Autism and the Nazis

For some reason many like the giraffe as a symbol for autism.

You might ask yourself what autism has to do with Hitler and the Nazis. There isn’t a direct link, but nevertheless I believe there is an interesting story. Let’s first consider Hitler’s project. He didn’t just want to get rid of the Jews. It wouldn’t matter how insignificantly different you were because any deviation from the norm would be seen as inferiority.

In addition to the Jews, the Gypsies, Slavs and people of African descent had no place in the new society Hitler wanted to build. Italy was an ally, but knowing how the Nazis thought about a German master race, most of Europe would probably have been seen as slaves at best. There was no room for homosexuals either, but the relevant group for this post is the disabled. The Nazis saw it as a waste of money to support these people, and it didn’t matter how blond hair or blue eyes you had.

The Nazis had a forced sterilization program to weed out genetic defects. I have a feeling that Hitler would have succeeded if he had been more patient because there was a strong support for the eugenics movement both in Europe and the USA. According to Jewish Virtual Library more than 30 000 people in 29 US states were sterilized between 1907 and 1939. Many of these victims either didn’t know or it was done against their will. It was much worse in Germany of course where between 300 000 and 400 000 were sterilized under the law. Some people may have thought that they didn’t have to do anything because they were not Jewish, but they would have been next.

We wouldn’t be honest if we maintained that Nazi Germany was the only regime that labeled certain groups as inferior. The Nazi Sterilization Law was introduced in 1934 and reading about it today it seems pretty clear where it was heading. There may have been some opposition in my country, but that didn’t stop the politicians in Norway from introducing a similar law the same year. They may not have used the Nazi term “life unworthy of life”, but the outcome was the same. Institutionalized people with a mental illness or mental handicap were sterilized, but different groups of travelers were also seen as a threat. It shocked me when I discovered that this law had been applicable as late as 1977, the year I turned nine.

The behaviour associated with autism existed before these symptoms were first described in a scientific article, but I think it’s pretty clear that both autism and nonverbal learning disorder would have been on the list of people the Nazi didn’t want in Europe. Hans Asberger described autistic symptoms in a paper in 1944, but his work was forgotten for almost four decades. Another Austrian, Leo Kanner, working at Johns Hopkins, published a paper in 1943 and that was to define the future of autism research. It wasn’t a positive development. I recently came across an article that aimed to correct the negative view many have of Leo Kanner, but as far as I understand there is no doubt that Kanner, together with other influential theorists, assumed that parents caused autism in their children. This was called the refrigerator mother theory. The result was that the negative views from the early research was accepted until Lorna Wing proposed the conditions we now know as Asberger’s syndrom in 1981. She challenged the negative model together with Uta Frith who translated Hans Asberger’s paper from German to English in 1991.

I plan to write more about this in a later post. There is still some debate about Hans Asberger and Leo Kanner. I have always heard that Asberger had a positive view of autism, and that it was Kanner’s negative theories that gained support. I have never heard anyone say that Asberger was a Nazi sympathizer, and I didn’t know that was even considered, but this article from NPR discusses that question. There are many things to consider, and I will do some more research before I write about it. When I think about the legacy, what Hans Asberger has meant to our understanding of autism, I can’t imagine him believing that disabled people were inferior, but I welcome any input on this before I write my next post.

The story of NLD research is tragically similar. Helmer Myklebust and Doris Johnson started describing children with learning disabilities in 1967, and they characterized some of them as having a deficiency in social perception. Myklebust continued his research and in 1975 he suggested a subtype of learning disability with a gap between higher verbal ability and lower performance IQ, which is the main tool for diagnosing people with NLD today. Unfortunately, progress is slow and there didn’t seem to be much happening until Byron Rourke started publishing his work in the second half of the 1980’s. What I see as the main issue today is adult NLD’ers. There hasn’t been much research on how to help adults with NLD. I might explore that as well when I dig deeper into the Kanner vs. Asberger story.

Persecution of the Mentally and Physically Disabled
Non-Jewish victimsperce