Hans Asperger: Nazi opponent?
The emergence of Hans Asperger from the shadows naturally led to some scrutiny of Asperger himself, especially as his career had blossomed during the Nazi period. Many of Asperger’s child patients fell into the category of “unworthy of life‘ because of the more antisocial and ungovernable aspects of their personalities. In Nazi society, anyone who was dependent and required care to the extent that they could not function as a ‘fully productive’ member of society fell into this category. Doctors became the eyes and ears of the Reich, rooting out those deemed physically, mentally and genetically unfit. Hans Asperger was perceived to have resisted this.
Asperger never joined the Nazi party unlike many of his contemporaries at the hospital. Indeed, references in his surviving papers suggest he was actively opposed to Nazi ideology. A narrative began to develop where Asperger was the savior of the children in his care. However, some of the evidence used was ambiguous at best. Adam Feinstein’s history of autism, written in 2010, refers to references in Asperger’s surviving papers where he seems to have expressed sympathy for some Nazi ideology. This sympathy was feigned, according to Feinstein, to draw away Nazi suspicion.
The testimony of Asperger himself forms a large part of this sympathetic narrative. During his inauguration to the Vienna chair of pediatrics in 1962, Asperger told how the Gestapo tried to arrest him twice, because of his refusal to hand over child patients with what the Nazi’s termed ‘deficiencies.’ He was only saved, he claimed, by the intervention of his mentor, Dr. Hamburger, “a convinced National Socialist.” This possibility of arrest was the reason why he distanced himself from the children’s hospital and signed up a military doctor in 1943.
In other interviews, Asperger made sure he established a firm ideological distance between himself and the Nazis- particularly on the question of eugenics. During a 1974 radio interview, Asperger condemned the program as “totally inhuman’. He explained when reporting on his patients, he went to great lengths to emphasize their potential rather than their deficiencies in an attempt to shield them from death.
However, this view of Asperger’s benevolence began to be questioned. The fact that Asperger’s career began to blossom at the expense of his Jewish colleagues with the rise of Nazism was noted. This may have been merely an unfortunate coincidence; a ‘sign of the times.’ However, the Nazi links to Asperger, worrying references to his beliefs in newly discovered papers, and Asperger’s close links with the euthanasia clinic, Am Spiegelgrund, began to build a picture of a less than caring doctor.