Asperger's Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna by Sheffer Edith

Author:Sheffer, Edith [Sheffer, Edith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2018-04-30T22:00:00+00:00

Herta Schreiber at Spiegelgrund in 1941.

Five-year-old Elisabeth Schreiber also died after Asperger recommended her transfer to Spiegelgrund. Elisabeth’s mother said that a head cold in the girl’s second year of life had left Elisabeth unable to talk and with “motor unrest.” The family lived in a small apartment with five children and was purportedly unable to care for her anymore. Asperger and the District Youth Office advised that Elisabeth be sent to Spiegelgrund. 63 The girl went temporarily to St. Josef’s Children’s Home, where Spiegelgrund doctor Heinrich Gross picked her file on one of his “selection trips.” Elisabeth arrived by group transport at Spiegelgrund on March 23, 1942. She looked calm in her photograph, with close-cropped hair and bangs matted in a crooked line on her forehead. 64

At Spiegelgrund, Elisabeth was eager for connection. One nurse wrote in a daily report that the girl could only speak a single word, “mama,” but tried to communicate with other vocalizations and sign language. Elisabeth had “a friendly nature, very affectionate and flattering with caregivers.” She was “very sensitive and moved easily to tears and, if treated strictly, cries and hugs the nurse.” Yet the girl was embracing her killers. Her caregivers gave hugs, it seems, alongside lethal doses of barbiturates. Gross had reported Elisabeth to the Reich Committee in Berlin for killing, diagnosing her with “congenital feeble-mindedness of the highest order.” Elisabeth was subjected to multiple lumbar punctures, likely a subject of Spiegelgrund’s medical experiments. She then died quickly. Her physical restlessness abated and, on September 13, her chart stated she “slept the entire day, waking only for meals.” She was diagnosed with pneumonia on September 29 and died the next day. Her brain was harvested, jarred, and kept in Dr. Gross’s collection of over four hundred children’s brains in Spiegelgrund’s cellar. 65

In all, Asperger appears to have been involved in the transfer of at least forty-four children to Spiegelgrund—at least nine youths from his clinic, two of whom died, and thirty-five youths that his city commission marked for “Jekelius Action” and died. Given that he served as a consultant to numerous city offices, and that the records are incomplete, the total number of children Asperger recommended for Spiegelgrund is likely higher.

These youths were not simply statistics, however, nor an abstract set of symptoms. Asperger personally examined many of them, touching their bodies and talking to them face-to-face. How he and his staff judged the children—and decided their fates—was a formidable and perilous process.

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