Talk:Hans Asperger

Involvement in Nazi T-4 program?

Hans Asperger worked in Nazi state hospitals during the 1930's, the time when the T-4 Euthanasia program to eliminate mental patients was in progress. Rumors based on biographies and personal notes of Hans Asperger spoke on his research on adults displayed "autistic" behaviors, was said related to the T-4 Euthanasia program. I wish to uncover the sources to prove this well-known theory that the Nazis hired Dr. Asperger to investigate mental/neurological disorders. It's well popular myth of other psychiatrists in the research field of autism like Bruno Bettelheim, although an Austrian Jew faced internment in Nazi concentration camps in 1938 was said to participated in the Nazi state hospitals, and Bettelheim was hired a camp doctor to serve Jewish prisoners. Bettelheim left Germany in 1941 to first Australia and in 1945 to the U.S. continued his research in autism and behavioral therapies of autistic adult patients. Now back to the question: Has Dr. Asperger took part in the Nazi T-4 program, even though not involved in any euthanasia? But his role in the Leipzig state hospital was to supervise and study mental patients in a way for Nazi officials to decide on matters...the value of their lives.--Mike D 26 07:29, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

This information was found to be factually incorrect after detailed analysis of Hans Asperger's work by qualified medical professional's psychologists, psychiatrists and historians examined all of the the patients Hans Asperger had involvement in as a director of the institution Asperger's reports and recommendations where examined. They where able to trace all Asperger's patients outcomes. Asperger never referred any of his patients for euthanasia but did recommend them for treatment and care at pedagogical institutes. Am Spiegelgrund doctors were forbidden by law from speaking about the child euthanasia program and could face being sent to a concentration camp if they did doctors who had referred patients for treatment and care at the institution did not know about the institutions darker past until 1942 and some where only informed by the parents of what had happened in fact one of Asperger's colleagues who had refereed patients there joined the resistance as a result. For Asperger it was to late he had been drafted in to the army and only learned about this after the war ended. The doctors and the historians did a really good examination available here https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/apa.16571 2A00:23C8:A476:5901:5C36:FCBD:C4B8:BC01 (talk) 01:07, 8 April 2024 (UTC)

Interestingly Aspergers was found not guilty of involvement in the child euthinasia program and all charges against him were dropped by the military tribunal held at the Hague which found Asperger had not involvement in the child euthinasia program they also had full access to all the files at the time sadly many of the files they had access to have went missing either because they were sent to the UK, US or Russia. Or were lost as a result of the miss management of the files by allied forces at a later date. However the Hague cleared Asperger of all charges on the grounds he did not participate in the euthanasia program. 2A00:23C8:A476:5901:5C36:FCBD:C4B8:BC01 (talk) 01:12, 8 April 2024 (UTC)

Ernst Tatzer, Werner Maleczek, and Franz Waldhauser, the authors of an article claiming that Hans Asperger would not have known about a child killing institution called Am Spiegelgrund, violate the Wikipedia:Neutral point of view.

"CONFLICT OF INTEREST

ET and FW were students and later colleagues of Hans Asperger, as previously documented,52, 53 and WM has been friends with the Asperger family for many years."

Tatzer E, Maleczek W, Waldhauser F. An assessment of what Hans Asperger knew about child euthanasia in Vienna during the Nazi occupation. Acta Paediatr. 2023; 112: 1109–1119. https://doi.org/10.1111/apa.16571

Autisticattitudes (talk) 06:00, 23 December 2024 (UTC)

The commentary above seems founded on an extremely vague understanding of what euthanasia was in the Third Reich. The euthanasia decree was only issued in September 1939. It purported to be for the relief of the suffering of incurably ill people. The decree was withdrawn two years after it was issued. During that time only 70,000 instances of euthanasia occurred, less than one in one-thousand Germans. This is far, far too small a number to include all moderately retarded or moderately psychotic people in the population. Hadding (talk) 09:31, 8 August 2008 (UTC)

