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May 17, 2018 · May 17, 2018. 4 min read. The Truth about Hans Asperger's Nazi Collusion. Neuroscientist Simon Baron-Cohen absorbs the grave revelations in a study on a pediatrician enmeshed in autism's...
Jan 20, 2016 · Hans Asperger identified autism as a spectrum of disorders in the 1930s, but his work was ignored for decades because he went on to work under the Nazis. Research and treatment suffered as a...
Apr 19, 2018 · Newly uncovered documents suggest Hans Asperger, the paediatrician whose name describes a form of autism, was actively involved in the Nazi regime's euthanasia programme in Austria. The...
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Asperger’s Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna Edith Sheffer W. W. Norton (2018)
The Austrian paediatrician Hans Asperger has long been recognized as a pioneer in the study of autism. 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.
Historian Herwig Czech fully documented this in the April 2018 issue of Molecular Autism (a journal I co-edit; see H. Czech Mol. Autism 9, 29; 2018). Now, historian Edith Sheffer’s remarkable book Asperger’s Children builds on Czech’s study with her own original scholarship. 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. The revelations are also causing debate among autistic people, their families, researchers and clinicians over whether the diagnostic label of Asperger’s syndrome should be abandoned.
In 1981, psychiatrist Lorna Wing published the paper in Psychological Medicine that first brought Asperger’s clinical observations to the attention of the English-speaking medical world, and coined the term Asperger’s syndrome (L. Wing Psychol. Med. 11, 115–129; 1981). A decade later, in the book Autism and Asperger Syndrome (1991), developmental psychologist Uta Frith translated into English the 1944 treatise by Asperger in which he claimed to have discovered autism.
- Simon Baron-Cohen
- 2018
May 8, 2018 · The truth about Hans Asperger’s Nazi collusion. May 8, 2018. Nature.com. The Austrian paediatrician Hans Asperger has long been recognized as a pioneer in the study of autism. He was even seen as a hero, saving children with the condition from the Nazi killing programme by emphasizing their intelligence.
Hans Asperger - Wikipedia. Contents. hide. (Top) Biography. Family. Religion. Education. Career. Early career (1930–1938) World War II (1939–1945) Post-World War II (1945 to death) Allegations of persecution by the Gestapo. Nazi involvement. Children sent to Spiegelgrund. Hansi Busztin. Works and publications.
Apr 25, 2018 · Why Did It Take So Long to Expose Hans Asperger's Nazi Ties? Suspicions dogged the autism researcher for years, but they were largely unverifiable, until now. By John Donvan
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