How were autistic people viewed in the early 1900s? What were Hans Asperger’s views on the extermination of disabled people?
Between World War I and World War II, the eugenics movement began growing in popularity. Among the groups of disabled people that eugenicists believe in exterminating were those with autism.
Keep reading to learn about the views on eugenics and autism in the early 1900s.
How Society Viewed Disabled People: The Eugenics Movement
What did eugenics and autism have to do with one another? While physician Hans Asperger and many of his colleagues saw disabled people as valuable humans who deserved basic rights, many at the time believed otherwise, explains Steve Silberman in NeuroTribes.
In the years following World War I, many people in America began to adopt eugenicist views. Eugenics was a pseudoscientific movement devoted to creating the ideal human by stamping out traits viewed as undesirable. Eugenicists believed that allowing certain groups of people to live and reproduce would cause a reverse natural selection process in which the worst elements of human nature would be passed on to successive generations while the best elements would be lost.
According to Silberman, eugenicists used a very strict definition of the “best” human qualities. Their idea of the “perfect” human was one who was white, of Northern European descent, physically and mentally able, and free of all disease. This excluded Black people, Native Americans, Jewish people, and disabled people, among many others. They viewed disabled people as defectives and moral degenerates unworthy of life. Throughout the first half of the 20th century, many US states allowed health officials to forcibly sterilize people in mental asylums, prisons, and schools for mentally disabled children.
As these ideas spread to Germany, Silberman explains, they became the basis for much of the Nazis’ ideology and genocidal tactics. In the next sections, we’ll explain how Nazi Germany adopted eugenics and used it to justify their extermination of disabled people. Then we’ll look at how this shaped the way Asperger presented his findings on autism to the world.
| How Eugenics and Forced Sterilization Persist Today Eugenicist views and forced sterilizations continue to this day in many areas. For example, The Great Replacement Theory posits that white people are being systematically replaced by minorities—echoing the early 20th-century fear that “inferior” people would replace “superior” people. Some polls suggest that as many as one-third of Americans currently hold such a view, as well as more than 60% of the French population. This theory often stokes fears about immigration and has been linked to hate crimes and acts of terrorism against people of color. Additionally, many US states continued to practice forced sterilization—especially on Black women—for decades after the laws allowing such sterilizations had been repealed. And in 2020, human rights groups filed a report against a private detention center for forcibly sterilizing people detained by the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE). |
Nazi Germany’s Embrace of Eugenics
According to Silberman, though eugenicist ideology initially developed in America, post-World War I Germany quickly embraced these ideas. Silberman suggests that this is partly because World War I had cost the lives of a generation of healthy soldiers—young, physically fit males who embodied the eugenicist idea of the “perfect” human. People feared that this loss left a disproportionate number of “defective” people who would reproduce and reduce the overall quality of the German populace.
(Shortform note: For context on Silberman’s claim about Germans embracing eugenics because of the casualties from the war, estimates suggest that the death toll for German soldiers in World War I was over 2 million. Advanced weaponry and military tactics, as well as rampant disease, contributed to the massive number of casualties suffered on both sides.)
Hitler crafted his vision for a “perfect” society around these eugenicist ideas. As he rose to power, the German government legalized the forced sterilization of German citizens who had schizophrenia, epilepsy, congenital deafness, or alcoholism, among other conditions. (Shortform note: Along with these groups, many other people were targeted for extermination during the Holocaust. These included members of the LGBTQ+ community—such as gay people and trans people—as well as Jewish people, Roma people, political dissidents, and Jehovah’s witnesses.)
Throughout the 1930s, the medical field in Germany became overrun with Nazis. Many who opposed their ideology were fired or sent to concentration camps. Though many of his colleagues joined the Nazi party and helped them carry out the Holocaust, Asperger refrained from doing so, according to Silberman. He also refused to report his patients to the Reich Committee, which determined whether a disabled person would be euthanized—sometimes based on nothing more than a person’s score on an IQ test.
According to Silberman, Asperger tried to speak out in favor of the value of disabled people’s lives without overtly defying the Nazis—as we’ll see in the next section, he curated the results of his research to try to dispel the idea that autistic people were worthless—but the eugenicist belief that disabled people deserved to be exterminated prevailed.
| New Evidence Suggests Asperger Was Complicit in the Nazis’ Euthanasia Program Historical evidence uncovered after the publication of NeuroTribes has led some scholars to criticize Silberman’s heroic depiction of Asperger. Historian Herwig Czech argues that Asperger was an enthusiastic Nazi collaborator who believed strongly in eugenics. He also suggests that he intentionally and knowingly referred many children to a facility that euthanized disabled people. Czech states that this evidence doesn’t invalidate or contaminate the research Asperger did on autism, but he emphasizes the importance of understanding this context when discussing Asperger’s work. Czech also thinks it’s unnecessary to eliminate the term “Asperger’s syndrome” from our lexicon since the research is still valid—though some argue otherwise. Silberman has acknowledged this new research on Asperger and updated later editions of his book to reflect the evidence of Asperger’s complicity in the Holocaust. |
Asperger’s Thesis: Consequences for Future Autism Research
In 1944, explains Silberman, Asperger published his thesis on autism. His goal was, in part, to demonstrate that autistic people could make valuable contributions to society in the hope that this would help spare them from the Nazis’ slaughter of those they considered “worthless.” Because of this, he chose to focus his paper on just four specific cases out of the hundreds of autistic children he’d studied. The children in these four cases had no severe impairments and displayed exceptional abilities in math and science. He tried to make the case that people with such abilities could be useful to the Nazis as code breakers.
According to Silberman, this well-intentioned choice had long-lasting, damaging consequences for the field of autism study: Whereas Asperger knew that autism wasn’t rare and that it was a broad spectrum, his published work made it seem like autism was strictly defined and not at all severe. This led other researchers to believe that the condition Asperger studied was a separate condition from autism. (It also later led to the development of the diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome, now colloquially understood to be a subtype of autism, though it no longer appears in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM).
