Famed paediatrician Hans Asperger ‘actively cooperated’ with Nazis during second world war, according to new research
From 1938, when the Nazis ‘annexed’ Austria into the Third Reich, Asperger took to signing his diagnostic reports with ‘Heil Hitler’
Austrian paediatrician Hans Asperger, after whom Asperger’s syndrome is named, “actively cooperated” with the Nazi euthanasia programme, according to a new study published on Thursday.
“Asperger managed to accommodate himself to the Nazi regime and was rewarded for his affirmations of loyalty with career opportunities,” Herwig Czech, a historian of medicine at the Medical University of Vienna, wrote in the study.
Asperger “publicly legitimised race hygiene policies including forced sterilisations and, on several occasions, actively cooperated” with the Nazis’ child euthanasia programme, according to Czech.
Asperger joined several organisations affiliated with the Nazis, although not the Nazi Party itself, Czech added in the report, published in the open access journal Molecular Autism.
Czech said he consulted a vast array of contemporary publications and previously unexplored archival documents including the doctor’s personnel files and case records from his patients.
Asperger managed to accommodate himself to the Nazi regime and was rewarded for his affirmations of loyalty
He quotes a Nazi document from 1940 as saying Asperger “was in conformity with National Socialist [Nazi] ideas in questions of race and sterilisation laws”.