MENTAL HYGIENE

Posted on 2019/01/20 by secret santa

NAZI CHILD PSYCHIATRY
https://www.theatlantic.com/2010/10/autisms-first-child/
https://www.theatlantic.com/2015/autism-history-aspergers-kanner/
https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-life-and-religion/196348/the-doctor-and-the-nazis
https://www.scientificamerican.com/how-history-forgot-the-woman-who-defined-autism/
https://www.npr.org/2016/was-dr-asperger-a-nazi-the-question-still-haunts-autism
https://www.theguardian.com/2018/aspergers-children-origins-autism-nazi-vienna-edith-sheffer-review
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/18/books/review/aspergers-children-edith-sheffer.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/31/opinion/sunday/nazi-history-asperger.html
The Nazi History Behind ‘Asperger’
by Edith Sheffer / March 31, 2018

“Edith Sheffer, a senior fellow at the Institute of European Studies at UC Berkeley, is the author “Asperger’s Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna.”

“My son’s school, David Starr Jordan Middle School, is being renamed. A seventh grader exposed the honoree, Stanford University’s first president, as a prominent eugenicist of the early 20th century who championed sterilization of the “unfit.” This sort of debate is happening all over the country, as communities fight over whether to tear down Confederate monuments and whether Andrew Jackson deserves to remain on the $20 bill. How do we decide whom to honor and whom to disavow? There are some straightforward cases: Hitler Squares were renamed after World War II; Lenin statues were hauled away after the collapse of the Soviet Union. But other, less famous monsters of the past continue to define our landscape and language. I have spent the past seven years researching the Nazi past of Dr. Hans Asperger.

Asperger is credited with shaping our ideas of autism and Asperger syndrome, diagnoses given to people believed to have limited social skills and narrow interests. The official diagnosis of Asperger disorder has recently been dropped from the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders because clinicians largely agreed it wasn’t a separate condition from autism. But Asperger syndrome is still included in the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases, which is used around the globe. Moreover, the name remains in common usage. It is an archetype in popular culture, a term we apply to loved ones and an identity many people with autism adopt for themselves. Most of us never think about the man behind the name. But we should. Asperger was long seen as a resister of the Third Reich, yet his work was, in fact, inextricably linked with the rise of Nazism and its deadly programs.

He first encountered Nazi child psychiatry when he traveled from Vienna to Germany in 1934, at age 28. His senior colleagues there were developing diagnoses of social shortcomings for children who they said lacked connection to the community, uneager to join in collective Reich activities such as the Hitler Youth. Asperger at first warned against classifying children, writing in 1937 that “it is impossible to establish a rigid set of criteria for a diagnosis.” But right after the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938 — and the purge of his Jewish and liberal associates from the University of Vienna — Asperger introduced his own diagnosis of social detachment: “autistic psychopathy.”

As Asperger sought promotion to associate professor, his writings about the diagnosis grew harsher. He stressed the “cruelty” and “sadistic traits” of the children he studied, itemizing their “autistic acts of malice.” He also called autistic psychopaths “intelligent automata.” Some laud Asperger’s language about the “special abilities” of children on the “most favorable” end of his autistic “range,” speculating that he applied his diagnosis to protect them from Nazi eugenics — a kind of psychiatric Schindler’s list. But this was in keeping with the selective benevolence of Nazi psychiatry; Asperger also warned that “less favorable cases” would “roam the streets” as adults, “grotesque and dilapidated.” Words such as these could be a death sentence in the Third Reich. And in fact, dozens of children whom Asperger evaluated were killed.

Child “euthanasia” was the Reich’s first program of mass extermination, begun by Hitler in July 1939 to get rid of children regarded as a drain on the state and a danger to its gene pool. Most of the victims were physically healthy, neither suffering nor terminally ill. They were simply deemed to have physical, mental or behavioral defects. At least 5,000 children perished in around 37 “special wards.” Am Spiegelgrund, in Vienna, was one of the deadliest. Killings were done in the youths’ own beds, as nurses issued overdoses of sedatives until the children grew ill and died, usually of pneumonia. Asperger worked closely with the top figures in Vienna’s euthanasia program, including Erwin Jekelius, the director of Am Spiegelgrund, who was engaged to Hitler’s sister. My archival research, along with that of other scholars of euthanasia like Herwig Czech, the author of a forthcoming paper on this subject in the journal Molecular Autism, show that Asperger recommended the transfer of children to Spiegelgrund. Dozens of them were killed there. One of his patients, 5-year-old Elisabeth Schreiber, could speak only one word, “mama.” A nurse reported that she was “very affectionate” and, “if treated strictly, cries and hugs the nurse.” Elisabeth was killed, and her brain kept in a collection of over 400 children’s brains for research in Spiegelgrund’s cellar.

