00:00 Welcome to the heart of history, I am Virginie Giraud.
00:03 Today, in France, 700,000 people are affected by the disorders of the autistic spectrum,
00:09 called Asperger's syndrome,
00:12 named after the Austrian psychiatrist Hans Asperger,
00:15 to whom we have dedicated a story.
00:17 You have surely heard this term before,
00:19 the name Asperger is almost back in the common language.
00:23 But what you may not know,
00:25 is that today, part of the scientific community and doctors
00:28 are advocating that the name Asperger
00:30 is no longer associated with the disorders of the autistic spectrum.
00:34 Because this psychiatrist, Hans Asperger,
00:36 who practiced in the 1940s,
00:38 took part, to a certain extent,
00:41 in the extermination of disabled children under the Third Reich.
00:45 So how did Nazi ideology model
00:48 the concept of Asperger's autistic psychopathy?
00:52 What were Asperger's methods of education?
00:55 And what remains of his research work today?
00:58 To discuss this, I have the pleasure of welcoming historian Edith Schaeffer,
01:02 associate researcher at the University of California, Berkeley,
01:05 and author of the book "The Asperger Children".
01:08 And I must say, we are very happy to receive her,
01:11 because she is one of the few historians to have worked on this topic.
01:14 And above all, it is our first duplex with the United States,
01:18 so we are very proud to welcome Edith Schaeffer.
01:21 Hello Edith Schaeffer!
01:22 Hello!
01:23 To start this interview,
01:25 can you briefly remind us what Asperger's syndrome is,
01:28 which the scientific community prefers to call "the autism spectrum disorder"?
01:33 Asperger's syndrome is difficult to define,
01:37 because it is a kind of a special diagnosis
01:40 to define people with different social difficulties.
01:44 People can present very different symptoms from one another.
01:47 This syndrome is considered to be part of the autism spectrum,
01:51 but in popular culture,
01:53 it is associated not with people who consider themselves to be disabled,
01:57 but with people who consider themselves to have superior abilities.
02:01 The Nazi period gave us a kind of a demarcation,
02:04 a kind of a dividing line,
02:06 a kind of eugenic distinction, at least in the United States,
02:08 between people with autism,
02:10 who we consider to be unable to find a job
02:13 or live independently,
02:15 and those who suffer from Asperger's syndrome
02:17 and who could be integrated into society.
02:20 And that's one of the findings that I make in my book,
02:23 this very eugenic consideration of the term.
02:26 Is Hans Asperger the first to use the term "autist"?
02:32 Did he invent it?
02:34 No, he was not.
02:36 And again, this was another surprising finding that I had in my book,
02:40 because he is regarded as the first person to invent the term in 1938.
02:45 But as a matter of fact,
02:47 the doctors in his clinic already used the term "autist" in the early 1930s.
02:53 And they were even using critical articles on children
02:57 who had autistic characteristics
02:59 several years before Asperger published his research in 1938.
03:04 And the key difference is that these doctors used the term "autist"
03:08 as a kind of adjective to describe various behaviors.
03:12 It was not a standard diagnosis.
03:16 Hans Asperger was much younger than his colleagues,
03:19 and less experienced than them.
03:21 And the key difference is that he called autism "pathology".
03:25 He even used the term "psychopathy",
03:27 which is a term with a criminal connotation in German.
03:30 So he had a much harsher definition of autism
03:33 than his senior colleagues.
03:39 At the time of the Second World War,
03:41 the psychiatrist Hans Asperger worked at Spiegelgrund,
03:44 a pediatric institution,
03:46 at the time when Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany.
03:50 Edith Schaeffer, what is the profile of the children
03:53 who are admitted to this pediatric hospital?
03:56 Can you tell us about some of these retirees
03:59 described by Asperger in his research?
04:01 Spiegelgrund housed a wide variety of children.
04:05 It was considered a welcoming place for children
04:08 with disabilities or physical disabilities,
04:11 such as deafness, amputated limbs, or heart conditions.