(It's perhaps rather late to reply to Hadding's comment above, but Silberman (Neurotribes, cited in the actual wiki article) gives a figure of more than 200,000 killed during the official phase of child euthenasia and the T-4 program. 88.144.51.83 (talk) 23:29, 4 December 2015 (UTC))

I personally would be interested in knowing if Asperger's positive 1944 take on the societal role of people with high functioning autism could have been influenced at all by humanitarian objectives (e.g. reinforcing the social value of persons who might otherwise have been subject to prosecution at the hands of the Nazis).99.240.139.189 (talk) 05:25, 14 March 2010 (UTC)

The paper on the link below has just been published and looks as though it will be highly relevant to this topic. I have no expertise in this field so have not attempted edits of the article myself. https://molecularautism.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13229-018-0208-6 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2.26.164.195 (talk) 07:20, 19 April 2018 (UTC)

A more recent paper found it is very unlikely that Asperger knew about the euthanasia program at all, since only 2 of the 13 patients he sent were euthanized, the rest receiving adequate care. The 2 that died were referred before the majority of the deaths in the euthanasia program, so any word of deaths or disappearances that may have been in public concern could have easily been dismissed as rumors by his colleagues since all of his patients there were still receiving quality care.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/apa.16571 CrazyFroster (talk) 22:27, 6 May 2023 (UTC)

Asperger was not born In Vienna

Sorry, but it would be better to check Asperger's place of birth and his location in his early years of life. The article says he was born in Vienna e raised in a town "not far away" from Vienna. Elsewhere I find that he instead was born and raised in Hausbrunn, a small town 80 km away from Vienna (which in a small country such as Austria is not considered "near" to the capital). Can you please check?

This is the parish register that shows that Asperger was born in Neustiftgasse in Vienna's 7th district. There is no reason to doubt this information, both Vienna and Hausbrunn are given as place of birth in various biographies. According to the parish register both his parents were born in Hausbrunn, which is still considered to be "near" Vienna even by Austrian standards.--TempusTacet (talk) 07:58, 4 May 2023 (UTC)

Wing and Falk

'The British psychiatrist Lorna Wing and the anthropologist Dean Falk consider that Hans Asperger's Catholic convictions are incompatible with the voluntary sending of children to extermination programs.'

This opinion goes without saying. Is the intended meaning of this passage that - in the view of Wing and Falk - Asperger's Catholic beliefs would have prevented his involvement in a program of extermination of disabled or neurodivergent children?

Regards to all Notreallydavid (talk) 22:00, 13 May 2023 (UTC)

I've checked the reference given for Wing only to discover that it doesn't mention her at all. I only know the anecdote described in Lorna_Wing#Hans_Asperger_controversy but I've never looked into it further. The cited piece in the Atlantic states:

But Volkmar [at the time the lead author for autism in the DSM-IV] told me in an interview that he was also concerned about the reputation question, since there was honor attached to being named in the DSM. He made a transatlantic phone call to the only person he knew who had ever met Asperger—Lorna Wing—and asked her point blank whether she knew anything about Asperger being a Nazi. Wing was shocked at the question, and, although she had only met Asperger once, for tea and conversation, she apparently felt compelled to vouch for him. She, too, did not actually have much information, but she knew him to be a religious man, and shared that with Volkmar.

Based on this, it seems that she did believe Asperger's faith would have prevented him from collaborating with the Nazis on anything cruel or unjust, thus ruling out the possibility that any rumors/accusations implying the opposite could hold merit.--TempusTacet (talk) 10:52, 14 May 2023 (UTC)

Am Spiegelgrund's immediate surroundings

The objectively verifiable fact is that the citizens of Am Spiegelgrund's immediate surroundings, as well as the citizens of Austria, knew at the time that Am Spiegelgrund was an organization that murdered children. Under the circumstances, the defense's view is that only Hans Asperger was unaware of this.

