This historical evidence must now be made available. Some may also say he sacrificed some children to save others. The case of Hans Asperger provides a troubling example of the horror that can be unleashed when medical professionals allow themselves to become complicit with a brutal ideology. Czech, Molecular Autism DOI: The article is available at the journal website. Editorial: Did Hans Asperger actively assist the Nazi euthanasia program? He was even seen as a hero, saving children with the condition from the Nazi killing programme by emphasizing their intelligence.
However, it is now indisputable that Asperger collaborated in the murder of children with disabilities under the Third Reich. Czech Mol. Autism 9 , 29; She makes a compelling case that the foundational ideas of autism emerged in a society that strove for the opposite of neurodiversity. These findings cast a shadow on the history of autism, already a long struggle towards accurate diagnosis, societal acceptance and support.
Wing Psychol. A decade later, in the book Autism and Asperger Syndrome , developmental psychologist Uta Frith translated into English the treatise by Asperger in which he claimed to have discovered autism.
The syndrome is characterized by strengths such as unusually deep, narrow interests, and challenges in social communication and interaction, in people with average IQ or above and no history of language delay. Credit: Pictorial Press Ltd. Sheffer lays out the evidence, from sources such as medical records and referral letters, showing that Asperger was complicit in this Nazi killing machine. He protected children he deemed intelligent. Some were starved, others given lethal injections. Their deaths were recorded as due to factors such as pneumonia.
He worked down the hall from people doing lethal experiments on babies, depriving them of fats and vitamin A. So we think of the Third Reich in terms of extermination, and the Holocaust of 6 million Jews, but I think that can obscure the extent to which all of this was based on the initial act of labeling people. So before you exterminate, you need to evaluate the person and decide to sort them.
The Third Reich was extremely concerned with sorting people into categories. Are they redeemable, are they irredeemable? So it was a double-sided effort. The diagnosis regime was this massive effort to index the population. Nazi Germany had these public health offices that kept large registries on individuals, combing through school records, medical records, down to sports club records, and each person would have a file.
So in Vienna, a quarter of the population wound up being indexed. The Nazi regime was basically this massive effort of reengineering the population through this labeling, which then sets the outcomes. Considering your personal experience with your son, do you see other flaws in our current system of diagnosing children? How would you like your son to be evaluated? At home, we never used the term autism or anything. It was just that he was working on certain issues, but my daughter has her own issues, so we just presented it as everyone has a different kind of mind.
Well, in fourth grade, they had a disability awareness day. The kid with autism was playing with trains, and there were bullet points about lack of eye contact and this and that, and my son came home with this cartoon, right? To draw a cartoon character of some kid with autism playing with trains? And he was just devastated. So yes, I much prefer to describe him as a person.
Hope Reese is a journalist in Louisville, Kentucky. Yet, six years later, the term persists. They find it easier to accept and understand than a broad umbrella diagnosis — especially when their child does not have the cognitive and language limitations that many other autistic children do.
Knowing this, many families — including mine — would clinic-hop, because different doctors often came to different conclusions. Kids not getting the treatment they need is in itself a very good reason to push for doing away with the term.
Asperger recognized that these kids displayed abnormal patterns of behavior and struggled to fit in socially — but he also noted their superior cognitive and linguistic abilities. But this part of the story was buried. After the Nazi regime fell, only the part about Asperger saving certain children became lore.
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