Hans Asperger

Template:Short description Template:Cs1 config Template:Use American English Template:Use dmy dates Template:Infobox medical person Johann Friedrich Karl Asperger (Template:IPAc-en, ; 18 February 1906 – 21 October 1980Template:Sfn) was an Austrian physician. Noted for his early studies on atypical neurology, specifically in children, he is the namesake of the former autism spectrum disorder Asperger syndrome. He wrote more than 300 publications on psychological disorders that posthumously acquired international renown in the 1980s. His diagnosis of autism, which he termed "autistic psychopathy", garnered controversy.

Further controversy arose in the late 2010s over allegations that Asperger referred children to the Am Spiegelgrund children's clinic in Vienna during the Nazi period. The clinic was responsible for murdering hundreds of disabled children deemed to be "unworthy of life" as part of the Third Reich's child euthanasia programs, although the extent of Asperger's knowledge of this fact and his intentions in referring patients to the clinic remain yet to be ascertained.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn

Biography

Hans Asperger was born in Neustiftgasse in the 7th district of Vienna, Austria, on 18 February 1906, and was raised on a farm in Hausbrunn not far from the city.Template:Sfn He was the eldest of three sons; his younger brother died shortly after birth.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn As a youth, he joined the Wandering Scholars of the Bund NeulandTemplate:SfnTemplate:Sfn (in the group of Fahrende Scholaren, which organized outdoor activities such as hiking and mountaineering).Template:Sfn "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 (...) which Asperger cited in 1974 as a guiding principle in his life."Template:Sfn He later stated that "[he] was moulded by the spirit of the German youth movement, which was one of the noblest blossoms of the German spirit."Template:Sfn This movement maintained close links with the Hitler Youth from the 1930s onwards.Template:Sfn

Hans Asperger was described as "cold and distant".Template:Sfn He collected over 10,000 books in his personal library during his lifetime.Template:Sfn He attributed his "progressive spiritual maturity" to his reading.Template:Sfn His former colleagues at the pediatric clinic in Vienna testified that he often quoted classical authors, poets or the Bible.Template:Sfn

According to his daughter Maria Asperger-Felder, the two events that most affected Hans Asperger between 1931 and 1945 were, on the one hand, the development of curative education (Heilpädagogik), and on the other hand, the confrontation with the ideology of National Socialism.Template:Sfn

Family

Hans Asperger married Hanna Kalmon in 1935,Template:Sfn whom he met during a mountain hike, and with whom he had five children; four daughters and a son:Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn Gertrud (born 1936), Hans (born 1938), Hedwig (born 1940), Maria (born 1946) and Brigitte (born 1948).Template:Sfn In 1961, Gertrud Asperger completed her doctorate at Innsbruck.Template:Sfn Another daughter, Maria Asperger Felder, became a renowned child psychiatrist.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn Hans Asperger and his daughter were also "socially well-connected".Template:Sfn

Religion

Hans Asperger was a devout Christian, a practicing Catholic,Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn but without the political tendencies generally associated with Catholicism at the time.Template:Sfn His faith was initially considered a disadvantage in his evaluation after the Anschluss.Template:Sfn He was a member of the Sankt-Lukas Guild, which, according to Sheffer and Czech, "advocated for Catholic eugenics",Template:Sfn including support for "positive eugenics" (the multiplication of individuals considered desirable) rather than "negative eugenics" (the limitation of individuals considered undesirable).Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn

Education

Hans Asperger claimed to have discovered his future vocation as a doctor by dissecting the liver of a mouse during his final year of high school.Template:Sfn He passed his secondary school final examination on 20 May 1925, with distinction and the grade of "very good" in all subjects.Template:Sfn

According to his daughter, from 1916 to 1928, he followed an education oriented towards humanism, learning western philosophy, Latin and ancient Greek.Template:Sfn Asperger studied medicine at the University of Vienna under Franz Hamburger and practiced at the University Children's Hospital in Vienna.Template:Sfn Asperger earned his medical degree in 1931 and became director of the special education section at the university's children's clinic in Vienna in 1932.Template:Sfn He joined the Fatherland Front on 10 May 1934, nine days after Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss passed a new constitution making himself dictator.Template:Sfn

Career

Early career (1930–1938)

According to Czech, "with the appointment of Hamburger as president in 1930, the Vienna University Paediatric Clinic became a beacon of anti-Jewish policy, long before the Nazi takeover."Template:Sfn This assessment is consistent with work from the 2020s on the role of academics at the University of Vienna long before the Nazi takeover in 1938. Ideas of "purity" were widespread and scholars were eager to enforce a narrow "conceptualization of what is ‘German’ and what not or by claiming some groups as forebears (Bavarians, Swabians) while excluding others (Slovene bilinguals, Jiddish, Rotwelsh speakers)". By helping to eradicate what was labelled as "impure" Volk members, Asperger may have actively supported NS doctrine.