In the postwar period, Asperger distanced himself from his Nazi-era work on autistic psychopathy. He turned to religious themes and social commentary about child rearing. He would probably have been a footnote in the history of autism research had it not been for Lorna Wing, a British psychiatrist who tracked down Asperger’s 1944 article on autistic psychopathy. She thought it lent important context to the narrower definition of autism then in use, and by the early ’80s, “Asperger syndrome,” and the idea of a broader autism “spectrum,” had entered the medical lexicon. In 1994, Asperger disorder was added to the American manual of mental disorders, where it remained until it was reclassified in 2013 as autism spectrum disorder. Yet Asperger syndrome is still an official diagnosis in most countries. And it is ubiquitous in popular culture, where “Aspergery” is too often invoked to describe general social awkwardness, a stereotype for classmates and co-workers that overshadows their individuality.

Does the man behind the name matter? To medical ethics, it does. Naming a disorder after someone is meant to credit and commend, and Asperger merited neither. His definition of “autistic psychopaths” is antithetical to understandings of autism today, and he sent dozens of children to their deaths. Other conditions named after Nazi-era doctors who were involved in programs of extermination (like Reiter syndrome) now go by alternative labels (reactive arthritis). And medicine in general is moving toward more descriptive labels. Besides, the American Psychiatric Association has ruled that Asperger isn’t even a useful descriptor. We should stop saying “Asperger.” It’s one way to honor the children killed in his name as well as those still labeled with it.”

DE-NAZIFYING the DSM
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25826582
https://molecularautism.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13229-018-0208-6
https://www.spectator.co.uk/did-hans-asperger-save-children-from-the-nazis-or-sell-them-out/
https://www.theguardian.com/2016/different-key-story-autism-review-donvan-zucker
https://lareviewofbooks.org/de-nazifying-the-dsm-on-aspergers-children-the-origins-of-autism-in-nazi-vienna
On “Asperger’s Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna”
by Andrew Scull / December 10, 2018

“For nearly four decades now, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association, or DSM for short, has exercised a stranglehold of sorts over the mental health sector in the United States, and indeed around the world. Since the publication of the manual’s third edition in 1980, psychiatrists have used a symptom-based approach to name and categorize varieties of mental disturbances — which essentially mirrors the 18th century’s approach to physical illness. As was also true then, there do not exist today any technologies that lend authority to psychiatric diagnoses: no x-rays or MRIs, no blood tests or laboratory analyses that would allow us to make even the most basic distinctions between mental health and mental illness. This unsatisfactory situation has invited controversy and led some misguided souls to deny the very reality of mental illness. The fact that the DSM has passed through three editions and two interim revisions since 1980 is eloquent testimony to the psychiatric profession’s struggle with delineating its territory. Yet, however haphazard, the diagnostic category or categories to which patients are assigned have profound social and medical ramifications. And American professionals — even clinical psychologists who reject the DSM’s model — have no choice but to use (and thereby uphold) these categories if they expect to be paid by insurance companies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvXsXWtGJ90

It is hardly any wonder that the steady proliferation of psychiatric “illnesses” has met with skepticism, alarm, and ridicule. Are “hoarding disorder” and “school phobia” genuine diseases? What of hyper-sexuality or temper dysregulation disorder or oppositional defiant disorder? Some of us are extremely shy. Are we then suffering from social anxiety disorder? If we are prostrated by grief, are we then candidates for a diagnosis of depression? This kind of blurring of the boundaries between normal human variations and mental pathology has not only elicited plenty of criticism, but accusations of professional imperialism — of psychiatry colonizing every area of human life. Not coincidentally, it has also provided a pretext for vast increases in psychoactive drugs prescriptions, and for even larger increases in Big Pharma profits. But the DSM giveth, and the DSM, in its various versions, taketh away. The second edition of the manual, for example, declared that homosexuality, previously labeled a mental illness, was nothing of the sort.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0TrcbUyjSM

This change derived from a decision taken by a majority vote of America’s psychiatrists — surely an odd way to decide a scientific question, though, to be sure, one that all but the most bigoted would eventually endorse as appropriate. But that very evolution of public opinion demonstrates how deeply intertwined with social and moral concerns many psychiatric diagnoses turn out to be. As for the third edition of the manual, and its first revision seven years later, these iterations stripped away all the forms of neurosis that had previously grounded psychoanalytic practice, including a psychiatric diagnosis like hysteria, which had existed for centuries. Carefully orchestrated by Robert Spitzer, the Columbia University psychiatrist in charge of the project, the elimination of these categories helped to end Freudian domination of American psychiatry, ushering in the biological reductionism that has taken its place.

