Published on 12, July, 2020
I've never liked the whole "Asperger" label, because it lends itself to a series of horrible puns (and is unfair to children in that way).
I presume this has been discussed on here, but Dr Hans Asperger is not the kind of man we should be celebrating. This is off Wikipedia - I apologise for using that source, but it is the quickest to cut and paste
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Edith Scheffer, a modern European history scholar, wrote in 2018 that Asperger cooperated with the Nazi regime, including sending children to the Spiegelgrund clinic which participated in the euthanasia program.[26] Scheffer wrote a book further elaborating on her research called Asperger's Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna (2018).[27][28]
Another scholar and historian from the Medical University of Vienna, Herwig Czech concluded in a 2017 article in the journal Molecular Autism, which was published in April 2018:
Asperger managed to accommodate himself to the Nazi regime and was rewarded for his affirmations of loyalty with career opportunities. He joined several organizations affiliated with the NSDAP (although not the Nazi party itself), publicly legitimized race hygiene policies including forced sterilizations and, on several occasions, actively cooperated with the child ‘euthanasia' program.[29]
Dean Falk, American anthropologist from Florida State University, questioned Herwig Czech's allegations against Hans Asperger in two papers in Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders.[30][31] Czech's reply was published in the same journal.[32]
In May 2019, Ketil Slagstad, a Norwegian doctor and historical scholar, added his interpretation of both Scheffer's and Czech's work, in his article "Asperger, the [National Socialists] and the children - the history of the birth of a diagnosis",[33] in which he describes the nuances of the situation. He offers an alternative explanation of Asperger's involvement, citing the challenges of war, desire to protect his career and protect the children for which he cared, Slagstad concludes:
The story of Hans Asperger, Nazism, murdered children, post-war oblivion, the birth of the diagnosis in the 1980s, the gradual expansion of the diagnostic criteria and the huge recent interest in autism spectrum disorders exemplify the historical and volatile nature of diagnoses: they are historic constructs that reflect the times and societies where they exert their effect.
Critically, though, Slagstad noted "Historical research has now shown that he [Asperger] was...a well-adapted cog in the machine of a deadly regime. He deliberately referred disabled children to the clinic Am Spiegelgrund, where he knew that they were at risk of being killed. The eponym Asperger’s syndrome ought to be used with awareness of its historical origin."[34]
On the autism vs Asperger controversy, one thing that has been discussed at my local AS support group is that defenders of AS who do not want it submerged into autism are somewhat analogous to Old Believers in Russia.
Old Believers (the name is a bit misleading as it manifests more in practices rather than beliefs) are people who stick with the original practices of the Russian Orthodox Church before the reforms implemented by Patriarch Nikon in 1652 to align the practices with those of the Greek Orthodox Church.
My local AS support group doesn't like to get too involved in conspiracy theories which lack evidence to back them up, but reading the runes we suspect that concerted efforts are being made to obliterate Hans Asperger's name from history and to revert ASD back to what it was in the 1980s. This is depite the US adopting ICD-10 in 2015 which enables an official diagnosis of AS, and DSM-6 may reinstate AS as ICD is the keeper of the codes for DSM.