69 Facts About Hans Asperger

Johann Friedrich Karl Asperger was an Austrian psychiatrist.

Hans Asperger is remembered for his pioneering studies of autism, specifically in children.

Hans Asperger's name was given to Asperger syndrome, a form of autism defined in 1981 by Lorna Wing, which in 1994 was included as a diagnosis in the DSM-IV and ICD-10.

Hans Asperger wrote more than 300 publications on psychological disorders that posthumously acquired international renown in the 1980s.

Hans Asperger had previously termed the diagnosis, "autistic psychopathy", which garnered controversy.

Hans Asperger was born in Neustiftgasse in the 7th district of Vienna, Austria, on February 18,1906, and was raised on a farm in Hausbrunn not far from the city.

Hans Asperger later stated that "[he] was moulded by the spirit of the German youth movement, which was one of the noblest blossoms of the German spirit".

Hans Asperger collected over 10,000 books in his personal library during his lifetime.

Hans Asperger attributed his "progressive spiritual maturity" to his reading.

Hans Asperger was a devout Christian, a practicing Catholic, but without the political tendencies generally associated with Catholicism at the time.

Hans Asperger's faith was initially considered a disadvantage in his evaluation after the Anschluss.

Hans Asperger was a member of the Sankt-Lukas Guild, which, according to Sheffer and Czech, "advocated for Catholic eugenics," including support for positive eugenics rather than negative eugenics.

Hans Asperger claimed to have discovered his future vocation as a doctor by dissecting the liver of a mouse during his final year of high school.

Hans Asperger passed his secondary school final examination on May 20,1925, with distinction and the grade of "very good" in all subjects.

Hans Asperger studied medicine at the University of Vienna under Franz Hamburger and practiced at the University Children's Hospital in Vienna.

Hans Asperger earned his medical degree in 1931 and became director of the special education section at the university's children's clinic in Vienna in 1932.

Hans Asperger joined the Austrofascist Fatherland Front on 10 May 1934, nine days after Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss passed a new constitution making himself dictator.

Hans Asperger thus obtained his first post in May 1931, thanks to the "purge" of Jewish doctors, as Hamburger's assistant at the University Paediatric Clinic in Vienna.

Czech points out the changes in leadership: "The political orientation of Hamburger's assistants is illustrated by the fact that among those who obtained the highest academic qualification, all, with the exception of Hans Asperger, were rejected in 1945 as Nazis".

When Erwin Lazar, the head of the curative pedagogy department died in 1932, Hans Asperger took over in May 1934 or 1935, as head of the department of Heilpadagogik at the pediatric clinic in Vienna.

Hans Asperger joined an experienced team, consisting of psychiatrist George Frankl, psychologist Josef Feldner and a nun, Sister Viktorine Zak.

The pedagogy employed in Heilpadagogik was inspired by Erwin Lazar, the founder of the clinic; Hans Asperger continued and developed this approach.

Hans Asperger was influenced by two pedagogues, Jan-Daniel Georgens and Johann Heinrich Deinhardt, who founded a specialized institute in 1856.

Hans Asperger is particularly interested in the "psychically abnormal child".

Hans Asperger's career was spent entirely in Vienna, with two brief exceptions.

Hans Asperger was invited for three months, during the summer of 1934, to the psychiatric hospital in Vienna, directed by Otto Potzl.

Hans Asperger joined the nationalist and anti-Semitic German Medical Association in Austria the same year.

Hans Asperger published a definition of autistic psychopathy in 1944 that resembled the definition published earlier by a Russian neurologist named Grunya Sukhareva in 1926.

Hans Asperger noticed that some of the children he identified as being autistic used their special talents in adulthood and had successful careers.

Under the Third Reich, with his position as a doctor in Vienna, Hans Asperger was a decision-maker in the context of examinations of minors: he could defend them if he thought they would integrate into Volk, or the contrary, sending to Spiegelgrund the minors he thought were too deficit, and therefore unfit for integration.

Hans Asperger underwent nine months of training in Vienna and Brunn, then was sent with the 392nd Infantry Division to Croatia in December 1943 as part of a "mission of protection" of the occupied territories in Yugoslavia and the struggle against the "partisans".

The Heilpadagogik, in which Hans Asperger worked before his military service, was destroyed in 1944 by a bombing, in which sister Viktorine Zak was killed.

In 1944, after the publication of his landmark paper describing autistic symptoms, Hans Asperger found a permanent tenured post at the University of Vienna.

Hans Asperger resumed his academic career after the war, in 1945, returning to the department he was directing, which had been destroyed by a bombardment.

Hans Asperger's name is the last one mentioned on the list of recommendations, after those of three other doctors.

Hans Asperger took up his new position on March 31,1957, with an inaugural lecture devoted to problems in modern pediatrics.