04:15 Some children were diagnosed with trisomy 21,
04:18 but many children did not have any particular pathology,
04:21 but very nebulous psychological diagnoses,
04:24 such as idiocy or mental weakness.
04:27 And about 10% of the children had no diagnosis whatsoever.
04:35 Among the children at Asperger's clinic
04:38 who were sent to Spiegelgrund,
04:40 many had behavioral disorders at home and at school.
04:44 They could be poorly raised,
04:46 they could be insolent with their parents,
04:48 they could run away or hang out with boys late at night,
04:51 they could skip school.
04:53 The oldest, for example,
04:55 were unable to hold a part-time job.
04:59 So Spiegelgrund was a place for children
05:02 who were not considered able to evolve in society,
05:06 whether for medical or behavioral reasons.
05:11 Among Asperger's patients,
05:13 as you say in your book,
05:15 some suffer from psychiatric diseases,
05:18 while others simply seem to be rebelling
05:21 because they challenge authority,
05:23 but without committing serious or reprehensible acts.
05:26 How is it that these two profiles
05:28 are diagnosed as autistic by Asperger
05:31 and end up being admitted to the same hospital, Spiegelgrund?
05:34 It's a fascinating question,
05:36 and again was one of the discoveries I made in my book,
05:40 this confusion between medical and behavioral labels
05:44 for children.
05:46 The way that I understand it,
05:48 is that psychiatry was not focused on conformity.
05:52 You had to look for a path to conformity
05:56 in the way that you did with other children
06:00 who would be at school with you or in the Hitler Youth.
06:04 And when they became adults,
06:06 they had to become productive members of society.
06:09 If you were not conforming,
06:11 whether physiologically or behaviorally,
06:13 you were considered a burden for society,
06:15 and you could fail to integrate.
06:17 So the diagnosis became blurred
06:19 between physiological and behavioral failings.
06:27 A child who was poorly raised at school
06:30 was considered as problematic
06:32 and as inapt to get a job or to join the army
06:35 as a child suffering from physiological failings.
06:38 And it was this idea that a child would be a lost cause
06:41 that made the difference.
06:43 There were children who could be educated
06:45 and others who could not.
06:51 And so, how do the psychiatrists at Spiegelgrund
06:54 evaluate the intelligence of children,
06:57 what can be saved, re-educated?
07:00 Because we see that from the late 1930s,
07:02 the doctors at this hospital
07:04 are very majorly supporters of the Nazi movement.
07:08 That is a very ironic question
07:10 because it was hardly a methodological, scientific process.
07:15 The Nazis thought they were scientists
07:17 when they issued their batteries
07:19 for formal, mathematical, textual and mathematical tests
07:22 to certain children.
07:25 These were traditional tests
07:27 where children were asked to associate words
07:30 or recite numbers.
07:32 But what mattered most during the Nazi period
07:35 were the rapid observations
07:37 of the doctors and nurses who treated a child.
07:41 And whether a child talked back
07:43 or whether a child did pee in bed
07:45 or whether a child was not wise.
07:48 These observations were consigned in a daily report
07:51 which was then used to determine
07:53 whether a child should be put to death or not.
08:00 So these were not scientific reports to Spiegelgrund,
08:04 but reports based on rapid interactions with children.
08:10 And so, how do doctors
08:12 make diagnoses of disabled children?
08:15 How do they see physical disability
08:17 but also mental disability?
08:20 One of the things I would like to explore in my book
08:23 is a new valuable concept,
08:26 which is the effect of Gemüt.
08:29 And bear with me,
08:30 Gemüt is one of the words
08:32 that is the most difficult to translate.
08:35 And in the Nazi period,
08:38 this term defined a kind of physical sense
08:41 of social connection between people.
08:45 A belonging between children
08:47 and a diagnosis of children who, according to them,
08:49 lacked Gemüt.
08:50 This capacity to create links with other children.
08:54 Children who do not have Gemüt
08:56 were not worthy of joining organizations
08:58 such as the Hitler Youth.
09:07 Asperger followed the footsteps of these Nazi psychiatrists
09:10 who identified children who lacked Gemüt.