Following the death of Clemens von Pirquet in 1929, Franz Hamburger expelled the Jewish doctors from the clinic, and also tried to remove the women.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn Hans Asperger thus obtained his first post in May 1931, thanks to the "purge" of Jewish doctors,Template:SfnTemplate:SfnTemplate:Sfn as Hamburger's assistant at the University Paediatric Clinic in Vienna.Template:Sfn He then worked for different departments.Template:Sfn Czech points out the changes in leadership: "The political orientation of Hamburger's assistants is illustrated by the fact that among those who obtained the highest academic qualification (habilitation), all, with the exception of Hans Asperger, were rejected in 1945 as Nazis."Template:Sfn Under the influence of Franz Chvostek junior, the Vienna clinic became a "hotbed of pan-Germanist and Nazi agitation".Template:Sfn

When Erwin Lazar, the head of the curative pedagogy department died in 1932,Template:SfnTemplate:SfnTemplate:Sfn Hans Asperger took over in May 1934Template:Sfn or 1935,Template:Sfn as head of the department of Heilpädagogik (or: Heilpädagogische curative pedagogy) at the pediatric clinic in Vienna. He joined an experienced team, consisting of psychiatrist Georg Frankl (who was Jewish), psychologist Josef Feldner and a nun, Sister Viktorine Zak.Template:Sfn Asperger's very rapid rise to head of the pediatric ward, despite his few publications and the existence of more qualified candidates, was facilitated by the anti-Jewish policy.Template:Sfn The team also included, from August 1933 to February 1936, a young doctor specializing in gastrointestinal disorders, Erwin Jekelius, who later became a major architect of the Nazi extermination.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn The pedagogy employed in Heilpädagogik was inspired by Erwin Lazar, the founder of the clinic;Template:Sfn Asperger continued and developed this approach.Template:Sfn He was influenced by two pedagogues, Jan-Daniel Georgens and Johann Heinrich Deinhardt, who founded a specialized institute in 1856.Template:Sfn He was particularly interested in the "psychically abnormal child".Template:Sfn

In addition to Hamburger and Jekelius, Asperger frequented other Nazi ideologues, including Erwin Risak, who studied with him in 1931 and with whom he co-authored an article the following year.Template:SfnTemplate:SfnTemplate:Sfn

His career was spent entirely in Vienna, with two brief exceptions.Template:Sfn In 1934 he was invited to work for some time at the psychiatric clinic in Leipzig, with Paul Schröder.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn He was also invited for three months, during the summer of 1934, to the psychiatric hospital in Vienna, directed by Otto PötzlTemplate:Sfn (whom he would later describe as a "terrifying exterminator"Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn). He joined the nationalist and anti-Semitic German Medical Association in Austria the same year.Template:Sfn

World War II (1939–1945)

During World War II, Asperger was a medical officer, serving in the Axis occupation of Yugoslavia; his younger brother died at Stalingrad. Near the end of the war, Asperger opened a school for children with Sister Viktorine Zak. The school was bombed and destroyed, Sister Viktorine was killed, and much of Asperger's early work was lost.Template:Sfn

Asperger published a definition of "autistic psychopathy" in 1944 that resembled the definition published earlier by Russian neurologist Grunya Sukhareva in 1926.Template:Sfn Asperger identified four boys with a pattern of behavior and abilities that included “a lack of empathy, little ability to form friendships, one-sided conversations, intense absorption in a special interest, and clumsy movements”.Template:Sfn Asperger noticed that some of the children he identified as being autistic used their special talents in adulthood and had successful careers: one became a professor of astronomy and solved an error in Newton's work that he had originally noticed as a student,Template:Rp and another was Austrian writer and Nobel Prize in Literature laureate, Elfriede Jelinek.

