenklinik für
Kinder, Krankengeschichten: überlebende Mädchen und
Knaben 1941–1945, Karl E., Führungsbericht und
Gutachten, signed Margarete Hübsch and Erwin Jekelius,
19 September 1941.
WStLA, 1.3.2.209.10, Nervenklinik für
Kinder, Krankengeschichten: überlebende Mädchen und
Knaben 1941–1945, Johann K., Befund, signed Asperger, 16
September 1942.
WStLA, 1.3.2.209.10, Nervenklinik für
Kinder, Krankengeschichten: überlebende Mädchen und
Knaben 1941–1945, Johann K., Gutachterliche Äußerung,
signed Ernst Illing, 6 January 1943.
WStLA, 1.3.2.209.10, Nervenklinik für
Kinder, Krankengeschichten: überlebende Mädchen und
Knaben 1941–1945, Charlotte H., Heilpädagogisches
Gutachten, signed Asperger, 20 February 1941.
WStLA, 1.3.2.209.10, Nervenklinik für
Kinder, Krankengeschichten: überlebende Mädchen und
Knaben 1941–1945, Charlotte H., Gutachterliche Äußerung,
signed Ernst Illing, 5 August 1942.
WStLA, 1.3.2.209.10.A1,
Krankengeschichten: überlebende Knaben und Mädchen
1941–1945, Johann T., Asperger to Wohlfahrtsamt der
Bezirkshauptmannschaft Mödling-Liesing, 26 November
1938.
WStLA, 1.3.2.209.10.A1,
Krankengeschichten: überlebende Knaben und Mädchen
1941–1945, Johann T., “Abschrift Küst” on Johann T.,
Befund Jekelius, probably 9 May 1941.
WStLA, 1.3.2.209.10, Nervenklinik für
Kinder, Krankengeschichten: überlebende Mädchen und
Knaben 1941–1945, Hildegard P., Führungsbericht und
Gutachten, signed Jokl and Jekelius, 29 May 1941.
WStLA, 1.3.2.209.1.A47, Kinderklinik;
Heilpädagogische Station: Krankengeschichten, case
history Karl M. On the Wanderhof
Herzogsägmühle, see ([137]: especially
53–4).
Deutsche Dienststelle, Auskunft zur
Wehrmachtdienstzeit des Dr. Hans Asperger, 28 July 2015.
He returned to Vienna on 22 September 1945, after
several months as a prisoner of war: WStLA, 1.3.2.202,
Personalakt Hans Asperger, Inhaltsverzeichnis.
The choice of the expression
niederschießen
(to gun down) in what sounds like a carefully
scripted monologue hints at the particular
character of the warfare he experienced, since it
suggests the killing of unarmed individuals rather
than military battle. A remark in his textbook,
first published in 1952, points in a similar
direction: “Also during the war, one had to
experience time and again how strong the pressure
of the ‘collective’ could be, what terrible deeds
a group of people as a whole were capable of,
deeds that none of them would have committed on
their own in their civil lives” ([76]: 81).
UAW, MED PA 17, Personalakt Hans Asperger,
Personalblatt, 1 September 1945; Asperger to
Professorenkollegium der med. Fakultät, 1 September
1945. On the denazification of the medical profession in
Austria, see [138].
This conflict also had political
overtones, since the dominating figure in post-World War
II youth psychiatry was Walter Spiel, a Social Democrat
[74].
This passage remained in the book
at least until the fourth edition, which was
published in 1965. The author wishes to thank
Thomas Mayer for the reference to this passage.
Regarding child “euthanasia,” Asperger declared
his fundamental opposition to the idea of
“unworthy life” in a letter to a board member of
the German Pediatric Association in 1961, when the
organization was mired in controversy over the
continued membership of Werner Catel, one of three
“experts” of the child “euthanasia” program
([139]: 115).
According to a former collaborator, in the
relative privacy of a case conference he called a
6-year-old girl a “whore” ([141]: 141). This is
in keeping with the fact that in his textbook, Asperger
quoted Lambroso and his idea of the “born criminal” and
the “born prostitute” ([76]: 85).
The concept of “pension neurosis” was
created by German psychiatrists after World War I. It
served to deny benefits to war veterans who suffered
from what today would be called PTSD. After World War
II, the concept was often turned against survivors of
Nazi medical experiments, concentration camps, and
ghettoes, again by denying a causal link between
experiences of persecution and long-term effects on
mental health ([142]: 166). A paper that Asperger
published in 1939 with his colleague Heribert Goll
demonstrates to what extent Asperger thought that inborn
(if not necessarily hereditary) characteristics
determined personality traits in later life. The article
was published in the journal Der
Erbarzt, edited by leading race hygienist
Otmar von Verschuer (1896–1969) [143].
WStLA, 1.3.2.207.A1-Zöglingsakten, F-H,
1946. I thank Gertrude Czipke for these documents. On
the concept of the “epileptoid personality,” see
([76]:
132–4). There is no indication that Max actually
suffered from epilepsy. Asperger’s diagnosis was based
purely on personality traits he observed during his
interaction with the boy, which he considered typical
for epileptics.
The other Austrian physician whom Kondziella
places in this category is Andreas Rett (1924–1997),
discoverer of Rett syndrome, a former NSDAP member who
became a leading figure in Austrian child neurology after
World War II with a special focus on the care of children
with disabilities, for whom he proved an effective and
tireless advocate. His paternalistic approach, focus on
segregation, use of non-approved drugs, and support for
sterilization remain controversial [104, 144]. Since Rett was
born 18 years after Asperger, the two cases are however
difficult to compare with regards to the Nazi period.
A large part of the work for this article was completed at the author’s previous institution, the
Documentation Center of the Austrian Resistance (DÖW),
Vienna.
Der belastende Arbeitsalltag wirkt sich negativ auf die psychische Gesundheit der Angehörigen ärztlicher Berufsgruppen aus. Chirurginnen und Chirurgen bilden da keine Ausnahme, im Gegenteil.
Extreme Arbeitsverdichtung und kaum Supervision: Dr. Andrea Martini, Sprecherin des Bündnisses Junge Ärztinnen und Ärzte (BJÄ) über den Frust des ärztlichen Nachwuchses und die Vorteile des Rucksack-Modells.
Chronische Insomnie als eigenständiges Krankheitsbild ernst nehmen und adäquat nach dem aktuellen Forschungsstand behandeln: Das forderte der Schlafmediziner Dr. Dieter Kunz von der Berliner Charité beim Praxis Update.
Darauf haben viele Praxen gewartet: Das Zi hat eine Liste von Praxisverwaltungssystemen veröffentlicht, die von Nutzern positiv bewertet werden. Eine gute Grundlage für wechselwillige Ärzte und Psychotherapeuten.