Hans Asperger (1906–1980) was an Austrian pediatrician who first described a pattern of traits in children he called “autistic psychopathy,” years before autism became a widely recognized diagnosis. His name became globally known in the 1980s and 1990s when “Asperger syndrome” entered the medical vocabulary, but his legacy has grown far more complicated in recent years as historians uncovered his cooperation with the Nazi regime.
Early Career in Vienna
Asperger joined the University of Vienna Children’s Clinic in May 1931 and began working on its Heilpädagogik ward (a therapeutic pedagogy unit for children with behavioral and developmental differences) the following year. He started as an auxiliary physician and took charge of the ward by May 1935. His early published work was limited. Before his landmark papers, he had only a single publication in the field, on bedwetting. Despite this thin research record, his clinical observations on the ward would eventually reshape how medicine understood autism.
His Descriptions of Autism
In 1938, Asperger gave a lecture in which he used the term “autistic psychopaths” to describe a group of children with a distinct set of psychological characteristics. This was several years before Leo Kanner, a psychiatrist working in the United States, published his own famous 1943 paper on autism. Asperger’s fuller account came in 1944, when he published a detailed thesis describing a group of boys who shared a recognizable pattern: high intelligence paired with significant social difficulties and what he called impairment of “instincts,” meaning the intuitive social behaviors most people develop automatically.
Asperger noted that these children often spoke in a formally correct but unusually pedantic way, delivering lengthy monologues on their favorite subjects. He observed that some were accepted by classmates as eccentric “professors” and respected for their unusual abilities. On the positive side, he described how their difficulties were closely interwoven with special strengths: exceptional memory, strong interest in natural sciences, skill with mental calculations, and a natural inclination toward abstract thinking. He saw these traits as a genuine foundation for scientific achievement. The children he described with this profile tended to have less severe symptoms and more distinct skills than those with more pronounced forms of autism.
How His Name Became a Diagnosis
Asperger’s 1944 paper was written in German and received little international attention for decades. That changed in 1981, when British psychiatrist Lorna Wing published a paper titled “Asperger’s Syndrome: A Clinical Account” in the journal Psychological Medicine. Wing described the clinical features, course, and epidemiology of what she proposed calling Asperger’s syndrome, and argued it should be grouped alongside early childhood autism within a broader family of conditions sharing impairments in social interaction, communication, and imagination.
Wing’s paper brought Asperger’s observations to an English-speaking audience and sparked a wave of clinical interest. Through the 1990s, “Asperger’s syndrome” became a recognized diagnosis, eventually entering both the DSM (the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual) and the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases.
Removal From Diagnostic Manuals
In 2013, the American Psychiatric Association removed Asperger’s Disorder as a standalone diagnosis from the DSM-5. It was folded into a broader category called Autism Spectrum Disorder, which treats autism as a single condition with varying levels of support needs rather than a collection of separate diagnoses. The WHO’s ICD-11 took a similar approach, placing all forms of autism under one umbrella while using subcategories to distinguish individuals based on intellectual ability, language development, and other factors.
The reclassification was driven by clinical evidence that there was no reliable boundary between Asperger’s and other forms of autism. But the change was not without pushback. Many people diagnosed with Asperger’s valued the label for its distinctiveness and felt it captured their experience in a way “autism spectrum disorder” did not. Some clinicians raised concerns that removing a term patients had built their identity around could itself cause harm.
His Cooperation With the Nazi Regime
For decades, Asperger was portrayed as a quiet resistor who protected vulnerable children from the Nazis. That narrative collapsed in 2018, when historian Herwig Czech published an extensive archival study in the journal Molecular Autism. Czech’s findings, drawn from original documents in Viennese archives, showed that Asperger accommodated himself to the Nazi regime and was rewarded with career advancement for doing so.
Asperger joined several organizations affiliated with the Nazi party (though not the party itself) and publicly endorsed race hygiene policies, including forced sterilizations. Most damaging, Czech found evidence that Asperger actively cooperated on several occasions with the child “euthanasia” program, in which children deemed “unfit” were transferred to institutions like Vienna’s Am Spiegelgrund clinic and killed. The language Asperger used in his diagnostic assessments was often remarkably harsh, in some cases even more severe than the language used by staff at the Spiegelgrund facility itself. This directly contradicted the longstanding claim that he tried to shield children by writing generous evaluations.
Czech’s conclusion was blunt: the narrative of Asperger as a principled opponent of National Socialism and a courageous defender of his patients does not hold up against the historical evidence. What emerges instead is a far more problematic figure, one whose pioneering work in autism research coexisted with complicity in some of the era’s worst abuses.
A Complicated Legacy
Asperger’s clinical observations were genuinely influential. His recognition that autism could coexist with high intelligence, strong verbal ability, and distinctive talents helped shape a broader understanding of the autism spectrum that persists today. Without his descriptions of children with intense interests, pedantic speech, and social struggles alongside intellectual gifts, the diagnostic landscape would look different.
But his wartime record has prompted a serious reckoning. Some advocacy organizations and researchers have moved away from using the term “Asperger’s” entirely, not only because of the diagnostic reclassification but because of what the name now represents. Others in the autistic community continue to use it as an identity term. The tension between his scientific contributions and his moral failures remains unresolved, and for many people, the historical revelations have permanently changed how they relate to a diagnosis that once bore his name.