09:13 He worked with these psychiatrists,
09:15 he attended their conferences
09:17 and he cited them in his work.
09:24 The difference is that these psychiatrists
09:26 did not use the term autistic,
09:28 while Asperger used it.
09:35 And how did doctors treat children
09:38 who suffered from a lack of Gemüt?
09:41 Did they set up special practices?
09:48 The doctors of the Spiegelgrund institution
09:50 had extremely violent methods
09:52 to try to control children.
09:54 And "control children" is really the right word here.
09:58 The goal was not to treat them,
10:00 but to house them and evaluate them
10:02 in view of their death.
10:04 These doctors of Spiegelgrund
10:05 used very violent methods,
10:07 comparable to those of the psychiatric asylums of the time.
10:10 For example, they dipped the children's heads
10:12 several times in ice water
10:14 or wrapped them in tight sheets for a very long time.
10:17 It even lasted for days.
10:20 The children could not move,
10:21 they were lying on their backs.
10:26 The doctors of Spiegelgrund also issued
10:28 what were called "vomit shots",
10:31 a substance that caused uncontrolled vomiting.
10:34 The children then vomited everything they ingested.
10:38 And if the doctors decided that a child was going to die,
10:41 the nurses mixed a overdose of barbiturates
10:43 in cocoa powder
10:45 that the children ate at will.
10:48 Then when they became too weak
10:50 because of these barbiturates,
10:51 they injected them with barbiturates
10:53 until the children fell ill and died,
10:56 usually from pneumonia.
10:58 The Spiegelgrund administration
11:00 made people believe that these children died from pneumonia,
11:03 when in fact it was due to poisoning,
11:05 to overdose of barbiturates
11:07 that caused pneumonia.
11:11 You write in your book "The Asperger Children"
11:14 by the Flammarion editions,
11:15 which is based on a very impressive documentation,
11:17 that the brain and neurology
11:20 are subject to special attention
11:22 under the Third Reich.
11:23 Why are the Nazis interested in these areas?
11:26 The Third Reich put a tremendous emphasis on conformity
11:30 and the creation of citizens.
11:33 It was a productive society for the people
11:36 and had little tolerance for people
11:38 considered non-conformist
11:40 on the physical, social and mental level.
11:43 In my book, I call the Third Reich
11:46 a diagnosis regime,
11:48 because the Nazis
11:50 sorted people by several criteria.
11:53 If they were Jewish, homosexual,
11:56 from the Roman communities,
11:59 if they were lazy,
12:01 their life was not worth living.
12:04 It did not concern only children.
12:07 All those who were considered
12:09 as deviant by the Nazis
12:10 were pathologized.
12:12 And neuropsychiatrists
12:14 were actually the doctors
12:15 who were highly involved
12:17 in the program of killing children.
12:20 Do you think that the Nazi ideology
12:22 influenced the work of Asperger
12:24 on autistic children?
12:26 Absolutely.
12:28 Asperger's definition of autism
12:30 was increasingly shaped
12:32 by the fascist ideology.
12:34 In 1937,
12:36 in one of his articles,
12:38 Asperger wrote that children
12:40 are too different from each other
12:42 to be able to establish
12:44 a universal diagnosis.
12:46 However, just months after
12:48 the Nazi annexation of Vienna,
12:50 Asperger made a diagnosis
12:52 on his own children.
12:54 He said that the children
12:56 were not as different
12:58 as they were before.
13:00 Then, in 1940,
13:02 he issued another definition
13:04 of autism,
13:06 much more focused
13:08 on social relations.
13:10 He described his children
13:12 as abnormal
13:14 and was much harder
13:16 in describing them.
13:18 Then, in his founding article
13:20 in 1944,
13:22 in which he gave
13:24 his final definition
13:26 of autism,
13:28 Asperger said that his children
13:30 represented a danger
13:32 to society.
13:34 He even said that they were
13:36 unable to integrate into society,
13:38 which is a pure and simple
13:40 fascist rhetoric.
13:42 It is therefore possible
13:44 to trace his publications
13:46 throughout the Nazi period
13:48 and to observe the way
13:50 he gradually absorbed
13:52 Nazi rhetoric.
