In popular legend, Asperger was an Oskar Schindler figure who shielded his charges from euthanasia. The truth is more uncomfortable
In nursing homes across the Third Reich, children diagnosed with “autistic spectrum disorder” (as it might be termed today) were systematically murdered. Caring for these “useless mouths” drained the Aryan state. It was best they died by lethal injection (the so-called “nursing cure”). Not all Nazi attempts to cleanse society medically resulted in murder. In Vienna during the Anschluss, Austrian paediatrician Hans Asperger had begun to view autism as a developmental condition rather than a form of “idiocy” to be eradicated. The juveniles in his care exhibited strange behavioural traits such as hand- flapping and other forms of “stimming” (repetitive body movements) that required unorthodox teaching methods commensurate with their “psychopathy”. In popular legend, Asperger was an Oskar Schindler figure who shielded his charges from euthanasia.
At the same time in 1940s America, coincidentally, child psychiatrist Leo Kanner claimed autism was a form of childhood schizophrenia brought on by emotionally deficient parents. Kanner’s talk of “refrigerator mothers” served largely to stigmatise the condition as shameful. (Autistic children were taken from their parents and shut away in state institutions.) Independent of each other, Kanner and Asperger had found new ways of looking at infantile autism. Asperger emphasised the potential benefits for society to be had from the unique intelligence of his “little professors”. Their tunnel-like focus on minutiae was often accompanied by an unconventional logic and bracingly skewed way of looking at the world. In his estimation, autism was at once a disability and a gift.
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