As the fifth, and latest, edition of the DSM neared completion in 2012, critics railed against yet another prospective deletion from the psychiatric pantheon. Other features of the new manual were drawing fierce criticism from within the profession, but in this case some of the loudest cries now came from patients — or rather patients’ families. Why? Because the press began to report that, alongside the inclusion of a host of new kinds of “illness,” such as attenuated psychosis symptoms syndrome, the new manual would eliminate a category of mental disorder called Asperger’s syndrome, whose prevalence had increased exponentially over the previous decade and a half. This news provoked enormous pushback from families with children who had been diagnosed with the disorder. The reality of the problems their children presented (at home, in school, and in the community) was about to be denied by those who had authority in these matters. And with the disappearance of the diagnosis, the social and educational services the label afforded these families might vanish — a disturbing, even frightening prospect. Parents’ protests were in vain. When the new edition of the DSM appeared in May 2013, Asperger’s syndrome had indeed been cast on the historical scrap heap, swallowed up in the much larger, more amorphous category of autism spectrum disorders.

Mainstream psychiatrists argued that distinctions among different developmental disorders — autism, Asperger’s syndrome, childhood disintegrative syndrome, Rett syndrome, and pervasive developmental disorders not otherwise specified — were inconsistently applied and obscured the existence of a continuum of disabilities. Parents on the one hand resisted the assimilation of Asperger’s syndrome into what was perceived as the more devastating diagnosis of autism, and on the other hand worried that their offspring might find themselves denied a diagnosis that was crucial to their eligibility for the social and educational services they had come to depend upon. In everyday life, psychiatry’s decision to deny hysteria the legitimacy of a professional diagnosis has not prevented ordinary folk from using the term, attaching to it certain kinds of emotional and behavioral performance. The same is likely to happen, one suspects, with Asperger’s syndrome. Almost certainly it will survive in the popular consciousness, and perhaps also in doctors’ consulting rooms, though it will doubtless disappear from official medical records.

Families who shrink from having their children labeled as autistic will doubtless continue using it. Yet the label itself was coined less than a half century ago, and its history is murky in many senses of the term. It is that history that the Stanford historian Edith Sheffer has now uncovered in her fascinating and disturbing new book published earlier this year, Asperger’s Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna. An impressive piece of historical detective work, it deserves a wide readership. Rumors have circulated for some time that Hans Asperger was a Nazi collaborator who sent autistic children to their deaths. Two recent books on autism, John Donvan and Caren Zucker’s In a Different Key (2016) and Steve Silberman’s NeuroTribes (2015), advanced radically discordant views on the subject, the former denouncing Asperger as an opportunist who was complicit in the murder of disturbed children, and the latter arguing that he was a compassionate clinician who under extraordinarily difficult and perilous conditions tried his best to save such children. Neither interpretation was grounded in a careful review of the historical record, so it was a debate that was difficult to settle. Sheffer’s research does much to resolve the issue, and in light of her findings, perhaps the label Asperger’s syndrome ought to be cast aside after all.

https://youtu.be/UlMOj8v_IqE

The practice of giving an eponymous name to a disease — naming it after someone as in Bell’s palsy, Parkinson’s disease, Crohn’s disease — was once relatively common in medicine. Typically, as in these cases, the label honors the physician who first delineated the disorder, though occasionally, as in the case of Lou Gehrig’s disease (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), the “honoree” was an unfortunate sufferer from the disorder. Asperger’s syndrome is true to type, being named after the Viennese psychiatrist who supposedly first linked a particular set of symptoms and behaviors into a single entity, or rather advanced the hypothesis that autism was not a single entity, but a spectrum of disorders. In reality, though, it was a British child psychiatrist, Lorna Wing, who first coined the label “Asperger’s syndrome” some decades later, in 1981, using it as a shorthand for high functioning autism.