Under the Third Reich, with his position as a doctor in Vienna, Hans Asperger was a decision-maker in the context of examinations of minors: he could defend them if he thought they would integrate into Volk (the national community of Nazi Germany), or the contrary, sending to Spiegelgrund the minors he thought were too deficit, and therefore unfit for integration.Template:Sfn Am Spiegelgrund clinic, created in July 1940 on the premises of the Steinhof psychiatric hospital in Vienna, was directed by Erwin Jekelius, a former colleague of Asperger's at the university clinic who became a major architect of the extermination policy, from June 1940 until the end of 1941.Template:Sfn

During the last two years of the Second World War, from April 1943, Asperger was a doctor for the Wehrmacht.Template:Sfn He underwent nine months of training in Vienna and Brünn, then was sent with the 392nd Infantry Division to Croatia in December 1943 as part of a "mission of protection" of the occupied territories in Yugoslavia and the struggle against the "partisans".Template:Sfn The Heilpädagogik, in which Asperger worked before his military service, was destroyed in 1944 by a bombing, in which Sister Viktorine Zak was killed.Template:Sfn

In 1944, after the publication of his landmark paper describing autistic symptoms, Asperger found a permanent tenured post at the University of Vienna. Shortly after the war ended, he became director of a children's clinic in the city. There, he was appointed chair of pediatrics at the University of Vienna, a post he held for twenty years. He later held a post at Innsbruck.

Post-World War II (1945 to death)

Hans Asperger resumed his academic career after the war in 1945,Template:Sfn returning to the department he was directing, which had been destroyed by a bombardment.Template:Sfn His authorization to teach was confirmed on February 9, 1946, because he was not a member of the NSDAP.Template:Sfn

Between 1946Template:Sfn and 1949, he was deputy director of the pediatric clinic in Vienna.Template:Sfn In 1948, he co-founded the pediatric clinic, Österreichische Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Heilpädagogik (now the Heilpädagogische Gesellschaft Österreichs) in Innsbruck, Austria, for 5 years,Template:Sfn succeeding Richard Priesel, who died suddenly on 18 November 1955.Template:Sfn Documentation of this part of his life is scarce.Template:Sfn Hans Asperger's name is the last one mentioned on the list of recommendations, after those of three other doctors.Template:Sfn Asperger took up his new position on 31 March 1957, with an inaugural lecture devoted to problems in modern pediatrics.Template:Sfn According to the Innsbruck historian Franz Huter (1899–1997), Hans Asperger "quickly created a circle of friends and colleagues".Template:Sfn His wife Hanna preferred to stay in Vienna.Template:Sfn He was generally appreciated there for his pedagogy.Template:Sfn

Asperger was then appointed to the chair of pediatrics at the Vienna hospital on 26 June 1962,Template:Sfn and was its director until his official retirement in 1977.Template:Sfn In 1964, he was in charge of SOS–Kinderdorf in Hinterbrüh.Template:Sfn That same year he was appointed president of the Internationalen Gesellschaft für Heilpädagogik.

On 8 May 1971, he was appointed vice-president of the newly founded Austrian Society for Allergy and Immunology (Österreichische Gesellschaft für Allergologie und Immunologie).

He became professor emeritus in 1977, and died three years later on 21 October 1980, after a short illness.Template:Sfn

Allegations of persecution by the Gestapo

Post-war tales of "resistance" by some of the most involved academic Nazi perpetrators were common. According to a statement from 1962, the Gestapo attempted to arrest Hans Asperger because of remarks during a 1938 lecture.Template:Sfn However, the only known source for this claim is Hans Asperger himself, who mentioned this incident during the inauguration of his chair of pediatrics, and then claimed to have been "saved from the Gestapo" by his mentor Franz Hamburger, during an interview in 1974.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn During the same interview, he claimed to have "volunteered for the army to escape Gestapo reprisals because he had refused to cooperate with Nazi racial hygiene policies".Template:Sfn There is no evidence in the archives of any attempted arrest by the Gestapo.Template:Sfn

Other facts speak against Asperger's self-portrayal as a man persecuted by the Gestapo for his resistance to Nazi racial hygiene, who had to flee into military service to avoid further problems. On several occasions, he published approving comments on racial hygiene measures such as forced sterilizations. – Herwig Czech,Template:Sfn Hans Asperger, National Socialism, and "race hygiene" in Nazi-era Vienna

There is no archival evidence that Asperger's publications were perceived to be opposed to the new regime.Template:Sfn In November 1940, the Vienna Gestapo responded that it had "nothing on him" to a request for a political evaluation of Asperger; this is the only documented interaction between Asperger and the Gestapo.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn Czech believes that this Gestapo investigation is the source of Asperger's subsequent claim that he was being persecuted, and that his Nazi party (NSDAP) mentor, Franz Hamburger, most likely vouched for his assistant while asking him to cooperate with the ruling regime, which would explain Asperger's statement during his 1974 interview.Template:Sfn

Nazi involvement allegations

According to Simon Baron-Cohen et al., "The degree of Asperger’s involvement in the targeting of Vienna’s most vulnerable children has remained an open and vexing question in autism research for a long time." However, as is becoming clearer in historical research, collaboration of scientists and university teachers of all fields was the norm rather than the exception in the Third Reich.

