Hans Asperger abandoned neurodiversity views within months of Nazi annexation

Evidence

One person who benefited from Austria’s doppelganger flip was Hans Asperger, a young doctor who was appointed as director of the famed Heilpädagogik clinic where so many young people with autism and other developmental challenges had been treated. He had come up as a medical student in the idealistic heyday of Red Vienna and worked alongside Jewish psychiatrists like Georg Frankl, who helped develop progressive theories that we would now recognize as central to the understanding of neurodiversity—the idea that brains are wired in a range of ways and difference need not be equated with pathology. Up until the year before the Germans annexed Austria, Asperger echoed this analysis, writing of his young patients displaying autistic traits that they could not be neatly categorized under a diagnosis. “There are as many approaches [to child development] as there are different personalities. It is impossible to establish a rigid set of criteria for a diagnosis,” he wrote in 1937. His view changed dramatically within months, as Asperger began to echo the Nazis’ eugenicist discourse, now writing of the need to avoid “transmission of diseased hereditary material.” Kids showing autistic traits that he had previously said defied diagnosis were recast as a “well-characterized group of children,” whom he named “autistic psychopaths.” — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 694

Categorization

• DEFINE: Grounds the term ‘autistic psychopaths’ and the flip from neurodiversity emphasis to eugenicist framing — needed to assess Klein’s device.
• SEED: Article angle: how a progressive clinician’s diagnostic categories were weaponized overnight by a regime change — the diagnostic naming itself becomes the sorting instrument.
• XREF: Connects to the ‘doppelganger flip’ motif from earlier chapters (who gets to be called what) and to diagnostic/nosology history generally.