It bears mentioning that Wing’s own daughter was autistic, as is Sheffer’s son. These were not abstract issues for either of them. Both autism and Asperger’s syndrome are identified with Austrian child psychiatrists, albeit men of very different backgrounds, temperaments, and career paths. Autism as a diagnosis is most commonly associated with Leo Kanner, who had relocated to the United States in 1924, first to take up a post at the Yankton State Hospital in South Dakota. In 1928, he obtained an appointment in the psychiatry department at Johns Hopkins, and it was here that he wrote his 1943 paper on “Autistic Disturbances of Affective Conduct,” a summary of his clinical observations of 11 children who were highly intelligent but displayed “a powerful desire for aloneness” coupled with “an obsessive insistence on persistent sameness.” Kanner borrowed the term “autism” from Eugen Bleuler, who is famous for being the first to diagnose and describe schizophrenia. Bleuler had used autism to describe the disconnection of schizophrenics from the outside world. But it was Kanner’s paper, and his application of the concept to children, that brought autism to public attention and inspired subsequent generations of researchers. Such children, he argued, exhibited characteristic patterns of social withdrawal, characterized by restricted social relationships, limited speech, repetitive language and behavior, and obsessions with the routine.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrA4NHvFTuo

Many parents were grateful to Kanner for providing a diagnostic label that helped give some semblance of order to the chaotic world into which their child’s social isolation and often self-harming behavior had plunged them, and Kanner’s formulation encouraged others to attend to and undertake research on the condition. But for over a decade in the 1950s and after, that sense of gratitude curdled. Kanner openly entertained the idea that it was the emotional constipation of the parents, and most especially the mother, that explained their children’s psychosis. It was a notion he came to repent of and recant by the late 1960s, but for a generation the idea of the refrigerator mother inflicted blame and misery on already traumatized families, largely through the self-promoting efforts of another Austrian refugee, the psychoanalyst and charlatan Bruno Bettelheim.

Bettelheim suggested that a crucial element in “curing” autism was a parentectomy — a severing of all ties between pathological parents and the child they had brought into the world. Kanner was a Jew, and it is not hard to guess what his fate would have been had he remained in Germany. Instead, he was able to play an important role in rescuing hundreds of Jewish physicians from the death camps, even welcoming some of them into his own home. Kanner was also active in socially progressive causes. For example, local judges in cahoots with prominent lawyers, had arranged for some mildly disturbed mental patients to be released from state mental hospitals and placed in the homes of wealthy Baltimoreans, where they served as unpaid “servants.” Kanner exposed their fate (sexual exploitation, descent into prostitution, imprisonment, and death) and so forced the abandonment of what amounted to a program of state-sponsored slavery.

https://vimeo.com/45195203

The creation of the diagnosis of childhood autism was an instance of what the distinguished American sociologist Robert Merton dubbed simultaneous and multiple discoveries in science. For in Vienna, at almost the very moment Kanner was articulating his vision of the disorder, the aforementioned child psychiatrist Hans Asperger was also arguing for recognition of the condition. Indeed, he had given a lecture on the subject as early as 1938, though his key paper on the subject did not appear until five years later, just as Kanner was publishing his own findings. Some have suggested that Kanner borrowed his ideas from Asperger, but Sheffer rightly rejects this idea, pointing out that Asperger’s 1938 lecture was published only in the ephemeral Viennese Clinical Weekly. The more likely explanation is that both men borrowed from the clinical work of Georg Frankl and Anni Weiss, a Jewish couple who had begun their work in Vienna. Kanner had helped rescue one of them from the clutches of the Nazis. Given that the Austrian Anschluss meant that Vienna had now become part of the Third Reich, it is perhaps unsurprising that, in the English-speaking world, Asperger’s work was ignored and overlooked for several decades until Lorna Wing discovered and publicized it.

Before the rise of Austrian fascism in the 1930s, Sheffer reminds us, the capital of the old Austro-Hungarian empire had been called Red Vienna, and with good reason. In the 1920s, the political program of the municipal authorities was detached from the policies and preferences to be found in the rural and conservative remnants of the empire. The Viennese authorities had pioneered programs of social welfare, public housing for the working classes, and free medical care. Hyperinflation and the depression, however, began to unravel these experiments, which then withered in the face of the rise of the authoritarian right. In the ’20s, government intervention in the lives of the poor was increasing, particularly when it came to child-rearing, with predictable and distinctly mixed consequences. Social workers built an extensive apparatus to mold child-rearing practices among the lower orders, and at times did not shrink from removing children from parents whose child-rearing practices offended their professional sensibilities, consigning the “rescued” to institutions where they were frequently neglected or abused. As the country slid toward fascism, the capture of this apparatus by those with a different agenda allowed for the realization of ever-more sinister possibilities to be realized. It was within this context and working within established child welfare services that Hans Asperger made his career.

