Hans Asperger

Also, the Waffen SS don't appear to have needed any threats to commit their atrocities.

True, they didn't KNOW it was a set-up but the experiments were being conducted in a reputable university. It's reasonable to assume that the university wasn't regularly disposing of torture victims and so the odds of any real danger were small indeed! The results of Milgram's experiment have been questioned for many reasons, including this one.  

Indeed, but an awful lot of them were in some form or another; denouncing neighbours or turning a blind eye to the regime's abuses.

The participants actually had no idea that it was a set up and the experiment was done for express purpose of trying to explain the atrocities that happened during WWII:

https://www.simplypsychology.org/milgram.html

In the original experiment, 65% of participants were willing to administer a lethal shock (450 V) to another human being upon being ordered to do so by the authority figure (who was really an actor, but the participants didn't know that). All of the participants went up to 300 V (which one can imagine would cause a lot of pain if 450 V would be lethal.

Scary stuff, especially considering the participants were under no perceived threat against themselves, but simply given orders by another person. Imagine how many people would have gone all the way to 450 V if their own lives, or the lives of family members, had been threatened (I'm guessing closer to 100%).

I think the Milgram experiment participants 'inflicted torture' for the opposite reasons to the people trapped in Nazi Germany. In the Milgram scenario, people most likely believed that a reputable university wouldn't actually torture people and certainly wouldn't kill study participants so they would have felt safe going along with things even when they seemed wrong - trusting that things couldn't actually be as they seemed.

In contrast, those trapped in Nazi Germany soon realised that the Nazi's held to no such ethical considerations and so they had no choice but to at least be seen to co-operate or face death themselves.  

So did millions of others but it doesn't mean they were all complicit.  

I remember reading about the euthanasia of children deemed genetically inferior in the 80's, when I was involved in a crummy independent bookshop. I remember thinking that had I been that much more in difficulties as a child, that might have been my fate.

But they were dangerous times. It does not sound as though Asperger's hands were totally free of blood though. 

I agree with other observations along the lines of - how do we know we would not do the same during times such as those? What if things end up swinging towards something similar in the future.

There was an experiment called the Milgram experiment carried out a whhle ago. Seems that most people, when put under pressure from an authority, were willing to push a button said to administer massive electric shocks to another subject. Way too many people caved in and kept on pushing that button at higher and higher voltages, I fear.....

Asperger had the opportunity to flee. He chose not to take it.

I have read it through, but a second read is necessary. I'm not feeling condemnatory about this.  It is bound to put a new slant on many things though. I guess we might eventually benefit from this by realising the need for constant re-examination of our hypotheses, notions and beliefs. WW1 & WW2 obviously did put Hans Asperger in a hard place. This makes me reflect on my own 'inadequacies' when faced with difficult decisions. Hard as that might be on our heroes and heroines, I think this article is very necessary reading. Better to publish it than just carry on ignoring some inconvenient truths.

I think that’s a very sensible and important comment DragonCat16, though I am quite happy to condemn Nazi ideology (and a number of other ideologies of this world...) and that’s what I attempted to convey in my comment above.

I have read quite a lot of the journal article, and there really is no more than speculation about Asperger's political inclinations. The main argument for Asperger being sympathetic to the prevailing regime at the time (the National Socialist party) seems to be that his writings and speeches gained approval from certain prominent figures in that regime. The author of the paper says that Asperger had an "ambivalent" attitude toward the ideology of the National Socialist party. He was apparently a member of a Catholic organisation which had its own ideas about eugenics but was opposed to the overall ideals of the National Socialist party. In 1945, after the war had ended, Asperger was the only one among his colleagues who wasn't fired for being a member of that party, so obviously they had some information available back then to support the conclusion that he wasn't working for the party.

The argument is also made that Asperger's early career benefitted from the fact that his Jewish colleagues lost their jobs. Certainly, he was an ambitious person and wanted to build his career, but there is no evidence that he had anything to do with the misfortune his Jewish colleagues suffered, and, after all, there wasn't really anything he could do, given that he held a very junior position when it happened. I suppose one could say that he should have resigned in protest, but how many people would really do that, and what good would it have done? He had no idea how long the political situation would last, and it's all nice and good for us to be looking back with 20/20 hindsight saying what he should and shouldn't have done. The political climate of the time was his reality, and he wanted to conduct his research within that framework. He did everything he could to keep the National Socialist party off his back while rejecting the inhuman aspects of the regime.

There is evidence that Asperger treated his Jewish patients the same as any of his other patients, and he tried to advocate for them as much as he could. He also used his language to try to protect children with mental incapacities from forced sterilisation, while seeming, with the wording he used, to fall in line with the ideology of the National Socialist party (the latter of which he is now being criticised for).

Something Asperger is criticised for in the paper is his voluntary participation in a program to screen residents of a children's home to select those suitable for being euthanised. The paper says that 35 out of 200 children were selected for euthanasia. There is no detail of the specifics of Asperger's participation in that program, but it is very clear that he was only one of several people involved in the screening. It could very well be that more of the children would have been selected if Asperger had not been involved. Just because he was involved in this horrific exercise does not mean that he agreed with it, so I think it is unfair to make assumptions without all the details.

We have to remember that the political climate of the time was very dangerous, and also that it was nearly a century ago. Some of the language used by Asperger himself was in line with the language typically used at the time, and that type of language would be considered quite unpalatable to people of today, even if there was no specifically racist or otherwise negative attitude behind it. He is said to have used harsher language than others about some of his patients, but he also clearly opposed having them classified with a genetic condition which would result in forced sterilisation or worse.

Pretty much anyone who lived in that part of the world in that time and came out of it unscathed could be accused of all sorts of things, but how far would most "good" people go against a very dangerous political regime? Think about what is happeneing in the world today. There are still dictators and otherwise really nasty people in political office now, and why is that allowed to happen? Because people who know that what's happening is wrong are afraid to lose their power, their careers, their political credibility, or even their lives. That fear was a very real part of everyday life back then as well.

I think we should be very careful before we condemn a person who is no longer around, because he has no way to defend himself against the accusations. I'm not saying that he definitely was or wasn't a sympathiser, and I have no personal reason for wanting it to be one way or the other, but I don't think a reliable conclusion can be drawn from the available evidence. I especially think that we as Aspies don't need anything more for others to think we should feel ashamed about, just because someone happened to conduct research on our condition in the time and place that he did.

This appears to be the full paper, online: https://molecularautism.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13229-018-0208-6

Editorial: https://molecularautism.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13229-018-0209-5

Elsewhere: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/was-this-autism-pioneer-also-a-nazi

There's a hyperlink on the above webpage to a full article on tablet magazine.

Personally I find this rather ironic because those people who carry Asperger’s name in their diagnosis invariably have a strong sense of social justice and they are willing to fight all the way for what they believe in, even if it goes against everybody around them. This is quite the opposite of what occurred with the N*zis, where for whatever reasons (fear, stupidity, brainwashing etc.) a vast number of people conformed to the idea that certain types of people should no longer exist based on the opinions of a few. 

So having the name in Asperger’s Syndrome doesn’t really bother me, because even if the association to Hans Asperger, and therefore possibly the Nazi regime, is made, those with this syndrome really have gone on to show up this crazy Nazi thinking about the lives of certain types of people, and I think that can only be a good thing.

I do tend to use the term Aspie, but mainly because it’s quicker to say and write and it’s just an abbreviation really.