Hans Asperger was then appointed to the chair of pediatrics at the Vienna hospital on June 26,1962, and was its director until his official retirement in 1977.

Hans Asperger became professor emeritus in 1977, and died three years later on October 20,1980, after a short illness.

In November 1940, the Vienna Gestapo responded that it had "nothing on him" to a request for a political evaluation of Hans Asperger: this is the only documented interaction between Hans Asperger and the Gestapo,.

Edith Sheffer, a modern European history scholar, wrote in 2018 that Hans Asperger cooperated with the Nazi regime, including sending children to the Am Spiegelgrund clinic which participated in the euthanasia program.

Hans Asperger managed to accommodate himself to the Nazi regime and was rewarded for his affirmations of loyalty with career opportunities.

Hans Asperger joined several organizations affiliated with the NSDAP, publicly legitimized 'race hygiene' policies including forced sterilizations and, on several occasions, actively cooperated with the child 'euthanasia' program.

Hans Asperger offers an alternative explanation of Asperger's involvement: citing the challenges of war, a desire to protect his career, and the protection of the children he cared for.

The story of Hans Asperger, Nazism, murdered children, post-war oblivion, the birth of the diagnosis in the 1980s, the gradual expansion of the diagnostic criteria and the huge recent interest in autism spectrum disorders exemplify the historical and volatile nature of diagnoses: they are historic constructs that reflect the times and societies where they exert their effect.

Hans Asperger deliberately referred disabled children to the clinic Am Spiegelgrund, where he knew that they were at risk of being killed.

Hans Asperger was never considered an opponent of the regime.

Czech asserts that Hans Asperger "publicly protected his patients from forced sterilization", supporting his claim with Hans Asperger's description of his patients "whose abnormity is not of a type that would call for sterilization, who would socially fail without our understanding and guiding assistance, but who with this help are able to occupy their place in the large organism of our people".

Hans Asperger obtained his accreditation in 1943, passing the political control of the National Socialist League of German Lecturers.

For Falk, it is not certain that Hans Asperger was aware of the fate awaiting the children he had transferred to: knowing his religion, his colleagues could have hidden this information from him.

Czech concludes that "The assumption that Hans Asperger was unaware of the risks to the children is unfounded".

The curative pedagogy promoted by Hans Asperger was never considered to be contrary to the objectives of the Third Reich, which was marked by a shortage of manpower.

Hans Asperger distinguished between young people whom he considered amendable, endowed with a potential for "social integration", and those judged irrecoverable.

Czech believes that the argument that Hans Asperger placed a positive emphasis on a small number of autistic individuals in order to protect all autistic children does not hold water.

For Sheffer, Hans Asperger is a "self-proclaimed eugenicist" and "this duality of Hans Asperger's mirrors that of Nazism as a whole".

In 1940, Hans Asperger obtained a position as a medical expert in Vienna, for which he was responsible for diagnosing "hereditary diseases" and proposing forced sterilization in the interest of the Nazi eugenics program.

Hans Asperger described one of the children he recommended for Am Spiegelgrund on June 27,1941, Herta Schreiber, as follows:.

In 1942, following a request addressed to his superior Franz Hamburger, Hans Asperger took part in a selection of patients aimed at separating the "uneducable" from those who could become German citizens.

Hans Asperger's family sent him to the countryside, where he survived the war under his parents' care.

In 1962, a member of Hans Asperger's family believed that he had saved Aurel from "castration" and possibly worse.

The Heilpadagogik Vienna department, where Asperger worked, is known to have taken in Hansi Busztin from September 1942, a Jewish patient in hiding until the end of the war, who states that about a hundred people knew of his existence, and that this department housed "a group of opponents of National Socialism".

Czech considers it likely that Hans Asperger joined the Wehrmacht to protect himself in case Busztin's presence in his ward was discovered, rather than because of "persecution by the Gestapo", which is not proven.

Hans Asperger published a total of 359 texts, most of them devoted to "autistic psychopathy" and the notion of death.

Hans Asperger established in 1943 the description of an "autistic psychopathy of childhood ".

Hans Asperger's article was not published until 1944 in the journal:.

Hans Asperger has been portrayed as progressive and opposed to eugenics under the Nazi regime, including by Lorna Wing and Steve Silberman.

Adam Feinstein's book argues that Hans Asperger deliberately disseminated Nazi-friendly references in his writing in order to hide his true intent.

Hans Asperger seems to have internalized at least some of the anti-Jewish stereotypes of his time.

The reactions of autistic people to the revelations about Hans Asperger's past are varied: some are attached to the terminology of "Asperger's syndrome", while others testify in favour of abandoning this name.

In 2007, Viktoria Lyons and Michael Fitzgerald hypothesized that Hans Asperger was affected by autism, as they believed that he exhibited features of the very disorder that later received his name as a child.