@Khiikiat

@Traumnovelle

There is no evidence that Hans Asperger knew what the Am Spiegelgrund was, but equally, to be truly objective and neutral, the fact that the Am Spiegelgrund was an institution that murdered children was known to the citizens of Austria in general, not just those around the Am Spiegelgrund area. Those who defend Hans Asperger claim that only Hans Asperger did not know this. These are objective, neutral facts.

Check out these articles.

Czech, H. Hans Asperger, National Socialism, and “race hygiene” in Nazi-era Vienna. Molecular Autism 9, 29 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13229-018-0208-6

"Furthermore, knowledge of the mass murders euphemized as “euthanasia” was not limited to insiders; it was in fact widespread among the Viennese population. During the so-called “T4” killing campaign, patients’ relatives staged public protests in front of the Steinhof psychiatric hospital in Vienna. They could not prevent approximately 3200 Steinhof patients from being transported to the gas chamber at Hartheim, but they took a courageous stance against the regime’s campaign of murder.Footnote102 Rumors were so widespread that the Viennese edition of the Völkischer Beobachter—the Nazi Party’s daily newspaper—was compelled to deny the killings. The article mentioned lethal injections and even gas chambers, which shows how specific the public’s knowledge was ([86]: 7). Anny Wödl, a Viennese nurse, had no doubt that the transfer of her son Alfred to Spiegelgrund, enforced in early 1941 despite her resolute resistance, would mean his death ([87]: 298). Even abroad, the killings at Spiegelgrund became known. In the fall of 1941, the Royal Air Force dropped leaflets mentioning both the Steinhof hospital and Jekelius’ name in connection with the systematic murder of patients.Footnote103"

"In reality, the fact that psychiatric patients were dying in great numbers under suspicious circumstances had already become widely known among the Viennese population in September 1940, months before Herta’s transferal (and Bishop Galen’s sermon), even leading to public protests (Klee 1985, p. 208–209). In November 1940, the Völkischer Beobachter, the official newspaper of the Nazi Party had to deny rumors that patients were being killed by poisoning and in gas chambers, referencing various Viennese institutions (Schödl 1940). Falk is correct in stating that transferals of children with disabilities from the Children’s Clinic to Spiegelgrund strongly increased after Hitler’s ‘halt’ order (by June 27, the day Asperger signed Herta’s transferal, 30 patients had died at Spiegelgrund; by October 27, the date of Elisabeth’s transferal note, the number had risen to 71).

^Footnote2 However, while this represents one potential way Asperger could have found out about Spiegelgrund’s purpose, it was certainly not the only source of information on the ‘euthanasia’ killings taking place practically before his eyes. Even if we assume that Asperger did not know the details of the ‘child euthanasia’ program at Spiegelgrund, he could not conceivably have been in the dark about the dangers faced by patients with mental disabilities at Steinhof psychiatric hospital, on the very premises of which Spiegelgrund was founded in July 1940. Spiegelgrund was not part of ‘Aktion T4’ (and therefore not affected by Hitler’s ‘halt’ order), but Asperger and his contemporaries could not be expected to have known this at the time, given the secrecy surrounding the killing operations and the fact that in Vienna one person—Erwin Jekelius—was in charge both of coordinating T4 and running Spiegelgrund. As it were, in June 1941 Asperger exposed Herta not only to the child euthanasia program at Spiegelgrund, but also to T4, which would only be suspended 2 months later.

The example of Anna Wödl, a nurse at the same General Hospital to which Asperger’s clinic belonged, illustrates how implausible it is that Asperger could have been in the dark about the dangers faced by his patients. Wödl, who had a son with a mental disability placed in an institution near Vienna, clearly recognized the threat he was under. By July 1940—almost a year before Asperger signed the transferal of Herta—she had gathered enough information to identify the Berlin official responsible for coordinating the T4 program (Herbert Linden) and to personally go see him and plead (ultimately unsuccessfully) for her son’s life (Fürstler and Malina 2003)."

Dekan Falk bestreitet nicht, dass die Menschen in der Umgebung von Am Spiegelgrund sowie Österreicher im Allgemeinen wussten, dass Am Spiegelgrund eine Kindermordanstalt war; Dekan Falk behauptet nur, dass Hans Asperger nicht wusste, was es war.