13:54 In the context of the Action T4
13:56 program, the Nazis decided
13:58 to exterminate the disabled
14:00 and the children
14:02 also severely disabled.
14:04 Did this fit
14:06 into the framework of
14:08 an eugenic policy?
14:10 Did they call it a positive eugenics?
14:12 And if so,
14:14 can you explain to us
14:16 what positive eugenics is
14:18 for the Nazis?
14:20 Eugenics is a doctrine
14:22 that was popular in many European
14:24 countries at the time.
14:26 It was seen as a way to
14:28 increase the population
14:30 following the First World War
14:32 which caused millions of deaths
14:34 throughout Europe.
14:36 Some people then focused
14:38 on what was called positive eugenics,
14:40 which was about increasing
14:42 the population by public health measures,
14:44 better housing, better family care
14:46 and encouraging fertility.
14:48 Nazi Germany
14:50 was the only country to focus
14:52 on negative eugenics,
14:54 which was the idea of
14:56 suppressing the population,
14:58 children and adults,
15:00 considered as undesirable.
15:02 This was translated by the forced sterilization
15:04 of at least 400,000 people,
15:06 considered as a genetic threat
15:08 to the folk.
15:10 They were therefore
15:12 considered as unfit to live.
15:14 And this did not only concern
15:16 children. Up to a quarter of a million
15:18 people were considered as unworthy
15:20 of life.
15:22 According to the Nazis,
15:24 these people could not be
15:26 remunerated or jobs or be useful to the people.
15:28 They were considered a financial burden
15:30 and were therefore put to death
15:32 by the Nazi regime.
15:34 It is estimated, for example,
15:36 that 75% of people diagnosed
15:38 with schizophrenia were either
15:40 sterilized or killed.
15:42 For the Nazis,
15:44 it is considered that the lives
15:46 of children are not worth living.
15:48 This is the expression they used.
15:50 How, for them, do we identify
15:52 someone whose life is not worth
15:54 being lived, who is even unworthy?
15:56 They were incredibly wide-spread children,
16:00 each of them.
16:02 What they had in common was that
16:04 they were all considered as irrecoverable.
16:06 The Nazi regime called its child murder
16:08 program "euthanasia".
16:10 According to the Nazis,
16:14 they were suffering from these children
16:16 by killing them.
16:18 For them, they were doomed to death anyway.
16:20 But this is a total misnomer.
16:22 The children who were killed
16:24 were not terminally ill, they were not suffering.
16:26 They could have lived their full lives.
16:28 One of the things I hope
16:30 today is that we can make
16:32 the term "euthanasia" disappear
16:34 to talk about these child murders.
16:36 Do you think, Edith Schaeffer,
16:40 Hans Asperger was aware of
16:42 the "Aktion T4" program and
16:44 did he participate in it voluntarily?
16:46 Absolutely.
16:50 I would say that Asperger was an accomplice
16:52 of the Nazi program aimed at killing
16:54 his children.
16:56 His role was to diagnose children
16:58 and he referred them to the Spiegelgrund
17:00 with a diagnosis that would send them to death.
17:02 He associated himself with the
17:04 main figure of the "euthanasia" program.
17:06 He founded organizations with them.
17:08 He published with them.
17:10 These were his most immediate colleagues.
17:12 He absolutely knew what was happening
17:16 at the Spiegelgrund and he referred children to it.
17:18 That said, he was not as bloodthirsty
17:22 as some of his most experienced colleagues.
17:24 In my assessment, he just followed the movement
17:28 and was not entirely
17:30 convinced by the program.
17:32 But he was still enough to believe
17:34 that some children could not be re-educated.
17:36 And in my opinion,
17:38 he was also a conscious participant
17:40 in a system of killing.
17:42 Hans Asperger knew about it.
17:46 He participated in it.
17:48 He is an accomplice.
17:50 And, incredibly, he is not at all worried
17:52 about his participation in the Action T4 program.
