Asperger's syndrome, despite the fact that it is excluded from the "official" diagnoses, is again on the hearing (thanks, Greta). In popular culture, it has become synonymous with autism. Vienna pediatrician Hans Asperger was one of the first to describe children with this disease. True, the term picked up a dangerous one - "autistic psychopathy". And it's not about the stigmatization of the mentally ill or a dissonant name, but about the real danger to the lives of young patients. After all, Asperger lived and worked in Vienna during the Anschluss of Austria, in other words, during the time of Nazi Austria. Let's make a reservation right away that the article will not contain the ashes of the pipes of concentration camps and horrific experiments on people. This is an ordinary story about a humble doctor at a university clinic, a father of five, who lived and worked in the spirit of the twentieth century, when eugenics was rampant in Europe. Then it seemed that humanity (finally!) created a teaching that will help separate the wheat from the chaff, healthy from the one to be destroyed. The simplest example is the idea of creating the most healthy human race by isolating and destroying children with hereditary diseases.
For a long time, it was believed that Mr. Asperger was a humanist and, filled with sympathy for the unfortunate children, was almost a medical Schindler. But the archives found and the curiosity of Herwig Czech led to unpleasant and unexpected results, which were published in the journal Molecular Autism.
Hans Asperger in 1940.
In accordance with the Law on the Prevention of Hereditarily Sick Offspring of July 1933, specially created hereditary courts could prescribe sterilization, and later "euthanasia" in the case of one of the following diagnoses: congenital weakness, schizophrenia, manic depressive disorders, hereditary epilepsy, Huntington's chorea, hereditary deafness or blindness, severe physical deformities and severe alcoholism. These actions were part of a program to create a race of healthy people in mind and body. It is obvious that those tens of thousands of forcibly sterilized or killed Europeans were the patients of ordinary doctors. Doctors followed the laws of their time, which clearly prescribed to report their "defective" patients to special services. And they, in turn, formed whole clinics, in order toin order to accurately study each ward and pass a sentence on him - murder, sterilization, or an attempt at treatment. Of course, in Austria, unlike Germany, doctors used indulgences and could, if desired, not so zealously inform about every suspicion of a hereditary defect. In the infamous Vienna euthanasia department of the Am Spiegelgrund clinic, about 800 children were killed during the Nazi regime in Austria (1938-1945). Death officially occurred as a result of pneumonia, but in reality - after an injection of phenol into the pericardial region, prolonged intake of barbiturates or banal hunger. Germany's statistics on the number of people killed under the same law is incomparably higher.in Austria, unlike Germany, doctors used indulgences and could, if desired, not so zealously inform about every suspicion of a hereditary defect. In the infamous Vienna euthanasia department of the Am Spiegelgrund clinic, about 800 children were killed during the Nazi regime in Austria (1938-1945). Death officially occurred as a result of pneumonia, but in reality - after an injection of phenol into the pericardial region, prolonged intake of barbiturates or banal hunger. Germany's statistics on the number of people killed under the same law is incomparably higher.in Austria, unlike Germany, doctors used indulgences and could, if desired, not so zealously inform about every suspicion of a hereditary defect. In the infamous Vienna euthanasia department of the Am Spiegelgrund clinic, about 800 children were killed during the Nazi regime in Austria (1938-1945). Death officially occurred as a result of pneumonia, but in reality - after an injection of phenol into the pericardial region, prolonged intake of barbiturates or banal hunger. Germany's statistics on the number of people killed under the same law is incomparably higher.but in reality - after an injection of phenol into the pericardial region, prolonged intake of barbiturates or banal hunger. Germany's statistics on the number of people killed under the same law is incomparably higher.but in reality - after an injection of phenol into the pericardial region, prolonged intake of barbiturates or banal hunger. Germany's statistics on the number of people killed under the same law is incomparably higher.
After the fall of the fascist regime, most doctors, except for desperate fanatics, escaped the trial and returned to their daily activities, preferring not to remember or discuss the methods of the recent past (who will remember the old?). Many of them, for example, Heinrich Gross, avoided retaliation to the last and even managed to make a brilliant career. So Asperger was in some way unlucky, unlike his unnamed colleagues. After all, his biography could be completely unpretentious, and everything that he said at the end of his more than successful academic career would not make sense to expose.
… Something like Asperger's answers to the questions of meticulous journalists would be if they took up interviews after he unexpectedly became a "star" in the study of autism in 1981. But fortunately for himself, the doctor died a year before the worldwide recognition. After his death, researchers, not without difficulty, were looking for new archival data that shed light on the true state of affairs. Why not without difficulty? There is an assumption that Asperger, after the fall of the Nazi regime, the Nünberg Tribunal (including over Nazi doctors), the exposure of the policy of racial hygiene, decided to destroy the compromising medical documentation. As head of the Children's Clinic at the University of Vienna, which he took after the end of World War II, this was easy enough to do.
