“There is no doubt that this is probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world, and it has been done by scientific machinery by nominally civilised men.” These were the words of Winston Churchill, and they were used to describe the Holocaust: Nazi Germany’s attempt to annihilate the Jewish people.

To mark Holocaust Memorial Day (27 January 2021), the Faculty is revisiting an article by an alumnus, Rabbi David Ariel Sher, published by the British Psychological Society last year, while David was studying with us. The piece elucidates how the celebrated reputation of the Viennese doctor and pedagogue, Hans Asperger, was ignominiously shattered as Asperger’s thorough enmeshment in the Nazi machinery of death became known.

Asperger’s participation in the 'euthanasia' programme for psychiatric patients of all ethnic backgrounds who were deemed ‘uneducable’ or 'useless' in the eyes of the Third Reich came as a shock to autistic people with the 'Asperger's syndrome' diagnosis that bears his name. In the article, David presents research evidence from the autism community showing a majority prefer for this term to no longer be used because of this connection. 

Much is now known about the death camps and atrocities committed during the Holocaust, yet less is known about the way in which pedagogues and practitioners benefitted from the removal of Jews from their occupations and the avaricious careerism manifest under Nazi rule during this bleak period. This article explains how Asperger profited from the removal and side-lining of more experienced Jewish practitioners by the anti-Semitic university superiors and colleagues he so admired, including his Nazi supervisor Franz Hamburger, whom he described as his ‘mentor’. It elucidates how Asperger's anti-Semitic comments and hazardous suggestions written on his young Jewish patients' diagnoses may have cost them their lives. 

The piece also features comments from the country's leading autism expert, Professor Sir Baron-Cohen, summarises the fallout of the Asperger exposé and considers the wider meaning of this Holocaust-era saga for researchers, psychologists and psychiatrists. This is a sobering but necessary read as Rabbi Sher spells out the implications of this sad narrative for day-to-day psychological practice. 

The full article may be read here.