Edith Sheffer, a modern European history scholar, wrote in 2018 that Asperger cooperated with the Nazi regime, including sending children to the Am Spiegelgrund clinic which participated in the euthanasia program.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn According to Sheffer, Asperger supported the Nazi goal of eliminating children who could not fit in with the Volk: "people" in german.

Herwig Czech, another scholar and historian from the Medical University of Vienna, concluded in a 2017 article in the journal Molecular Autism, which was published in April 2018:

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.Template:Sfn

However, he worked under the direction of Franz Hamburger, a prominent long-time member of the NSDAP,Template:Sfn for whom he expressed the greatest admiration,Template:Sfn signed his letters with the formula "Heil Hitler",Template:Sfn and joined organizations affiliated with the Nazi Party after 1938. (Deutsche Arbeitsfront, Nationalsozialistische Volkswohlfahrt, Nationalsozialistischer Deutscher Ärztebund).Template:Sfn For Czech, "by renouncing membership in the NSDAP, he chose a middle path between staying away from the new regime and aligning himself with it."Template:Sfn

Dean Falk, an American anthropologist from Florida State University, questioned Czech and Sheffer's allegations against Hans Asperger in a paper in Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders.Template:Sfn Czech's reply was published in the same journal.Template:Sfn Falk defended her paper against Czech's reply in a second paper.Template:Sfn

Norwegian doctor and historical scholar Ketil Slagstad added his interpretation of both Sheffer's and Czech's work in his 2019 article "Asperger, the Nazis and the children – the history of the birth of a diagnosis", in which he describes the nuances of the situation.Template:Sfn He offers an alternative explanation of Asperger's involvement: citing the challenges of war, a desire to protect his career, and the protection of the children he cared for.

Slagstad concluded:

The story of Hans Asperger, Nazism, murdered children, post-war oblivion, the birth of the diagnosis in the 1980s, the gradual expansion of the diagnostic criteria and the huge recent interest in autism spectrum disorders exemplify the historical and volatile nature of diagnoses: they are historic constructs that reflect the times and societies where they exert their effect.Template:Sfn

Slagstad also wrote, "Historical research has now shown that [Asperger] was...a well-adapted cog in the machine of a deadly regime. He deliberately referred disabled children to the clinic Am Spiegelgrund, where he knew that they were at risk of being killed. The eponym Asperger’s syndrome ought to be used with an awareness of its historical origin."Template:Sfn

After the Anschluss, Asperger, like all medical personnel, was investigated in the application of the "decree on the reorganization of the Austrian professional civil service" dated May 31, 1938,Template:Sfn and then received confidential evaluations from NSDAP officials, who expressed an increasingly positive opinion of him.Template:Sfn His first evaluation, dated June 1939, judged him "politically acceptable from the National Socialist point of view", "unassailable as far as his character and politics are concerned", and concluded with the statement that Asperger was "in conformity with the racial and sterilization laws of National Socialism", despite his Catholic orientation.Template:Sfn In October 1940, he wrote that he had "committed himself to work for the Hitler Youth". Czech analyzed this as a desire to adapt to the new regime and to protect his career.Template:Sfn Hans Asperger was never considered an opponent of the regime.Template:Sfn According to Czech, "Asperger’s political socialization in Neuland likely blinded him to National Socialism’s destructive character due to an affinity with core ideological elements."Template:Sfn Czech asserts that Asperger "publicly protected his patients from forced sterilization",Template:Sfn supporting his claim with Asperger's description of his patients "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".Template:Sfn

In 1939, he published an article with his colleague Heribert Goll, in which he "demonstrated" that innate or hereditary characteristics determine later personality traits. This article was published in the journal, edited by Otmar von Verschuer, a prominent propagator of Racial hygiene theories.Template:Sfn According to Czech's analysis, "Asperger went so far in these attempts [to prove his loyalty to the NSDAP] that his collaborator Josef Feldner had to restrain him, lest he risks his credibility."Template:Sfn

Asperger obtained his accreditation in 1943, passing the political control of the National Socialist League of German Lecturers.Template:Sfn