Where Kanner was a progressive Jew, Asperger was a conservative Catholic. From the earliest stages of his career, he was associated with and sponsored by extreme right-wing elements. Franz Hamburger, for example, who appointed the 25-year-old Asperger to his first post at the University of Vienna’s Children’s Hospital, employed a strict ideological test for all appointments at the institution he ran. He purged liberal and Jewish faculty appointed before he took charge, and most of his own appointees went on to be major Nazi enthusiasts and proponents of the euthanasia of children deemed mentally ill. Some had a direct role in the killing. Hamburger was zealous from the start: he joined the Nazi Party in 1934 when it was still illegal and regarded as a terrorist organization. Another of his other protégés, Erwin Jekelius, a close associate of Asperger’s over the years, would become the leading figure in the extermination of the mentally ill, adult and child alike. Asperger idolized Hamburger, continuing to praise him in extravagant terms as late as 1977. As a devout Catholic, Asperger never took the fateful step of joining the Nazi Party, even after the Anschluss of 1938. That was fortunate for his later reputation, and for his ability to continue his career after the war. But those who try to portray him as some sort of Schindler figure, using his position to rescue children from Nazi extermination will have to reckon in the future with the materials Sheffer has uncovered.

Engelbert Dollfuss, the Austrian chancellor from 1932 onward, seized dictatorial power within months of his appointment, dissolving Parliament, banning the Austrian Nazi Party, and ruling by decree. In February 1934, he also banned the socialist movement, provoking civil unrest that was violently put down. He then cemented the rule of an Austro-fascist movement modeled on Mussolini’s regime in Italy. (Though he was assassinated in July 1934 as part of a failed coup, the fascist regime endured until Hitler annexed Austria in 1938.) Within days of Dollfuss’s consolidation of Austro-fascist rule, Sheffer informs us, Asperger had joined the ultra-nationalist Fatherland Front. He subsequently held leadership positions in a variety of extreme nationalist and antisemitic organizations, including the Bund Neuland. Asperger had a long-standing commitment to far-right politics. As Jews were systematically purged from academic positions and from medicine, he seized opportunities to advance professionally, and after the Anschluss when violence against Jews became yet more extreme, he swore an oath to Adolf Hitler, and registered his Aryan bloodline. In the years that followed, he became a compliant and willing partner in the macabre version of psychiatry that flourished under the Nazis.

Some will dismiss these activities as the actions of a careerist, as if that is sufficient excuse for his behavior. Others will be tempted to see a consistent pattern linking his politics to his conduct. Like Sheffer, I incline to the latter view. Asperger’s defenders have constructed a benevolent image of him. His writings on autism emphasized that children of this sort existed on a continuum, and that the higher functioning among them — those who would later be diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome — could, with proper “understanding, love and guidance” find “their place in the organism of the social community.” Some of them, he stressed, possessed special talents, and with proper attention and therapeutic measures could become of particular “social value,” especially in specialized technical professions. In other words, autistic children who “did not really fit into this world” might, through professional intervention and care, be transformed into useful contributors to the community — an argument, one might say, for neurodiversity avant la lettre. “The example of autism,” he wrote in 1943, “shows particularly well how even abnormal personalities can be capable of development and adjustment.” But Asperger was, it turns out, a Janus-faced figure. Sheffer’s meticulous archival research into Asperger’s writings and professional activities has brought to light an entirely different facet of the man. For those Asperger saw as remediable, he indeed served as an advocate, but that was only part of the story. Others were, in his view, irremediable, undesirable versions of humanity: their biological defects pushed them into the ranks of autistic psychopaths incapable of connecting with the collective, examples of the “useless eaters” depicted in Nazi propaganda. For creatures such as these, death was the preferred treatment option.

