{"id":127818,"date":"2024-07-31T15:04:33","date_gmt":"2024-07-31T19:04:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/?p=127818"},"modified":"2024-08-07T11:41:51","modified_gmt":"2024-08-07T15:41:51","slug":"eugenics-and-autism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/eugenics-and-autism\/","title":{"rendered":"Eugenics and Autism in the Post World War I Era"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

How were autistic people viewed in the early 1900s? What were Hans Asperger’s views on the extermination of disabled people?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Between World War I and World War II, the eugenics movement began growing in popularity. Among the groups of disabled people that eugenicists believe in exterminating were those with autism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Keep reading to learn about the views on eugenics and autism in the early 1900s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

How Society Viewed Disabled People: The Eugenics Movement<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

What did eugenics and autism have to do with one another? While physician Hans Asperger and many of his colleagues saw disabled people as valuable humans who deserved basic rights, many at the time believed otherwise, explains Steve Silberman <\/em>in NeuroTribes<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the years following World War I, many people in America began to adopt eugenicist<\/em> views. Eugenics was a pseudoscientific movement devoted to creating the ideal human by stamping out traits viewed as undesirable.<\/strong> Eugenicists believed that allowing certain groups of people to live and reproduce would cause a reverse natural selection<\/a> process in which the worst elements of human nature would be passed on to successive generations while the best elements would be lost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to Silberman, eugenicists used a very strict definition of the \u201cbest\u201d human qualities. Their idea of the \u201cperfect\u201d human was one who was white, of Northern European descent, physically and mentally able, and free of all disease.<\/strong> This excluded Black people, Native Americans, Jewish people, and disabled people, among many others. They viewed disabled people as defectives and moral degenerates unworthy of life. Throughout the first half of the 20th century, many US states allowed health officials to forcibly sterilize people in mental asylums, prisons, and schools for mentally disabled children<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As these ideas spread<\/a> to Germany, Silberman explains, they became the basis for much of the Nazis\u2019 ideology and genocidal tactics<\/strong>. In the next sections, we\u2019ll explain how Nazi Germany adopted eugenics and used it to justify their extermination of disabled people. Then we\u2019ll look at how this shaped the way Asperger presented his findings on autism to the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How Eugenics and Forced Sterilization Persist Today<\/strong>

Eugenicist views and forced sterilizations continue to this day in many areas. For example, The Great Replacement Theory posits that white people are being systematically replaced by minorities<\/a>\u2014echoing the early 20th-century fear that \u201cinferior\u201d people would replace \u201csuperior\u201d people. Some polls suggest that as many as one-third of Americans currently hold such a view<\/a>, as well as more than 60% of the French population<\/a>. This theory often stokes fears about immigration<\/a> and has been linked to hate crimes and acts of terrorism<\/a> against people of color.

Additionally, many US states continued to practice forced sterilization<\/a>\u2014especially on Black women\u2014for decades after the laws allowing such sterilizations had been repealed. And in 2020, human rights groups filed a report against a private detention center<\/a> for forcibly sterilizing people detained by the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE).<\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Nazi Germany\u2019s Embrace of Eugenics<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

According to Silberman, though eugenicist ideology initially developed in America, post-World War I Germany quickly embraced these ideas<\/strong>. Silberman suggests that this is partly because World War I had cost the lives of a generation of healthy soldiers\u2014young, physically fit males who embodied the eugenicist idea of the \u201cperfect\u201d human. People feared that this loss left a disproportionate number of \u201cdefective\u201d people who would reproduce and reduce the overall quality of the German populace. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