The British psychiatrist Lorna Wing and the anthropologist Dean FalkTemplate:Sfn consider that Hans Asperger's Catholic convictions are incompatible with the voluntary sending of children to extermination programs. For Falk, it is not certain that Asperger was aware of the fate awaiting the children he had transferred to:Template:Sfn knowing his religion, his colleagues could have hidden this information from him.Template:Sfn Czech refutes Falk's conclusions, noting that the Viennese population was protesting against the mortality rates in psychiatric hospitals several months before Asperger referred patients to the Am Spiegelgrund clinic and that even if he was not informed of the intention of the officials of the clinic to kill the children he referred there, he was necessarily aware of these mortality rates and of the risks that a transfer to the clinic would pose to the children. Czech concludes that "The assumption that Asperger was unaware of the risks to the children is unfounded."Template:Sfn

The curative pedagogy promoted by Hans Asperger was never considered to be contrary to the objectives of the Third Reich, which was marked by a shortage of manpower.Template:Sfn Moreover, this approach was approved by euthanasia policy makers such as Erwin Jekelius.Template:Sfn Only children considered to be educable benefit from it.Template:Sfn Hans Asperger's text, which is most often interpreted as a defense of his autistic patients against the "euthanasia" program, can also be read in a utilitarian way.Template:Sfn For Sheffer, "the examination of the archives reveals the dual nature of his action."Template:Sfn According to her:

He distinguished between young people whom he considered amendable, endowed with a potential for "social integration", and those judged irrecoverable. At the same time as he offered intensive and individualized care to promising children, he ordered the placement in an institution or even the transfer to the home of severely handicapped children.Template:Sfn

Czech believes that the argument that Asperger placed a positive emphasis on a small number of autistic individuals in order to protect all autistic children does not hold water. For Sheffer, Asperger is a "self-proclaimed eugenicist"Template:Sfn and "this duality of Asperger's mirrors that of Nazism as a whole."Template:Sfn

Children sent to Am Spiegelgrund

File:Wien - Steinhof - Eingang Pavillon 17.jpg

Doorstep of Am Spiegelgrund clinic

In 1940, Asperger obtained a position as a medical expert in Vienna, for which he was responsible for diagnosing "hereditary diseases" and proposing forced sterilization in the interest of the Nazi eugenics program.Template:Sfn Even at that time, the excess mortality in Vienna's psychiatric hospitals was well known to the population, which protested against this situation, especially in September and November 1940.Template:Sfn According to Czech's analysis of Hans Asperger's written diagnoses, he was not "more benevolent towards his patients than his peers in labelling children with diagnoses that could have an enormous impact on their future – quite the contrary";Template:Sfn in the majority of cases, Asperger made a harsher judgment than other doctors towards the children and adolescents he examined.Template:Sfn

He described one of the children he recommended for Am Spiegelgrund on 27 June 1941, Herta Schreiber, as follows:Template:Sfn

Severe personality disorder (post–encephalic?): very severe motor retardation; erethic idiocy; epileptic seizures. The child is an unbearable burden at home for her mother, who has five healthy children to care for. A permanent placement in seems absolutely necessary – Dr. Asperger, WStLA file, 1.3.2.209.10, Herta Schreiber, Heilpädagogische Abteilung der Universitäts–Kinderklinik Vienna, 27 June 1941

Sent to the hospital on 1 July as Asperger had requested, Herta Schreiber died there two months later, on 2 September, officially of "pneumonia".Template:Sfn

In 1942, following a request addressed to his superior Franz Hamburger,Template:Sfn Asperger took part in a selection of patients aimed at separating the "uneducable" from those who could become German citizens.Template:Sfn Although he was not directly responsible for their death, he chose 35 children whom he considered to be "uneducable".Template:Sfn

While he did not cooperate with the forced sterilization programs according to the records,Template:Sfn he also did not oppose them.Template:Sfn According to Czech, "what emerges from the available sources is that Asperger's approach to the forced sterilization program was ambivalent."Template:Sfn He quotes passages written by Hans Asperger demonstrating his support for this aspect of racial hygiene policy:

In the new Germany, we took on 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 people [], which is more than the well–being of the individual. I need not add to the enormous amount of dedicated work done in terms of affirmative action and support. But we all know that we must also take restrictive measures. Just as the physician must often make painful incisions during the treatment of individuals, we must also make incisions in the national body [], out of a sense of responsibility: we must make sure that those patients who would pass on their diseases to distant generations, to the detriment of the individual and of the Volk, are prevented from passing on their diseased hereditary material – Hans Asperger, Pädagogische Therapie bei abnormen KindernTemplate:Sfn

