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Did Hans Asperger actively assist the Nazi euthanasia program?

2018; BioMed Central; Volume: 9; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1186/s13229-018-0209-5

2040-2392

Simon Baron‐Cohen, Ami Klin, Steve Silberman, Joseph D. Buxbaum,

Medical History and Research

His carefully researched article concludes that the pediatrician Hans Asperger, after whom the subgroup of Asperger syndrome was named, and who worked in the University of Vienna Pediatric Clinic during the Second World War, not only collaborated with the Nazis but actively contributed to the Nazi eugenics program by referring profoundly disabled children to the Am Spiegelgrund clinic located elsewhere in Vienna.This was a clinic that he knew participated in the Third Reich's child euthanasia program, where children were killed as part of the Nazi goal of eugenically engineering a genetically "pure" society through "racial hygiene" and the elimination of lives deemed a "burden" and "not worthy of life."We take the unusual step of publishing this Editorial so as to explain our reasons for publishing this article.Two of us are Editors-in-Chief of Molecular Autism (SBC and JDB), one of us served as Action Editor during the long review process of this article (SBC), and two of us served as anonymous reviewers for this article, but have decided to forgo their anonymity (SS and AK).We write this Editorial for two reasons.First, to assert the importance of this kind of scholarship and its relevance to this Journal, which aims to publish excellent research into autism of any kind, whether the research focuses on the molecular, neurological, psychological, clinical, or in this case social aspects.Second, to underline our support of this article for exploring in meticulous detail how a medical doctor, Hans Asperger, who for a long time was seen as only having made valuable contributions to the field of pediatrics and child psychiatry, was, as Herwig Czech's newly unearthed evidence shows, also guilty of actively assisting the Nazis in their abhorrent eugenics and euthanasia policies.We are persuaded by Herwig Czech's important article that