(Shortform note: For context on Silberman\u2019s claim about Germans embracing eugenics because of the casualties from the war, estimates suggest that the death toll for German soldiers in World War I was over 2 million<\/a>. Advanced weaponry and military tactics, as well as rampant disease, contributed to the massive number of casualties suffered on both sides.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hitler crafted his vision for a \u201cperfect\u201d society around these eugenicist ideas.<\/strong> As he rose to power, the German government legalized the forced sterilization of German citizens who had schizophrenia, epilepsy, congenital deafness, or alcoholism, among other conditions. (Shortform note: Along with these groups, many other people were targeted for extermination<\/a> during the Holocaust. These included members of the LGBTQ+ community\u2014such as gay people and trans people<\/a>\u2014as well as Jewish people, Roma people, political dissidents, and Jehovah\u2019s witnesses.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Throughout the 1930s, the medical field in Germany became overrun with Nazis. Many who opposed their ideology were fired or sent to concentration camps. Though many of his colleagues joined the Nazi party and helped them carry out the Holocaust, Asperger refrained from doing so<\/strong>, according to Silberman. He also refused to report his patients to the Reich Committee, which determined whether a disabled person would be euthanized\u2014sometimes based on nothing more than a person\u2019s score on an IQ test. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to Silberman, Asperger tried to speak out in favor of the value of disabled people\u2019s lives without overtly defying the Nazis\u2014as we\u2019ll see in the next section, he curated the results of his research to try to dispel the idea that autistic people were worthless\u2014but the eugenicist belief that disabled people deserved to be exterminated prevailed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

New Evidence Suggests Asperger Was Complicit in the Nazis\u2019 Euthanasia Program<\/strong>

Historical evidence uncovered after the publication of NeuroTribes<\/em> has led some scholars to criticize Silberman\u2019s heroic depiction of Asperger<\/a>. Historian Herwig Czech argues that Asperger was an enthusiastic Nazi collaborator<\/a> who believed strongly in eugenics. He also suggests that he intentionally and knowingly referred many children to a facility that euthanized disabled people. 

Czech states that this evidence doesn\u2019t invalidate or contaminate the research Asperger did on autism, but he emphasizes the importance of understanding this context when discussing Asperger\u2019s work. Czech also thinks it\u2019s unnecessary to eliminate the term \u201cAsperger\u2019s syndrome\u201d from our lexicon since the research is still valid\u2014though some argue otherwise<\/a>.

Silberman has acknowledged this new research<\/a> on Asperger and updated later editions of his book to reflect the evidence of Asperger\u2019s complicity in the Holocaust. <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Asperger\u2019s Thesis: Consequences for Future Autism Research<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

In 1944, explains Silberman, Asperger published his thesis on autism. His goal was, in part, to demonstrate that autistic people could make valuable contributions to society in the hope that this would help spare them from the Nazis\u2019 slaughter of those they considered \u201cworthless.\u201d Because of this, he chose to focus his paper on just four specific cases out of the hundreds of autistic children he\u2019d studied<\/strong>. The children in these four cases had no severe impairments and displayed exceptional abilities in math and science. He tried to make the case that people with such abilities could be useful to the Nazis as code breakers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to Silberman, this well-intentioned choice had long-lasting, damaging consequences for the field of autism study<\/a>: Whereas Asperger knew that autism wasn\u2019t rare and that it was a broad spectrum, his published work made it seem like autism<\/strong> was strictly defined and not at all severe<\/strong>. This led other researchers to believe that the condition Asperger studied was a separate condition from autism. (It also later led to the development of the diagnosis of Asperger\u2019s syndrome, now colloquially understood to be a subtype of autism, though it no longer appears in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM).\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How were autistic people viewed in the early 1900s? What were Hans Asperger’s views on the extermination of disabled people? Between World War I and World War II, the eugenics movement began growing in popularity. Among the groups of disabled people that eugenicists believe in exterminating were those with autism. Keep reading to learn about the views on eugenics and autism in the early 1900s.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":127889,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,39],"tags":[1560],"class_list":["post-127818","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ethics","category-history","tag-neurotribes","","tg-column-two"],"yoast_head":"\nEugenics and Autism in the Post World War I Era - Shortform Books<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"In the early 1900s, eugenics were gaining popularity. 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