So I objectively wrote: “ The objectively verifiable fact is that the citizens of Am Spiegelgrund's immediate surroundings, as well as the citizens of  Austria, knew at the time that Am Spiegelgrund was an organization that murdered children. Under the circumstances, the defense's view is that only Hans Asperger was unaware of this.”

Where in these descriptions is there a violation of objectivity and neutrality?

Autisticattitudes (talk) 05:33, 23 December 2024 (UTC)

Ernst Tatzer, Werner Maleczek, and Franz Waldhauser, the authors of an article claiming that Hans Asperger would not have known about a child killing institution called Am Spiegelgrund, violate the Wikipedia:Neutral point of view.

"CONFLICT OF INTEREST

ET and FW were students and later colleagues of Hans Asperger, as previously documented,52, 53 and WM has been friends with the Asperger family for many years."

Tatzer E, Maleczek W, Waldhauser F. An assessment of what Hans Asperger knew about child euthanasia in Vienna during the Nazi occupation. Acta Paediatr. 2023; 112: 1109–1119. https://doi.org/10.1111/apa.16571

CONFLICT OF INTEREST are identified that violate Wikipedia:Neutral point of view.

I did not violate Wikipedia:Neutral point of view, Wikipedia:Academic bias, Wikipedia:Reliable sources, and Wikipedia:No original research. Autisticattitudes (talk) 05:51, 23 December 2024 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Neutral point of view, Wikipedia:Academic bias, Wikipedia:Reliable sources, and Wikipedia:No original research.

I didn't violate any Wikipedia rules at all.

@Khiikiat

@Traumnovelle Autisticattitudes (talk) 05:58, 23 December 2024 (UTC)

NPOV is a wikipedia policy sources cannot violate NPOV nor COI (although independence is a factor to be considered when considering a source).

We cannot report Czech's views whilst ignoring the contradicting views. I am not familiar enough with the topic to know which view is the minority/majority (or if there even is a consensus) but removing all conflicting references and citing just Czech is not appropriate per WP:NPOV Traumnovelle (talk) 07:11, 16 August 2025 (UTC)

Have you read Dean Falk's paper on her claims about Am Spiegelgrund? Autisticattitudes (talk) 07:17, 16 August 2025 (UTC)

No, but you removed that source in your edit and only ended up citing Czech several times. If Falk supports the view then please provide the citation and the line and I will take a look at it when I have the chance. Traumnovelle (talk) 07:18, 16 August 2025 (UTC)

@Traumnovelle

Traumnovelle, I did not delete Dean Falk's paper. I simply consolidated the footnotes into one.

(Czech 2018); (Czech 2019); (Czech 2020); (Czech 2021); (Czech 2023a); (Czech 2023b); (Falk 2020)

Dean Falk's paper was not deleted; the footnotes were simply consolidated. Autisticattitudes (talk) 07:24, 16 August 2025 (UTC)

In her paper, Dean Falk exclusively discusses the T4 program. She does not address the abuse and murder of people with disabilities at the Am Spiegelgrund clinic that is separate from T4. In other words, her paper completely omits any discussion of the clinic's abuse of people with disabilities that is distinct from the T4 program. Autisticattitudes (talk) 07:30, 16 August 2025 (UTC)

So how does Falk support the claim then...? Traumnovelle (talk) 07:42, 16 August 2025 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Neutral point of view "Avoid stating seriously contested assertions as facts. If different reliable sources make conflicting assertions about a matter," Dean Falk didn't participate in the debate concerning the abuse and murder of people with disabilities at the Am Spiegelgrund clinic, which was separate from T4. Therefore, no conflicting discussion occurred regarding the clinic, at least in her case. Autisticattitudes (talk) 07:58, 16 August 2025 (UTC)

So what does Falk have to do with this then? Tatzer et al. clearly disagrees with the conclusion and you are aware of that. Traumnovelle (talk) 08:19, 16 August 2025 (UTC)