ABC Radio Australia – PM with Linda Mottram Interview Edith Sheffer – The truth behind the namesake of Asperger’s Syndrome
LINDA MOTTRAM: Well, there’ve been huge advances in the understanding of autism but the story of what was separately named Asperger’s syndrome has an unsettling past.
The syndrome was named after the war-time Vienna-based, paediatrician, Dr Hans Asperger, and a cloud has long hung over his sympathies.
The World Health Organization recently folded Asperger’s syndrome into the broader term, “autism spectrum disorder”, but researchers have been determined that the truth about Hans Asperger must be known.
A new research paper this week by Dr Herwig Czech says that previously unseen documents prove that he sympathised with Nazi ideology and helped the Nazis kill children.
Edith Sheffer worked closely with Dr Czech. She’s a senior fellow at the Institute of European Studies at the University of California, Berkley, and her new book, “Asperger’s Children: The Origin of Autism in Nazi Vienna” is out early next month.
I asked her what the papers from this latest research tell us.
EDITH SHEFFER: They tell us that he was very much involved in the top echelons of the euthanasia program.
Czech considers him more of a cog in the machine; I consider more of an active perpetrator.
He was associating with the then who were leaders in the program of Vienna, including one engaged to Hitler’s sister, and he would transfer or endorse the transfer of dozens of children to their deaths at Spiegelgrund, the killing centre.
LINDA MOTTRAM: Hans Asperger was researching in this field before the Nazis annexed Austria. How did his work change under the Nazis?
EDITH SHEFFER: That is really the key question. He, in fact, wrote before the Nazis annexed Vienna that he did not believe in issuing children diagnoses.
He believed that children had unique characters and that they shouldn’t be labelled.
Just months after the Nazis annexed Vienna, however, he saw an opportunity in naming his own diagnosis.
Seventy-eight per cent of the medical facility at the University of Vienna had been purged and Asperger’s clinic was surviving unscathed, and he saw an opportunity and gave a talk and published a paper on autistic psychopathy – basically echoing his senior colleagues in Nazi child psychiatry identifying children seen to lack ‘collective spirit’ which they called gamut (phonetic).
It was a term in Nazi child psychiatry for children who couldn’t participate in collective activities such as the Hitler Youth. And so Asperger’s senior colleagues began diagnosing children for lack of social spirit and Asperger, after the Nazis annexed Vienna, followed in their footsteps, and every year employed ever more fascist rhetoric in his publications to describe what autistic psychopathy was.
So by 1944, in the post-doctoral thesis he wrote for promotion under his ardent Nazi mentor, he said that autistic psychopaths were unable to become members of the greater organism, which is clearly fascist language, and you know, his ideas of the diagnosis are deeply inflected by ideology.
Also most telling is after the fall of the Third Reich, he never wrote about autistic psychopathy again.
He turned away from his Nazi-era work, which to me raises the question about the extent to which he believed in what he was writing in the first place, or to what extent was his work shaped by circumstances.
LINDA MOTTRAM: Can we know how many children suffered and/or died because of Hans Asperger?
EDITH SHEFFER: Medical records are fragmentary – 789 children are known to have perished at Spiegelgrund, the killing centre to which he sent children.
Some of these transfer orders are written in pencil and shorthand but these records have been combed over, and I think that it is unlikely any more discoveries will be made.
Czech and I have done comprehensive research, as have other euthanasia scholars in Vienna, and I think that this will be what we know for the time being.
LINDA MOTTRAM: And so we know about individual children, do we, or suffered or died?
EDITH SHEFFER: Yes, we do. There are two girls that were directly transferred from Asperger’s clinic who perished, and he was a member of a city commission that authorised the transfer of 35 children who then perished.
I make the point, however, that I think we should consider the children Asperger transferred who did not necessarily die. I think the moral moment that matters is knowingly sending someone to a potential death, right?
If you’re transferring someone to Auschwitz, does it matter if they die or not? You are still putting them at risk for death.
And I found case studies of children that he was transferring and designating for death who did not perish.
And in fact, one of the chapters in my book discusses his different treatment of boys and girls in his clinic. Boys that he diagnosed with autism versus girls where he noted similar traits of social detachment; and those two girls were sent to Spiegelgrund arguably designated for death, whereas the two boys were given compassionate care, play therapy and tutoring on the ward.
So he had a very different treatment of those boys and girls in his clinic.
LINDA MOTTRAM: So why, in the face of these long lingering questions about Dr Hans Asperger, did the idea persist that while he worked under the Nazis he actually cared for the children he saw – a difficult but honourable accommodation, if you like?
EDITH SHEFFER: This was an image that he himself crafted. He claimed in post-war interviews that he had resisted the Nazi Party, and this seemed credible to many people because he never joined the Nazi Party.
Although this was not unusual for someone at the time; only three in 10 physicians in Vienna did join the Nazi Party, so not being a member is really not evidence of his political sympathies. And in fact, he did join other Nazi organisations and worked for the government.
So I actually became interested in this story because I had heard of Asperger’s reputation as having rescued children from the Nazi killings, and stressing, in fact, their special abilities in order to stress that they could be useful to the national community, and the idea that autism was really a psychiatric Schindler’s list.
And so I went off to Vienna- I’m the mother of a child with autism and I loved this idea – and I went off and my very first day in the archives opened up a district party file on Asperger and saw right away that this hero story was really more of a horror story.
LINDA MOTTRAM: So even with this understanding now of Asperger and his Nazi sympathies, as you and Czech describe them, can we discount completely the work that he did to advance an understanding and acceptance of autism in this century, I suppose?
EDITH SHEFFER: Well, that’s a really good question and I would say we cannot discount his work if it was in fact his work, but our idea of Asperger syndrome is not, in fact, what Asperger had in mind.
It was Lorna Wing who came across his paper from 1944 who published in 1981 on Asperger syndrome; and it was she who cleansed what he wrote of its Nazi rhetoric.
So if you read his original publications, he is describing children, as I said, in Fascist terms. He speaks of them as unable to learn, as grotesque, as dilapidated.
He says that they are inherently sadistic. He calls them psychopaths and psychopathy in German psychiatry had criminal connotations of malicious behaviour, and this understanding of autism is antithetical to our understanding today.
LINDA MOTTRAM: It’s an unsettling situation, isn’t it, and some might say let sleeping dogs lie. Why shouldn’t we let sleeping dogs lie?
EDITH SHEFFER: I think it is terribly important that we remember the history of the Holocaust and that the victims do not get lost to time.
I think the story of Asperger is really a cautionary tale of how a good man can slowly slide into more and more nefarious actions unwittingly and unintentionally; and that is a lesson that is important for all of us to learn.
LINDA MOTTRAM: And so what are the implications then for Hans Asperger’s legacy? The condition that bears his name, should that be changed?
EDITH SHEFFER: In my opinion it should. In medical ethics, eponymous diagnoses are granted to individuals to either credit that individual for discovering a condition or to commend them for honorary achievement; and in Asperger’s case, I really believe neither is true.
There are numerous cases of diagnoses named after Nazi doctors that have been renamed.
One well-known example is Reiter syndrome, which was named after Hans Reiter who killed prisoners at Buchenwald, has been renamed reactive arthritis. And that’s arguably a much more helpful label for patients treated for it.
And medicine in general is moving away from eponymous diagnoses to descriptive diagnoses.
LINDA MOTTRAM: Edith Sheffer, whose book is out soon. It is called “Asperger’s Children: The Origin of Autism in Nazi Vienna”. It is still a very controversial issue.
Edith is at the University of California, Berkley.