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Hans Asperger

Ken

Well-Known Member
V.I.P Member
I just learned something yesterday that I find a bit disturbing. The label; Asperger comes from Johann Friedrich Karl (Hans) Asperger who was a Nazi pediatrician who sent children diagnosed with autism to be killed! Hans Asperger - Wikipedia

I am curious how many of you already knew this?
 
What is most disturbing is to think that the very climate the Nazis created in terms of unethical medical research opened a window for Dr. Asperger that otherwise might not have ever been there.

That without his research under such odious circumstances it's conceivable that to this very day people like us would have remained a medical mystery.

Why did so many German doctors join the Nazi Party early? - PubMed
 
I just learned something yesterday that I find a bit disturbing. The label; Asperger comes from Johann Friedrich Karl (Hans) Asperger who was a Nazi pediatrician who sent children diagnosed with autism to be killed! Hans Asperger - Wikipedia

I am curious how many of you already knew this?

very little.this is why people with any form of autism need to be defending themselves while standing up for themselves & each other against potential wrongdoers.
 
Sandy Hook mass-murderer Adam Lanza certainly didn't help in putting Asperger's Syndrome into the public eye in 2012. With the DSM-V erasing it in 2013 to formally refer to it as "Autism Spectrum Disorder".

Meanwhile whatever the public refers to us as, more often than not the media tends to sensationalize and exaggerate who and what we are. So yeah, establishing a more accurate public image remains a daunting task for most of us.
 
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I've heard of this. It's why a number of autistic people have rejected the term "Aspie"; they don't want to be associated with him. Not that this rejection is universal; a lot of people, especially those who have been diagnosed with Asperger's (before it was reclassified as being part of ASD) still call themselves aspies.
 
Hans was never a real Nazi. If you wanted not to be consumed by the regime that's what you did. He did what he could do in the face of Nazi brutality. There are examples of speeches he gave to encourage the Nazis to protect and nurture Aspie children. Because he would not toe the line, they took his clinic away and he was in danger of going to the camps. He ended up a medic on the front lines where he surrendered as soon as he could.

I consider myself an Aspie.
 
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It is from the book Neurotribes by Steven Silberman

This is from an NPR review:

In 1938, an Austrian pediatrician named Hans Asperger gave the first public talk on autism in history. Asperger was speaking to an audience of Nazis, and he feared that his patients — children who fell onto what we now call the autism spectrum — were in danger of being sent to Nazi extermination camps.


As Asperger spoke, he highlighted his "most promising" patients, a notion that would stick with the autistic spectrum for decades to come.


"That is where the idea of so-called high-functioning versus low-functioning autistic people comes from really — it comes from Asperger's attempt to save the lives of the children in his clinic," science writer Steve Silberman tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross.


Silberman chronicles the history of autism and examines some of the myths surrounding our current understanding of the condition in his new book, NeuroTribes. Along the way, he revisits Asperger's calculated efforts to save his patients.


neurotribes-author-photo-courtesy-of-keith-karraker-59923c03c7b85b242cc6ed987fae9af60f557c75-s300-c85.jpg


Steve Silberman's articles have been published in Wired, The New Yorker, Nature and Salon.

Keith Karraker/Avery
Silberman shies away from using the terms high-functioning and low-functioning, because "both of those terms can be off base," he says. But he praises Asperger's courage in speaking to the Nazis. "I would literally weep while I was writing that chapter," he says.
 
Hans Asperger cherry picked children to not go to the gas chambers and still recommended a lot !to be murdered, having the courage of convictions disappeared !!!,when it came to your neck or Human beings suffering murder!
 
New study investigates whether Hans Asperger actively assisted the Nazi euthanasia program

"Herwig Czech has performed a valuable service to history by diving deep into the archives and making his findings available to fellow scholars. The case of Hans Asperger provides a troubling example of the horror that can be unleashed when medical professionals allow themselves to become complicit with a brutal ideology."

-Steve Silberman

"These findings about Hans Asperger are the result of many years of careful research in the archives. What emerges is that Asperger successfully sought to accommodate himself to the Nazi regime and was rewarded with career opportunities in return. This is part of a broader effort by historians to expose what doctors were doing during the Third Reich."

-Herwig Czech

"We are aware that the article and its publication will be controversial. We believe that it deserves to be published in order to expose the truth about how a medical doctor who, for a long time, was seen as only having made valuable contributions to the field of pediatrics and child psychiatry, was guilty of actively assisting the Nazis in their abhorrent eugenics and euthanasia policies. This historical evidence must now be made available."

-Dr. Simon Baron-Cohen

New study investigates whether hans asperger actively assisted the nazi euthanasia program
 
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Ah well. I liked the sound of how Aspie rolled easily off the tongue.

Dueling biographies. I read the article in Molecular Autism. Now, if he were a real Nazi sympathizer, he'd have turned his coworker into the Nazis, not waited for years and then fled out of fear his coworker would be discovered. And likely got great praise for turning him in. He never did join the Nazi Party even though that was the way to climb the ladder at the time, regardless of his otherwise "impeccable" credentials.

Everything can be looked at in two ways. The authors themselves said the investigation was controversial. Even if correct, I don't see any benefit to the world in it. He's long dead and mythology is a necessary component for any functioning society.

Almost nobody in the general public knows anything about Hans Asperger, good or ill, so I don't think the term will disappear.
 
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I just learned something yesterday that I find a bit disturbing. The label; Asperger comes from Johann Friedrich Karl I
(Hans) Asperger who was a Nazi
pediatrician who sent children diagnosed with autism to be killed! Hans Asperger - Wikipedia
I am curious how many of you already knew this?
I just learned something yesterday that I find a bit disturbing. The label; Asperger comes from Johann Friedrich Karl (Hans) Asperger who was a Nazi pediatrician
who sent children diagnosed with autism to be killed! Hans Asperger - Wikipedia
I am curious how many of you already knew this?

I think it would be appropriate for people to stop using aspergers and aspie. Can I change my profile name?
 
Yes, I knew this. I actually did a class for my advanced students about Hans Asperger. Pretty sad tale especially from my perspective.
 

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