Hans Asperger: True or not?

Abstract

Hans Asperger was a Viennese paediatrician. He described the syndrome of ‘autistic psychopathy’ in an article written in the German language,1 at a time when the second world war was raging. Leo Kanner described his cases of ‘infantile autism’ in the English language at about the same time,2 and it has been reported3 that Kanner had learnt from Asperger's colleagues about autistic psychopathy. Kanner never referred to Asperger (even though he was, of course, fluent in German). It was only in 1981 that Asperger's syndrome was given his name, by English psychiatrist Lorna Wing.4 Much later did it become clear that Asperger's syndrome—or something very similar—had already been described (in Russian) by a Russian neurologist, G Ssucharewa, in 1926.5 Kanner—wrongly—believed that autism was caused by ‘refrigerator mothers’, whereas Asperger stated that genetic and possibly brain damaging factors were in the background of his own autistic/psychopathy cases. When Simon Baron-Cohen and colleagues valued friend and research colleague—in 2018 wrote a text in Molecular Psychiatry6 praising the ‘insight and careful historical research’ undertaken by ‘historian’ Edith Sheffer7 in discovering that Hans Asperger was in fact a Nazi supporter, and that he had knowingly sent children to Hitler's euthanasia program in Vienna, I was, in shock. How could the man (Asperger) have been a Nazi (and not an ‘autist’ as I might have suspected)? I myself (with a small amount of Jewish genes in me, and with a mother who warned me almost every day about indications that people might have a positive view about Hitler) had referred to Hans Asperger hundreds of times in my own texts and books as a supporter of young children with autism; how could I have been so naïve as to not suspect that he was instead a supporter of Hitler? My thoughts drifted to the time some 30 years back, (September 1989 in Zürich), when Uta Frith and I had interviewed Maria Asperger-Felder, Asperger's daughter, who had been what I and Uta believed to be relatively ‘open’ about her famous father8; how could we all have avoided the ‘elephant in the room’? Maria Asperger-Felder described how the Asperger family, was visited several times by the Gestapo, because Hans Asperger was not a member of the Nazi Party. She also described her father as ‘reserved’ almost ‘untouchable’, ‘motor clumsy’ and with a ‘special interest’ in the German language, that is, somebody with a personality and style that for a long time we have associated with ‘Asperger syndrome’. In this issue of Acta Paediatrica, an article is published, that, without emotionally opinionated wording, lays the foundation for a step back, and for not ‘buying’ the ‘new truth’ about Hans Asperger.9 History (probably) has no end, and it is possible that the article by Tatzer et al will not be the end of ‘the story’, but it seems to me to be based on much better historical research than the book by Edith Sheffer. The author has no conflicts of interest to declare.