17:54 In the end, in the 80s,
17:56 we will give his name to what we will call
17:58 the Asperger syndrome,
18:00 a part of the Autistic Spectrum disorder.
18:02 How come we give him the name
18:04 of Asperger in the 80s?
18:06 Did we forget about it?
18:08 That is a wonderful question
18:12 that I think deserves to be studied.
18:14 After the war,
18:16 Asperger insisted that he was innocent.
18:18 He even said
18:20 that he had been persecuted by the Nazi Party.
18:22 But that is completely false.
18:24 He never joined the Nazi Party,
18:26 which is not unusual for a doctor
18:28 in Vienna.
18:30 Only about three in ten doctors
18:32 joined the Nazi Party.
18:34 But he used this to assert
18:36 that he had always been opposed
18:38 to the children's murder program.
18:40 He even said that the Gestapo
18:42 had come to arrest him,
18:44 which has never been confirmed.
18:46 So, compared to his experienced colleagues,
18:50 he could emerge from the Nazi period
18:52 by claiming that he was innocent
18:54 of these crimes.
18:56 I should say that he was a very marginal figure
18:58 in psychiatry in the world.
19:00 He did not participate
19:02 in international conferences
19:04 or publish anything important about autism.
19:06 He published about 300 articles,
19:08 a handful of which
19:10 were about autism.
19:12 They were published in newsletters
19:14 and were not important publications.
19:16 Asperger would have been
19:20 a real downer in the history
19:22 of autism research
19:24 if it had not been for Dr. Lorna Wing,
19:26 a British psychiatrist
19:28 who had not been for Dr. Lorna Wing
19:30 when she had discovered the Asperger article
19:32 in 1944.
19:34 By courteous professional,
19:36 she decided to give her name
19:38 to the syndrome.
19:40 But the definition of Lorna Wing's
19:42 autism had very little in common
19:44 with Asperger's.
19:46 Lorna Wing got rid
19:48 of Nazi rhetoric
19:50 and talked about a syndrome
19:52 rather than a psychopathy.
19:54 It was thanks to Lorna Wing
19:56 in the 1980s
19:58 that Asperger's syndrome
20:00 appeared and people believed
20:02 his words, that he was innocent
20:04 during the Nazi period.
20:06 Edith Schaeffer, you are the great
20:10 specialist in the history of Hans Asperger.
20:12 You know the case thoroughly.
20:14 Do you think that today
20:16 the Asperger's syndrome should be
20:18 disbaptised, find another name
20:20 simply to
20:22 do his trial in history,
20:24 that is, to take away a prestige
20:26 that he does not deserve?
20:28 I am absolutely convinced
20:30 that we should rename
20:32 the term Asperger's syndrome.
20:34 In medicine, the diagnoses are named
20:36 according to the people
20:38 who are at the origin of the definition
20:40 of a syndrome or of a disease
20:42 as an honor.
20:44 In my opinion, Asperger
20:46 does not deserve either.
20:48 As I said,
20:50 the definition of Asperger's syndrome
20:52 as we know it today
20:54 has advantages related to Lorna Wing
20:56 and her research.
20:58 In fact, we should rather
21:00 talk about the wing syndrome.
21:02 Asperger said that malice and sadism
21:04 were inherent in autism,
21:06 which is not the case.
21:08 I think Asperger
21:10 does not deserve the honor
21:12 of an eponym.
21:14 He was a conscious participant
21:16 in a system of killing.
21:18 In the United States,
21:20 his work has generated
21:22 intense debates.
21:24 Many people have now decided
21:26 to no longer use the term Asperger.
21:28 I hope this discussion
21:30 can continue.
21:32 Thank you so much,
21:34 Edith Schaeffer.
21:36 Thank you.
21:38 It was a joy.
21:40 Thank you so much
21:42 for participating in the heart of the story.
21:44 I remind you that your book
21:46 "Les enfants d'Asperger"
21:48 was published by Flammarion.
21:50 Thank you all for listening to us.
21:52 "Au coeur de l'histoire" is an original podcast
21:54 by Europe 1 Studio.
21:56 See you soon on your favorite listening platform.
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