Steve Silberman, who has been one of Asperger’s primary defenders, acknowledged in a revised edition of NeuroTribes that Asperger had sent a single patient, Herta Schreiber, to her death in the wards of Am Spiegelgrund, the children’s wing of Steinhof, the huge mental hospital that had been constructed above Vienna in the early 20th century. Silberman excused that action by arguing that brutal regimes like the Third Reich can compel even well-intentioned people to do monstrous things. Despite the fragmentary nature of the surviving records, Sheffer is able to document not one but dozens of such cases. She reminds us that in 1941, Asperger co-founded an organization that went under the Orwellian name of the Vienna Society for Curative Education (Wiener heilpaedagogischen Gesellschaft) with his one-time lieutenant, the ardent Nazi, Jekelius — a man once engaged to Hitler’s sister Paula, and by this time a notorious mass murderer, having sent 4,000 adult patients and more than a hundred children to their deaths. (As early as 1940, Jekelius was referred to by the Viennese as “the mass murderer of the Steinhof.”) The society’s other co-founder was Franz Hamburger, who had acted behind the scenes to organize and construct the killing machine, and who openly decried how “excessive care of the inferior allows inferior genetic material to circulate,” a problem that could be resolved by allowing children with “poor constitutions” to die.

In 1942, Asperger was a member of a seven-person commission for the city of Vienna that collectively examined children who had fallen into the “care” net. Sheffer cites the Austrian scholar Herwig Czech who discovered that, in a single day, these men examined the files of 210 children at the Gugging care facility, determining that nine girls and 26 boys were “incapable of educational and developmental engagement.” All were sent to Am Spiegelgrund, their files stamped “dispatched for Jekelius Action.” “Jekelius Action” was a euphemism for death. Asperger referred children to Am Spiegelgrund in his other capacities as well, and many of these referrals survive as well. Though not himself administering euthanasia, he was without any doubt “trusted in the highest echelons of the killing system” and, if not as active as some of his colleagues, “he was in the club.”

“In 1998, an ABC News team broke into a basement vault at Spiegelgrund Psychiatric Hospital and found 417 children’s brains encased in formaldehyde in glass jars. It is believed that originally one thousand specimens made up the collection.”

Some of the more disturbing sections of Sheffer’s book are the passages where she uses archival materials, including the desperate scribblings of children sent to Am Spiegelgrund. Here, they weren’t just “allowed to die.” Rather, alongside neglect and starvation, they were injected with barbiturates designed to induce infections (pneumonia in particular) to hasten their demise and to provide a medical cover-story for their deaths. For the children, fright turned into desperation and then despair. Only death provided a release, and the pathway to death was often prolonged and agonizing. Brains of some 400 hundred children who had died were pickled and preserved by one of the psychiatrists, Dr. Heinrich Gross. The jars into which they were placed survived the war, becoming the basis for his on-going research.

After the war, there were a few feeble attempts at a reckoning. At a trial of three of the perpetrators, the defendants took care to emphasize just how “scientific” the killing process had been, and how those in charge had conducted experiments to determine the most effective killing methods. The deaths, they explained, were acts of compassion. Of the three doctors, only one was sentenced to death, and though the other two received sentences of eight and ten years of imprisonment, they actually each served only two. And they were the unlucky ones. Like the architects of the mass murder of adult mental patients in Germany, the so-called T4 program that ended up gassing and killing nearly a quarter million mental patients, the Austrian medical personnel who had slaughtered the children they were charged with treating mostly escaped serious consequences. Children who had survived often lived out their lives haunted by what had happened to others, and almost happened to them. But their torturers and murderers, and their assorted accomplices, emerged essentially unscathed. Jekelius was captured by the Russians and sentenced to 25 years’ imprisonment. He died in captivity from bladder cancer. But his and Asperger’s superior Hamburger, who had reached emeritus status in 1944, never faced trial. As previously mentioned, Gross, who had preserved the hundreds of brains of murdered children was able to use that forensic material as the basis of his research career for more than three decades after the war.

And Asperger? He was cleared of all wrongdoing, and because he had never joined the Nazi party, he benefited once again from a professional vacuum, in this case created by the mild measures of de-Nazification. Between 1946 and 1949, he served as interim director of the University of Vienna Children’s Hospital, and for decades afterward denounced the Nazis’ child euthanasia policies, which he claimed to have resisted at some considerable personal risk. His postwar research, however, had little to do with autism, the field for which he is now remembered, and he was dead by 1980, the year before Lorna Wing proposed that high-functioning autistic children might be referred to as examples of Asperger’s syndrome.”

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