Dr. Hans Asperger’s Complicity in Nazi Mass Murder of Disabled Children

“Child killing was the Reich’s first system of mass murder,” –Edith Sheffer, author of Asperger’s Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna.

The book Asperger’s Children offers a crucial and unsettling re-evaluation of Dr. Hans Asperger’s legacy. The book reveals that Asperger’s work on autism was deeply influenced by the horrific racial policies of Nazi Germany. Asperger was not a benevolent figure, but rather complicit in the Nazi eugenics program and he was complicit in the murder of disabled children who were “unfit” for society.

This was part of the Aktion T4 program, a secret euthanasia program which officially operated between 1939 and 1941. Their target was to kill individuals with physical and mental disabilities, including hereditary and congenital conditions. The Nazi ideology of racial hygiene and eugenics fueled their aim to create a pure Ayran race. They killed their victims whom they called “useless eaters” and “burdens” by lethal injection, starvation, or gassing them with carbon monoxide.

The Trump administration is attempting to organize a study of autistic people in order to “cure” autism, repeating the rhetoric that they are “burdens” and unfit for society.

Upwards of 300,000 adults and 10,000 children were killed for their disabilities in Nazi Germany, and an estimated 400,000 people were legally sterilized, with many more illegal procedures.

Civilian complicity in the 37 child euthanasia centers extended beyond the medical professionals. The maintenance staff, cooks, cleaners, delivery drivers, city officials, and especially the parents were all passive participants in the mass murder of children.

Parents delivered their children to the hospitals for “rehabilitation” sometimes knowing they would not see the child again, and sometimes believing they would receive treatment. Several parents rescued their children from the hospitals when they knew the true nature of the facilities. When public knowledge of both the child and adult killing program caused outrage, the T4 program was officially ended in 1941—although the murder of disabled people continued in other ways.

Portrait of Dr. Hans Asperger, circa 1940, unknown photographer, public domain

The book details how the Nazis viewed these children only by their ability to conform and contribute to society; if they could not conform or be “rehabilitated,” they had no value and were “euthanized.” Sheffer shows Asperger’s active participation in this system, highlighting his adoption of Nazi ideology in his writings and his direct contribution to the transfer of children to Spiegelgrund, the child-killing centers.

While Asperger advocated for the education of some higher-functioning autistic boys seen as potentially useful, he labeled others as having “negative worth,” leading to their deaths. Asperger identified a pattern of behavior in boys that he called “autistic psychopathy.”

His definition included:

• A lack of empathy
• Little ability to form friendships
• One-sided conversations
• Intense absorption in a special interest
• Clumsy movements

It was not until the 1980s when the term “Asperger’s Syndrome” was popularized by a British psychiatrist named Dr. Lorna Wing. The term gained recognition in the fields of psychology and psychiatry, and became a formal diagnosis in 1992.

In 2013, “Asperger’s Syndrome” was removed from the DSM-V due to the controversy because Hans Asperger was complicit in the Nazi regime.

Asperger’s Children compels readers to confront the uncomfortable origins of autism research.

The intimacy of the child euthanasia program, is deeply disturbing. Sheffer illustrates that the “doctors personally examined the children they condemned” to die.

“Nurses personally fed and changed the sheets of the children they killed. They knew the children’s names, voices, faces, and personalities. Killings were typically done in the children’s own beds. Death came slowly, painfully, as children would be starved or given overdoses of barbiturates until they grew ill and died, usually of pneumonia.”

The book offers a historically informed understanding of autism’s origins.