The Failed Attempt to Cancel Hans Asperger
Have you ever assumed someone was bad, then you found out they were a hero?
It’s a common story. Abusive people are getting exposed at lightning speed thanks to the Internet, but sometimes the mob gets it wrong. Every mob does. Really, the current mob has been historically well-behaved.
One of the good people we punished discovered and named Asperger’s Syndrome. And people were given good reason to suspect him.
Hans Asperger worked with disabled children in WWII Austria, where Nazi sentiment was even stronger than in Germany. He gave acts of loyalty that Nazis didn’t need to do, like signing ‘heil Hitler’ at the end of his letters.
And some of those WWII-era letters suggest that his over-the-top cheerleading for the Nazis probably saved his ‘little professors’, a group of Aspie kids he was studying. That seems to have been his plan all along.
That’s why this year, it came out that Hans Asperger wasn’t quite as Nazi as all the literature says he was.
True, Asperger would write things like ‘Thanks to the Fuhrer’ in academic papers. Medical researchers weren’t expected to thank Hitler for their luck as part of their research.
This is where Dr Asperger’s plan begins:
The Nazis made sure to keep unwilling people away from their war crime programs. If you had a problem smashing through human rights every day, you were free to say so and the officers sent you somewhere else. After all, soldiers who didn’t agree with the Nazis’ most sensitive and horrific work wouldn’t be able to keep up the work. They’d burn out, quit or start helping the enemy.
There are plenty of records where soldiers with attacks of conscience were sent to the Western front, which is interesting since the cruel Soviet conscripts were badly beating them in the East. We do know that the Soviets saw their torture of Nazi prisoners as revenge for the cruelty that Nazis had shown them, which would make a brownshirt with a conscience fairly unfit for the East Front.
Meanwhile Dr Asperger was in the brutal medical program, acting as a happy patriot. He seems to have acted so well that in the 21st Century we still believed him, even after he spent the rest of his life denouncing every human experiment and mass murder he heard about.
Asperger became a Schindler to his patients, fudging records and sending children on the Spectrum to facilities where they had a better chance of surviving. He knew they were destroying disabled kids wholesale, but records also show he didn’t know every hospital was murdering them. Before the War he famously called for the end of euthenasia by writing in his teaching materials “You know what measures are being taken”, and the earliest papers written about Asperger’s Disorder stress that these children are not mentally deficient. The papers stress that these children deserve to live.
When Hans Asperger became an activist after the war and pushed to never see children mistreated in a lab again, it got lost somewhere. Instead, people called him a Nazi. They only remember the praise of Hitler — not his life-risking referrals, his sneaky but extremely effective resistance against the murder program and his calls to save these children.
So what does that mean for us in this century?
It feels trivial to bring up cancel culture, but that is evidently what happened to Hans Asperger. The recent research shows that Dr Asperger’s modern enemies are pushing to cancel him out of ill will.
The big debate in autism this decade has not been about vaccines (we wrapped that one up in 1999) or how to show people on the Spectrum in movies (like human beings) or whether autism can exist in the workplace (the biggest block is discrimination, every worker has some special needs but autistic needs are ignored). It’s where Hans Asperger fell on the Nazi scale.
It’s ironic that he showed us you need an open mind to study autism, but the public was so ready to hit the Cancel button on him once we confirmed that he was a Nazi. Well, we knew from day one that he was a Nazi, but Asperger was a real person living a complex, nuanced, real life. He made it his mission to save children with Asperger’s from the Nazi murder machine, and he could only do that from the inside. He didn’t openly oppose the killings, because he was no good to the autism community if his bosses executed him, but he did speak openly about the hush-hush killings — sometimes to whole audiences.
After the War he viciously spoke up against eugenics, as if making up for all those times he wrote that his Asperger’s kids were superior Germans who should not be killed but treated as the perfect white ubermenschen, arrived at last.
Every single motive pointed to him saving his kids under a Nazi disguise, and he was so successful that even now we think he was in on the genocide.
Maybe that’s why we let a few academics take his name out of the autism spectrum (Asperger’s is now just called ASD, Autism Spectrum Disorder, a name Asperger wouldn’t particularly like for his ‘little professors’). While he worked personally with kids on the Spectrum and made them his life, the latest shot-callers have ignored the autism community’s horror at Asperger’s being literally cancelled from textbooks and diagnoses.
For about half a decade, the very worst people have been made unfashionable when the crowd turned on them. And they deserved it. This year we’ve seen some of those monsters start to redeem themselves, and society seems to be thinking about taking them out of the permanent box where we throw all our most unpopular people. We consistently throw Nazis in that box and wouldn’t dare take any out, but Hans Asperger may have just become an exception.
Innocent people have been stuffed away too, and haven’t been believed. Not in the short term, anyway. The point of cancelling someone, throwing them in that box, is to immediately pull their voice away from everyone forever. The idea is that their character is too dangerous to put on trial, so we have to assassinate it today. And the latest research shows that the allegations against Hans Asperger were never in good will, but a lot of the time were inaccurate.
It’s amazing that this research came from a few letters, waiting to be discovered since nearly a century ago. This simple inoculation was under the cover of some box or vault, possibly beside the other letters that people used to condemn Asperger. Maybe right beside them, completely available to the people who ruled that we should erase Asperger’s name and make homeless the identity of everyone who calls themselves aspies.
With complex characters like Hans Asperger, there’s always more to know.