There is a possible protective case of a patient, Aurel I., whom Hans Asperger examined in the autumn of 1939 and exempted from group education.Template:Sfn His family sent him to the countryside, where he survived the war under his parents' care.Template:Sfn In 1962, a member of Asperger's family believed that he had saved Aurel from "castration" and possibly worse.Template:Sfn Asperger wrote his report a few days before the introduction of the sterilization law in Austria.Template:Sfn

Further Research by Ernst Tatzer, Werner Maleczek, Franz Waldhauser in 2022 concluded as follows. ″Our detailed investigation, aided by historians, and investigations by other authors, showed no clear evidence to support the allegation that Asperger knowingly or willingly participated in the National Socialist Child Euthanasia programme in Vienna. This investigation included thorough analyses of the records for all the patients he and colleagues referred to Am Spiegelgrund from the Therapeutic Pedagogy Unit of the University Children's Hospital in Vienna. This covered the period between 1939 and March 1943 when Asperger was drafted by the military.″ They first examined all admissions from the hospital where Aspergers worked and then which patients Asperger had either direct or indirect involvement with, cross-referencing this with Am Spiegelgrund's own records including their book of the dead to trace any missing records as well as all referrals to the Reich committee responsible. They found no reports by Hans Asperger. One patient died of natural causes while another was referred to the clinic after having been sent to another institution. They were reported by the then director of Am Spiegelgrund to the Reich committee, against Hans Asperger's original recommendation, at the request of the institution the child had been sent to. A third child was not referred to the clinic by Asperger but by his family doctor. He did not die at the clinic or as a result of Asperger's recommendation, but as a result of a director of another institution and his family doctors own actions as well as orders from the Reich committee in relation to forced labour workers. Asperger had no involvement in this case and this patient was referred by the family doctor to Am Spiegelgrund and had been reported for forced labour by the director of the institution he had been placed at. All of Hans Asperger's other patients survived.

Hansi Busztin

The Heilpädagogik Vienna department, where Asperger worked, is known to have taken in Hansi Busztin from September 1942, a Jewish patient in hiding until the end of the war, who states that about a hundred people knew of his existence, and that this department housed "a group of opponents of National Socialism".Template:Sfn However, Busztin does not mention Hans Asperger's name, and Asperger makes no reference to this episode even after the war, even though it could have helped him establish anti-Nazi credentials.Template:Sfn According to Czech, Asperger may have been aware of this Jewish patient, but he did not take an active role in protecting him, and more importantly, joined the Wehrmacht only six months after Busztin's admission.Template:Sfn Czech considers it likely that Asperger joined the Wehrmacht to protect himself in case Busztin's presence in his ward was discovered, rather than because of "persecution by the Gestapo", which is not proven.Template:Sfn However, he also did not denounce the presence of this Jewish child.Template:Sfn

Works and publications

Hans Asperger published a total of 359 texts, most of them devoted to "autistic psychopathy" and the notion of death.Template:Sfn All of his publications are written in German.Template:Sfn According to Edith Sheffer, the context in which Asperger evolved facilitated the development of his most famous publication, insofar as he and his colleagues frequently used the notion of "Gemüt", which had been misused in Nazi psychiatry to refer to "the metaphysical capacity of humans to form social bonds".Template:Sfn This caused Nazi doctors and psychiatrists to pay attention to children they considered to have a weak Gemüt.Template:Sfn The first description of autism was thus based on an observation of this population of children.Template:Sfn Czech, on the other hand, believes that Sheffer places too much emphasis on the concept of Gemüt and that "psychiatry during National Socialism is much better characterized by the concept of ‘life unworthy of living’."Template:Sfn

Die "Autistischen Psychopathen" im Kindesalter

Hans Asperger established in 1943 the description of an "autistic psychopathy of childhood".Template:Sfn He identified in over 200 children (including 4 cases of young boys described in detailTemplate:Sfn) a pattern of behavior and skills including "lack of empathy, poor ability to make friends, unidirectional conversation, strong preoccupation with special interests, and awkward movements".Template:Sfn Asperger calls these four boys his "little teachers" because of their ability to talk about their favourite subject in great detail.Template:Sfn His article was not published until 1944 in the journal:Template:Sfn

• (de) "Die 'Autistischen Psychopathen' im Kindesalter", Archiv für Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten, no 117, 1944, pp. 76–136 – the article appeared in 1938 in Wiener Klinische Wochenschrift.

