A new study conducted by Herwig Czech, a historian of medicine at the Medical University of Vienna has revealed some shocking facts about Hans Asperger, the Austrian pediatrician, and medical theorist.
According to the study report, Hans Asperger, an autism pioneer, worked closely with the Nazis during World War II, and he even actively participated in the eugenics program, wherein several children with disabilities including autism were killed.
The new study report contradicts with the previous findings which indicate that Asperger was protecting the children from being sent to concentration camps. The research report from Czech also reveals that after sympathizing with Nazi politics, Asperger played a pivotal role in the eugenics program in Am Spiegelgrund, a concealed killing center. Most victims were given lethal drugs, but pneumonia was often cited as the cause of their death.
The study report even indicates that the close association of Hans Asperger with the Nazi supreme government helped him to obtain excellent career opportunities.
"The existing literature on the topic has tended to downplay or overlook any such involvement, or even to postulate that Asperger took a position of active resistance. With few exceptions, however, these judgments are based on a limited number of sources," Czech reports.
The research report is published in the journal Molecular Autism.
However, there is a certain other section of people who consider Asperger a man who dedicated his entire life to children with disabilities. These people describe Asperger as a soft-spoken man who really cared for disabled children, and he even lauded these children for their special abilities.
Molecular Autism's co-editor-in-chief Simon Baron-Cohen, from Cambridge University in England, said that the study report will be surely controversial, but they consider this report deserves to be published.
"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," said Baron-Cohen, Philly.com reports.
