54 What is Autism?
racial purity. As the purposes of the institution were fundamentally com-
promised by useless and harmful studies by Nazi‐appointed researchers,
the University of Vienna’s former international prestige was lost. Hans
Asperger lived for decades after the end of World War II and the death of
Hitler, his own death not coming until 1980. Meanwhile, his groundbreak-
ing research and foundational ideas received little of the attention they
merited, and so the needed progress in understanding and dealing with
autism suffered.
It is truly unfortunate that Asperger’s ideas did not flourish in a timely man-
ner. Major positions taken by researchers and public health officials today
parallel those that Asperger took so many decades ago. He realized autism had
variations of severity and that a spectrum was appropriate in describing these
levels. Asperger knew that autism was a rather uncommon condition, and
found that it was often related to intelligence. Modern researchers have come
to similar conclusions, but autism studies might well be more advanced today
had precious time not been lost, a victim of the madness that was Nazism.
Many people today know of Adolf Hitler and they have heard of Asperger
syndrome, but they do not know of the impact of Hitler’s regime on Asperger’s
life and research. At Asperger’s Clinic, researchers found that autism seemed
to be connected to genius, involved a whole spectrum of conditions. Asperger
was correct, but his ideas did not come to prominence for two historical rea-
sons. First, as previously mentioned, Germany’s leading Nazi, Adolf Hitler,
transformed the focus of the University of Vienna and did irreparable damage
to the institution’s intellectual leadership. Secondly, in order to retain some
measure of intellectual freedom, and to protect individual lives from suspi-
cious Nazis, Asperger focused his scholarship on highly functioning individu-
als. This led to the incorrect view that Asperger was limited to high functioning
individuals. His broad ranging interests were simply not understood because
of the threat posed by Nazism and because of his understandable response to
that threat. Hitler annexed Austria in 1938 and made it part of the infamous
Third Reich. Reversing the previous pattern that featured careful selection of
presidents and rectors at the University of Vienna, the Nazis simply appointed
favorites who were political stooges, ideological cronies. Racial and political
motives resulted in a massive removal of students and professors. In fact,
some 45% of the scientific staff and over 50% of the university’s lecturers in the
areas of law and medicine lost their jobs, uprooted by the National Socialists’
myopic obsession with eugenics. This destructive anti‐scientific barrage
caused the previously illustrious reputation of the University of Vienna to
quickly vanish. The impact was long lasting; it is estimated that biological
excellence did not really return to the institution until the 1980s, decades after
Hitler’s assault on the academic life of a great city and a great university.
Asperger’s scholarship was outstanding and he wrote over 300 publications,
mostly on autistic psychopathy [17].