More on Asperger’s Career: A Reply to Czech

Hans Asperger – Zwischenbericht einer Aufarbeitung durch seine SchülerInnen und KollegInnen

“…But you are not willing to allocate adequate space for presenting facts that show that this report's arguments are manipulative. 13 This is neither fair nor does it serve scientific truth" 14 .…”

Response to ‘Non-complicit: Revisiting Hans Asperger’s Career in Nazi-era Vienna’

“…In her paper ‘Non-complicit: Revisiting Hans Asperger’s Career in Nazi-era Vienna’, evolutionary anthropologist Dean Falk claims to refute what she calls ‘allegations’ raised against Asperger (Czech 2018; Sheffer 2018) ‘with newly translated and chronologically-ordered information that takes into account Hitler’s deceptive “halt” to the T4 euthanasia program in 1941.’ She states that ‘[i]t is highly unlikely that Asperger was aware of the T4 program when he referred Herta Schreiber to Vienna’s child “euthanasia” facility Am Spiegelgrund or when he mentioned that institution 4 months later on the medical chart of another (unrelated) girl, Elisabeth Schreiber’ (Falk 2019). However, the ‘newly translated’ information presented to ‘exonerate’ Asperger appears largely irrelevant to the questions at hand, while the various arguments put forward are characterized by fundamental factual errors, misleading quotes, mistranslations of German language sources (the author had to rely on online translation tools), and a refusal to seriously engage with the evidence presented in my paper by omitting everything that does not support the author’s manifest agenda of defending Hans Asperger’s record.…”

“…Falk’s argument (mentioned no less than five times in the paper and in Appendix 2) that Asperger was, because of his critical stance towards the Nazi regime, investigated over several years by ‘numerous Nazi officials’ (Falk 2019, p. 5), ‘the Nazis’ (p. 5), ‘the Nazi party’ (p. 10), and even ‘the Gestapo’ (Appendix 2, p. 7) is similarly misleading. In another passage, she even goes so far as to falsely attribute the claim of an ‘investigation by the Gestapo’ to me by combining it (within brackets) with a direct quote from my paper (Falk 2019, p. 5).…”

“…Falk’s argument (mentioned no less than five times in the paper and in Appendix 2) that Asperger was, because of his critical stance towards the Nazi regime, investigated over several years by ‘numerous Nazi officials’ (Falk 2019, p. 5), ‘the Nazis’ (p. 5), ‘the Nazi party’ (p. 10), and even ‘the Gestapo’ (Appendix 2, p. 7) is similarly misleading. In another passage, she even goes so far as to falsely attribute the claim of an ‘investigation by the Gestapo’ to me by combining it (within brackets) with a direct quote from my paper (Falk 2019, p. 5). In reality, as I explain in the referenced passage, the ‘preliminary investigation’ opened in 1938 was part of a general vetting operation of all public employees (which included university staff) undertaken after the ‘Anschluss’ in order to identify (and remove) Jewish and politically undesirable individuals (Czech 2018, p. 8–9).…”

“…Any meaningful argument, therefore, must focus on the stance that Asperger took vis-à-vis the ‘hopeless’ cases such as (in Asperger’s view) Elisabeth Schreiber and Hertha Schreiber. Falk’s paper not only ignores this entire line of argument, it systematically misrepresents Asperger’s public statements as referring to ‘disabled children,’ including by misleadingly adding the expression ‘[with disabled children]’ to a direct quote from one of Asperger’s papers, where no such reference can be found (Falk 2019: Appendix 2, p. 13; Asperger 1942). In reality, Asperger’s positive remarks (his alleged ‘campaign’) only ever explicitly referred to ‘abnormal’ or ‘difficult’ children, never to the children with severe mental disabilities who were targeted by the ‘child euthanasia’ program implemented at Spiegelgrund.…”