Other publications

• ;
• Chapters:
  • "Schwierigkeiten Hochbegabter".

Posthumous adoption of Asperger syndrome diagnosis

Due to his major role in defining the notion of the "autism spectrum", Hans Asperger has been "often touted as a champion of neurodiversity",Template:Sfn particularly by Adam Feinstein and Steve Silberman.Template:Sfn Although he died before his identification of behavioural patterns in autistic people became widely recognized, this was in part due to his work being exclusively in German and as such it was little translated.

After the Second World War and before access to the archives concerning him, Hans Asperger had a reputation as a protector of sick and handicapped children,Template:SfnTemplate:SfnTemplate:Sfn notably under the influence of Uta Frith's book published in 1991.Template:Sfn His earliest detractor, Eric Schopler, portrayed him instead as participating in racial hygiene programs, but without being able to provide evidence of this.

He has been portrayed as progressive and opposed to eugenics under the Nazi regime,Template:Sfn including by Lorna WingTemplate:Sfn and Steve Silberman (in his book, NeuroTribes, published in 2015Template:Sfn). The educator Brita Schirmer, who first published about Hans Asperger's relationship with Nazism in 2002, gives her article an explicit title: "Hans Aspergers Verteidigung der 'autistischen Psychopathen' gegen die NSEgenik'", i.e. "Hans Asperger's defense of autistic psychopaths against Nazi eugenics."Template:Sfn Helmut Gröger, on the basis of Asperger's scientific publications, concludes that he generally avoided addressing themes related to Nazi ideology, such as race.

His description of the technical contributions of the four children described in his 1944 article is initially interpreted in terms of a desire to protect them.Template:Sfn Adam Feinstein's (2010) book argues that Asperger deliberately disseminated Nazi-friendly references in his writing in order to hide his true intent.Template:Sfn This perception was facilitated by his self-portrait as a protector of children and a resister.Template:Sfn In his 1974 interview, Asperger stated that when "the time for National Socialism came, it was clear from my previous life that one could well accept many 'national' things, but not inhumanity (Unmenschlichkeiten)."Template:Sfn John Donvan and Caren Zucker's book, In A Different Key, is according to Czech, who shared some of her sources with the authors, "the first publication in the English language to break with the narrative of Asperger as an active opponent of Nazi racial hygiene and to introduce hitherto unknown critical elements into the debate."Template:Sfn

Translation of Asperger's work in the late 20th century

English researcher Lorna Wing proposed the condition Asperger's syndrome in a 1981 paper, Asperger's syndrome: a clinical account, that challenged the previously accepted model of autism presented by Leo Kanner in 1943. It was not until 1991 that an authoritative translation of Asperger's work was made by Uta Frith;Template:Sfn before this, Asperger's syndrome had still been "virtually unknown". Frith says that fundamental questions regarding the diagnosis had not been answered, and the necessary scientific data to address this did not exist.Template:SfnIn the early 1990s, Asperger's work gained some notice due to Wing's research on the subject and Frith's recent translation, leading to the inclusion of the eponymous condition in the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems 10th revision (ICD-10) in 1993, and the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 4th revision (DSM-IV) in 1994, some half a century after Asperger's original research. In Asperger's 1944 paper, as Frith translated in 1991, he wrote: "We are convinced, then, that autistic people have their place in the organism of the social community. They fulfill their role well, perhaps better than anyone else could, and we are talking of people who as children had the greatest difficulties and caused untold worries to their caregivers."Template:Sfn Based on Frith's translation, however, Asperger initially stated: "Unfortunately, in the majority of cases the positive aspects of autism do not outweigh the negative ones.Template:Sfn Psychologist Eric Schopler wrote in 1998: "Asperger's publications did not inspire research, replication, or scientific interest before 1980. Instead, he laid the fertile groundwork for the diagnostic confusion that has grown since 1980."

Despite this brief resurgence of interest in his work in the 1990s, Asperger's syndrome remained a controversial and contentious diagnosis due to its unclear relationship to the autism spectrum.

Perceptions of Asperger's work in the 21st century

In 2010, there was a majority consensus to subsume Asperger's syndrome into the diagnosis "Autistic Spectrum Disorder" in the 2013 DSM-5 diagnostic manual. The World Health Organization's ICD-10 Version 2015 describes Asperger's syndrome as “a disorder of uncertain nosological validity”.

