Hans Asperger was born in Austria in 1906. He had a successful career as a pediatrician. He was instrumental in the propagation of Autism diagnoses that have skyrocketed since his death in 1980. He was ostensibly a strong proponent of positive eugenics (the more forgiving half which tries to incentivize replicating desirable attributes as opposed to eliminating undesirable ones). He is the namesake of Asperger's Syndrome. If you didn’t check the official Nazi party registry, you would assume his political affiliation by the company he kept. He was also complicit in the medical murder of children.
In 2019, Taiki Waititi released Jojo Rabbit, a movie that takes a sympathetic, but damning view of how the insecurities and prejudices of Nazism affected the mind of a child in Germany during the last days of Hitler's Germany. The main character, a boy named Jojo, is obsessed with trying to classify the characteristics of the Jewish girl he finds hidden in the attic. The movie portrays him grilling her about where her fangs, devil wings, and long nose are. Jojo, we are shown from the beginning, is obsessed with classifying others. How does one identify a Jew? What are their tells? These are questions that Jojo tries to answer and codify in a field manual to better identify Jews he might come across. Jojo's deepest concern is precisely what makes Jewish Germans different. Not so that he can determine the efficacy of the antisemitism around him, but so he can directly report any Jews he find to the Führer.
The obsession with classifying others was a very real phenomenon during the Third Reich, according to historian Edith Sheffer. In her book, Asperger's Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna, she demonstrates the steady increase in criteria for classifying the people of Central Europe during Hitler's reign. According to Sheffer, the Nazi's incessant classifications between Aryan and Undesirable began with far simpler criteria than the minutia they ended with. The quick progression of promoting the importance of "treating" those diagnosed with autism to the eventual death sentences of those with below average sociability does a disservice to the term "snowball effect."
One of the lesser known tenets of Aryanism, right there with blonde hair and blue eyes, is the idea of sociability. The Nazis emphasized the desire for the strength and purification of the Vólk, the German people. In addition to strong mental and physical characteristics, the Nazis aimed to foster a camaraderie which, they feared, would be rapidly undermined by those uninterested in, or staunchly opposed to, participating in the collective activities required by the Vólk. There was a particular subset of the population that the Nazi's had a very difficult time enticing to be interested in their collective ways. Luckily, from the Reich's perspective, Hans Asperger had recently published influential papers outlining the identifying factors of people in this newly discovered and "dangerous" group. He also named and assigned a medical condition to the group: Psychopathic Autism.
In the 1920's, Asperger, along with two other, more benevolent, researchers, Anni Weiss and George Frankl, became interested in identifying those with particular behavioral patterns that ostracized them from their teachers, parents, and peers. This interest led to the creation of "Curative Education Clinics." Here, children were given special attention, teaching, and help with the end goal of allowing them to gain the sociability held to be necessary for success in greater society. Initially, these clinics were an earnest attempt to positively habilitate those believed to be unable to socially assimilate. George Frankl said that "one should not see 'malice' in children with social difficulties, that their challenges had nothing to do with 'character or morals.'" At the outset of Autism diagnoses in Austria, the intent was to help. This empathy did not survive the rise of the Nazis.
Weiss and Frankl were forced to emigrate from their home on account of their Jewish faith in 1934 an 1937, respectively. Asperger remained present and assisting in the criminalization of his own psychological classification. As Nazism gained traction, a paranoia ran rampant that there were those within the population who could undermine the Vólk through their mere presence in it. The segregation of the in and the out group was simplistic at first. Obvious physical and religious differences were well known and quelled. But eventually, most deemed as undesirables at the outset were incarcerated, killed, or escaped, but the desire to make safe the Vólk from an insider threat was not satisfied. Next on the chopping block were those similar to the children Asperger was working to identify. Asperger, and those he worked with and for, began writing off those autistic children they deemed to be beyond treatment. The children were then killed through direct means, neglect, and horrific experimental medicine or sterilized. As more children were killed, more were diagnosed as untreatable and met the same fate as their flimsily identified predecessors.
Everything that Hans Asperger and his ilk did in the murderous hospitals of Vienna in the 1940s was all done in the name of medicine. All acts, from the administration of penicillin to the surgical prevention of procreation in children, were deemed treatments. The existence of treatments implies an ideal state of being that one hopes to return to. Dispensing chemotherapy has the desired end state of an individual eventually being cancer free. Amputation seeks to prevent the incurable pain or disease in a limb. Medical treatments (obviously) result from the existence of a problem that precedes them. Problems incentivize actions that counteract them. A natural response to an event.
The desire to fix problems, particularly taking extreme measures to solve problems, becomes deeply troublesome when things begin to be called problems when they are not problems at all. The Nazis were horribly wrong about what was a problem in their archetypal Vólk. So wrong, that they could stomach classifying between 1% and 20% of their countrymen with titles that could lead to their death. An obsession amongst ordinary men to root out problems in their society where there were none had a most sad and evil end. Humans will take extreme measures to bring an end to what they deem to be maladies. Extreme prudence in identifying what truly is and is not a problem can be a lifesaving endeavor.
