In a ground breaking new study, Austrian medical historian Herwig Czech, debunks the myth that Hans Asperger, who was the first to describe a group of children with distinctive psychological features as “autistic psychopaths,” had opposed the Nazis and defended his patients against the Nazi ‘euthanasia’ program.
The article entitled “Hans Asperger, National Socialism, and ‘race hygiene’ in Nazi-era Vienna, published in Molecular Autism reports that Asperger sent patients to the Am Spiegelgrund clinic in Vienna, where almost 800 children were murdered by poisoning and other means from 1940 to 1945.
“The picture that emerges is that of a man who managed to further his career under the Nazi regime, despite his apparent political and ideological distance from it,” Czech concludes. “This was not least due to opportunities created by the political upheaval after Austria’s Anschluss (annexation) to Germany in 1938, including the expulsion of Jewish physicians from the profession.”
By making political compromises to Nazi dogma, Asperger advanced his career by cooperating with the race hygiene system, including the Nazis’ child “euthanasia” program.
The Evolution of Sterilization into Euthanasia Killing Centers
What is often overlooked, is that before the Nazis sent Jews to the gas chambers, where they were murdered with Zyklon-B or carbon monoxide, the Nazis created clandestine programs that systematically targeted certain groups of people for extermination.
The sterilization programs began in late 1933, as historian Henry Friedlander wrote in the Origins of Nazi Genocide. Within a year, 32,268 individuals were sterilized. In 1935 there were 73,174. Justification for this treatment included schizophrenia, epilepsy, alcoholism, deafness, blindness, manic-depression psychosis and feeblemindedness. Those deemed sex offenders were castrated.