Look, Asperger looked at 34 (1940). At the dawn of his career in the Third Reich, how you look was extremely important. It was possible not to have a pleasant appearance, the main thing is not to be like a Jew. And Hans Asperger was not. In the medical and pedagogical department (Heilpädagogische), where he came to work after graduating from university, many of the leading specialists of the department were Jews, who were soon "washed away" by a wave of anti-Semitism outside Europe, freeing up prestigious jobs for novice specialists (65% of Vienna doctors were classified as Jews and deprived of work in accordance with Nazi law). For this reason, Asperger's career took off sharply, and he soon took over as head of the department. Ironically, Asperger’s close friend Georg Frank, after fleeing to the United States, began working with Leo Kanner at Hopkins Hospital. Kanner, in turn, was the first to publish an article on childhood autism in 1943 and gained worldwide fame, and everyone forgot about Asperger's article in 1938 and his doctoral dissertation in 1943 until the publications of 1981, as already mentioned, a year after his death. So the question of who was the first to describe autism remains open.
Leo Kanner, commonly regarded as the pioneer of autism.
Promotional video:
Let's digress a little and talk about the Heilpädagogische branch. Founded in 1911 by Erwin Lazar at the dawn of eugenics, it gained fame under the director, Clemens von Pirke. Heilpädagogik drew inspiration from a variety of concepts, including Cesare Lombroso's criminal biology (the doctrine of traits for calculating a natural-born criminal), Ernst Kretschmer's constitutional types (the relationship between appearance and mental disorder), and Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis (needs no introduction).
After Pirke's suicide in 1929, Nazi Franz Hamburger became the head physician of the Children's Hospital at the University of Vienna, who appointed Asperger head of Heilpedagogic. The adaptation of this world-renowned Viennese "brand" to the new political order and its paradigm of racial hygiene was facilitated by the fact that, since 1930, Hamburger "purged" it from the influence of factors such as psychoanalysis, and established the predominance of a purely biological paradigm based on the importance of inherited " constitutional "defects. Asperger, who began his career with Hamburger, shared many of these views, including an undeniable and determined opposition to psychoanalysis:
Ideas about "hereditary constitutions" as the root of most mental problems, his bias towards victims of sexual and other violence, unshakable belief in closed educational institutions, frequent abuse of his authority as a "genius teacher" during his career, rigidity of thinking in general … all of this influenced the lives of thousands of children, who were often stigmatized with the label of "constitutional inferiority" on scientifically questionable grounds in the post-war period.
Erwin Jekelius (mentioned above) practiced in Asperger's department, who soon took over as head of the pediatric euthanasia program at the Am Spiegelgrund Clinic at the Steinhof Psychiatric Hospital in Vienna. Of course, officially it did not have such an inhuman name, it was too much even for the Nazis. However, the inhabitants of Vienna (including doctors) were aware of the methods of "treatment" of children unnecessary to the state system. During the height of the so-called "T4" campaign (the official name of the eugenic program of the German National Socialists for the sterilization, and later the physical destruction of people with mental disorders, mentally retarded and hereditary patients), relatives of patients staged public protests in front of Steinhof. They were unable to prevent the transport of Steinhof's roughly 3,200 patients to the gas chamber at Hartheim, but they took a bold stance against the regime.
Erwin Yekelius.
From the above, it can be assumed that Asperger had close working relationships with key Nazi leaders in Vienna's health care during the Anschluss years.
The only thing that spoiled the new regime's pleasant first impression of our hero was his Catholicism, but Hamburger most likely vouched for his subordinate. In 1940, the Gestapo in a personal file pointed to his "political impeccability."
Conclusion on the recognition of Asperger “politically impeccable” and those who “comply with National Socialist racial and sterilization laws” (WStLA, 1.3.2.202. A5, Personalakt)
Later, in his post and while defending his doctoral dissertation on autism, Asperger did not experience any persecution, this can be said for sure. It would be ironic to note whether his department colleague Josef Feldner had any difficulties in his work when, risking his life, for years he hid the Jewish student Hansi Bushtin from the Nazis? In any case, Asperger, as a cautious, calm, timid man, did not participate in saving the young Jew, although he knew about his existence. There is an assumption that he went to the front, because he feared Feldner's exposure and subsequent reprisals by the Gestapo, and not at all because he had conflicts with the authorities.
During the formation of the "clean nation", the department of curative education (Heilpädagogische) became one of the key departments for the selection of patients for subsequent sterilization or euthanasia. In his article, Cech spoke in detail about the routing of patients using the example of two girls:
It turns out that the "Schindler image", based on these and other examples described in Cech's article, is not suitable for Asperger. One gets the impression that the "pioneer of autism" was not imbued with great compassion for his charges, but simply did his job well and conscientiously in the realities of the Nazi era in accordance with the standards of the Third Reich. In some children, he saw some potential for rehabilitation and socialization, in others he saw only a "learning limit" and recommended that they be placed in Spiegelgrund, increasing their risks of not getting out of there alive. Quite in the spirit of the racial hygiene policy. Moreover, Hans Asperger often made harsher diagnoses for patients. After admission to Spiegelgrund, the attending physicians often changed them to more accurate ones, making more optimistic predictions, which allowed the children to avoid the department of pediatric euthanasia. The example described above by Edith H.- more proof of this.
As we can see, Asperger was not a fanatic, sadist and psychopath. His work on autism was also not connected with the medical experiences of the Nazis in concentration camps. We see only a description of the operation of a working screw of a medical machine of the XX century. Isn't it just another reason to think about ethics in neuroscience?
Author: Marina Kalinkina