Czech was the first to study the issue of Hans Asperger's Jewish patients. While Asperger did not express overtly anti-Semitic ideas, his public statements and Asperger's treatment of his Jewish patients show an indifference to the persecution suffered by this population.Template:Sfn He also seems to have internalized at least some of the anti-Jewish stereotypes of his time.Template:Sfn

CzechTemplate:Sfn and ShefferTemplate:Sfn believe that Hans Asperger's diagnoses are sexist, while Dean Falk refutes that Hans Asperger was sexist.Template:Sfn

Sheffer devotes a chapter of her book to the differences between the diagnoses of boys and girls. According to Claude Grimal's review in the journal, it should not be considered surprising that Asperger's diagnoses contain "all the gender biases of the time".

Czech notes that Hans Asperger's gender bias leads to "disadvantaging girls in terms of sexual abuse and precociousness",Template:Sfn adding that he blames victims of sexual abuse.Template:Sfn Czech cites, in particular, the example of the diagnosis of a 12-year-old Jewish girl, who, according to Asperger, "acted like a madwoman, talked about anti-Jewish persecution, was afraid". Asperger interpreted these signs of distress as symptoms of schizophrenia, and concluded his report, "for her age and race, sexual development is visibly retarded".Template:Sfn

In Steve Silberman's first edition of his book, in 2015, before the publication of the archives studied by Czech, Silberman openly supports Asperger's work, postulating that, if Asperger's syndrome had been used as the basis for defining autism in the twentieth century, rather than Leo Kanner's infantile autism, autistic individuals and their families would have avoided a great deal of suffering, positive criteria would have been used for diagnosis rather than deficits, and financial resources would have been allocated more quickly to supporting autistic individuals themselves rather than to seeking therapies and cures.

According to Czech, it is from April 2018 onwards that Hans Asperger's legacy is seriously questioned, notably through an editorial and press release distributed by, widely reported in the media, and then by the publication of Edith Sheffer's book a few weeks later.Template:Sfn This gave rise to some sensationalist media exaggerations concerning the true role of Asperger's.Template:Sfn Silberman reconsidered his position, pointing out that autistic people who once saw Hans Asperger as an ally probably felt betrayed, and updated new editions of his book.

In Asperger's Children, historian Edith Sheffer argues for the abandonment of the notion of "Asperger's syndrome". After reading this book, Judy Sasha Rubinsztein says she is "convinced not to use the term 'Asperger's Syndrome' because it raises the spectre of that barbaric time when medical values were distorted to support Nazi ideology".Template:Sfn Simon Baron-Cohen states that, in light of Czech and Sheffer's findings, "we now need to revise our views, and probably our language as well", by no longer referring to "Asperger's syndrome" but only to "autism".Template:Sfn In contrast, the American journalist Seth Mnookin does not agree with Sheffer's conclusion, which he analyzes as an attempt to deconstruct the notion of autism by falsely making it sound like a "Nazi invention". As if to support Mnookin's assertion, many autistic people call themselves "autists" despite the fact that Asperger himself coined the term.Template:Sfn

The reactions of autistic people to the revelations about Hans Asperger's past are varied: some are attached to the terminology of "Asperger's syndrome", while others testify in favour of abandoning this name.Template:Sfn This is notably the case of the doctor of philosophy Josef Schovanec, who states:

Even more than his links with Nazism, it is what must have been Dr. Asperger's strong point that will seal his doom, namely his ability to sort out children among humans.

- Josef SchovanecTemplate:Sfn

Did Hans Asperger have Asperger's syndrome?

In 2007, Viktoria Lyons and Michael Fitzgerald (a controversial expert in retrospective diagnosis) hypothesized that Hans Asperger himself had Asperger's syndrome, as they believed that as a child he exhibited features of the very disorder that later received his name.Template:Sfn The article is based on a German newsletterTemplate:Sfn and on the book by Uta Frith, published in 1991.Template:Sfn

This hypothesis was taken up by the investigative journalist Steve SilbermanTemplate:Sfn and by Élisabeth Roudinesco, who asserted that Hans Asperger was affected during his childhood by the syndrome he later described. It is refuted by Sheffer, who believes that the diagnostic criteria for Asperger's syndrome are irrelevant (and even less so in retrospect), but also that Asperger's "severe criticism" of "autistic psychopaths" precludes the possibility that he would have considered applying a diagnosis that he judged so negatively to himself.Template:Sfn

Czech points out that "the potential obstacles to his [Hans Asperger's] support for National Socialism were his religious convictions, his humanistic background, and his elitist and cultured habitus. He adds that "Asperger's political socialization at the time probably blinded him to the destructiveness of National Socialism because of an affinity with its ideological core elements."Template:Sfn