Dr. Asperger is believed to have sent many children to their deaths

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-5630411/Hans-Asperger-childrens-doctor-famed-early-work-autism-assisted-Nazi-euthanasia.html

The doctor who gave his name to Asperger syndrome sent helpless disabled children to their deaths in a vile euthanasia clinic, a study shows.

Dr Hans Asperger, an Austrian psychiatrist, was first to chronicle the condition, a form of high-functioning autism in 1944 . . . The research overturns decades of claims that the child psychiatrist was an 'Oskar Schindler' figure who saved children from being killed or used in horrific medical experiments. Now patient groups said the research triggers the question whether is still acceptable to continue to call the condition after the discredited doctor.

Asperger is believed to have consigned dozens of children to their death at Am Spiegelgrund, a children's clinic in Vienna's notorious Steinhof hospital. The clinic served the Nazi goal of eugenically engineering a genetically 'pure' society through 'racial hygiene' and the elimination of lives deemed a burden. In Am Spiegelgrund, some 789 children were either given lethal injections or left to starve to death - mostly from being given drug overdoses - and their deaths recorded as 'pneumonia', researchers claim.

Dr Herwig Czech, a historian of medicine at the Medical University of Vienna, has analysed previously unseen documents including Dr Asperger's personnel file and case records of his patients from between 1928 and 1944 which had previously been thought to have been destroyed. He concludes Asperger referred several 'profoundly disabled' children to the Am Spiegelgrund clinic.

Herwig Czech said: 'These findings about Hans Asperger are the result of many years of careful research in the archives. 'What emerges is that Asperger successfully sought to accommodate himself to the Nazi regime and was rewarded with career opportunities in return.' Dr Czech said it was unlikely Asperger was unaware patients were being put to death in the 'overcrowded' clinic.

That is pretty terrible. He probably rationalized what he did with pure logic. "It is good that they should die because they don't contribute much to society anyway."

OsricPearl wrote:That is pretty terrible. He probably rationalized what he did with pure logic. "It is good that they should die because they don't contribute much to society anyway."

That way of thinking seems to have been a major feature of the whole Nazi regime. But it ends up with a solution that is worse than the original problems and a society that is not worth living in for most people. And it all gave nationalism such a bad reputation that many people now assume nationalist = Nazi and go to opposite extremes.

Neon Knight wrote:

OsricPearl wrote:That is pretty terrible. He probably rationalized what he did with pure logic. "It is good that they should die because they don't contribute much to society anyway."

That way of thinking seems to have been a major feature of the whole Nazi regime. But it ends up with a solution that is worse than the original problems and a society that is not worth living in for most people. And it all gave nationalism such a bad reputation that many people now assume nationalist = Nazi and go to opposite extremes.

Any idea, taken to an extreme, can produce terrible results. I think that some people don't realize this and think that the ideas themselves are bad.

What the nazi party did was beyond extreme, it was pure evil.

 It is hard to imagine what life would be like living in Germany during WW2, on either side.
 I don't know how the chosen scientists and doctors could go along with experiments on humans. It is almost like they some how got caught up in it, under Hitlers control?

There is no excuse, what Asperger did to those poor children, is unbelievable and sickening.

All on the name of some unattainable utopia.