[9] "Founded in 1921, the Austria-based Bund was a split-off from the Christian-German Student Union (CDSB) but stressed its affinities with the German Youth Movement (...) which Asperger cited in 1974 as a guiding principle in his life.

[27] According to Czech, "with the appointment of Hamburger as president in 1930, the Vienna University Paediatric Clinic became a beacon of anti-Jewish policy, long before the Nazi takeover.

Ideas of "purity" were widespread and scholars were eager to enforce a narrow "conceptualization of what is ‘German’ and what not or by claiming some groups as forebears (Bavarians, Swabians) while excluding others (Slovene bilinguals, Jiddish, Rotwelsh speakers)".

[16] Czech points out the changes in leadership: "The political orientation of Hamburger's assistants is illustrated by the fact that among those who obtained the highest academic qualification (habilitation), all, with the exception of Hans Asperger, were rejected in 1945 as Nazis.

He joined an experienced team, consisting of psychiatrist Georg Frankl (who was Jewish), psychologist Josef Feldner and a nun, Sister Viktorine Zak.

[7] The team also included, from August 1933 to February 1936, a young doctor specializing in gastrointestinal disorders, Erwin Jekelius, who later became a major architect of the Nazi extermination.

[46] He underwent nine months of training in Vienna and Brünn, then was sent with the 392nd Infantry Division to Croatia in December 1943 as part of a "mission of protection" of the occupied territories in Yugoslavia and the struggle against the "partisans".

[47] In 1948, he co-founded the pediatric clinic, Österreichische Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Heilpädagogik (now the Heilpädagogische Gesellschaft Österreichs) in Innsbruck, Austria, for 5 years,[50] succeeding Richard Priesel, who died suddenly on 18 November 1955.

[59]Other facts speak against Asperger's self-portrayal as a man persecuted by the Gestapo for his resistance to Nazi racial hygiene, who had to flee into military service to avoid further problems.

[57] According to Simon Baron-Cohen et al., "The degree of Asperger’s involvement in the targeting of Vienna’s most vulnerable children has remained an open and vexing question in autism research for a long time.

[61] Edith Sheffer, a modern European history scholar, wrote in 2018 that Asperger cooperated with the Nazi regime, including sending children to the Am Spiegelgrund clinic which participated in the euthanasia program.

[65]However, he worked under the direction of Franz Hamburger, a prominent long-time member of the NSDAP,[2] for whom he expressed the greatest admiration,[16] signed his letters with the formula "Heil Hitler",[66] and joined organizations affiliated with the Nazi Party after 1938.

"[59] Dean Falk, an American anthropologist from Florida State University, questioned Czech and Sheffer's allegations against Hans Asperger in a paper in Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders.

[69] Norwegian doctor and historical scholar Ketil Slagstad added his interpretation of both Sheffer's and Czech's work in his 2019 article "Asperger, the Nazis and the children – the history of the birth of a diagnosis", in which he describes the nuances of the situation.

"[70] After the Anschluss, Asperger, like all medical personnel, was investigated in the application of the "decree on the reorganization of the Austrian professional civil service" dated May 31, 1938,[57] and then received confidential evaluations from NSDAP officials, who expressed an increasingly positive opinion of him.

[66] The British psychiatrist Lorna Wing[citation needed] and the anthropologist Dean Falk[75] consider that Hans Asperger's Catholic convictions are incompatible with the voluntary sending of children to extermination programs.

"[82] In 1940, Asperger obtained a position as a medical expert in Vienna, for which he was responsible for diagnosing "hereditary diseases" and proposing forced sterilization in the interest of the Nazi eugenics program.

This investigation included thorough analyses of the records for all the patients he and colleagues referred to Am Spiegelgrund from the Therapeutic Pedagogy Unit of the University Children's Hospital in Vienna.

[14] According to Edith Sheffer, the context in which Asperger evolved facilitated the development of his most famous publication, insofar as he and his colleagues frequently used the notion of "Gemut", which had been misused in Nazi psychiatry to refer to "the metaphysical capacity of humans to form social bonds".

[14] His article was not published until 1944 in the journal:[98] Due to his major role in defining the notion of the "autism spectrum", Hans Asperger has been "often touted as a champion of neurodiversity",[99] particularly by Adam Feinstein and Steve Silberman.

After the Second World War and before access to the archives concerning him, Hans Asperger had a reputation as a protector of sick and handicapped children,[7][101][100] notably under the influence of Uta Frith's book published in 1991.

"[106][107] Helmut Gröger, on the basis of Asperger's scientific publications, concludes that he generally avoided addressing themes related to Nazi ideology, such as race.

"[110] John Donvan and Caren Zucker's book, In A Different Key, is according to Czech, who shared some of her sources with the authors, "the first publication in the English language to break with the narrative of Asperger as an active opponent of Nazi racial hygiene and to introduce hitherto unknown critical elements into the debate.

[115]In the early 1990s, Asperger's work gained some notice due to Wing's research on the subject and Frith's recent translation, leading to the inclusion of the eponymous condition in the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems 10th revision (ICD-10) in 1993, and the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 4th revision (DSM-IV) in 1994, some half a century after Asperger's original research.

[121] In Steve Silberman's first edition of his book, in 2015, before the publication of the archives studied by Czech, Silberman openly supports Asperger's work, postulating that, if Asperger's syndrome had been used as the basis for defining autism in the twentieth century, rather than Leo Kanner's infantile autism, autistic individuals and their families would have avoided a great deal of suffering, positive criteria would have been used for diagnosis rather than deficits, and financial resources would have been allocated more quickly to supporting autistic individuals themselves rather than to seeking therapies and cures.

[126] According to Czech, it is from April 2018 onwards that Hans Asperger's legacy is seriously questioned, notably through an editorial and press release distributed by, widely reported in the media, and then by the publication of Edith Sheffer's book a few weeks later.

After reading this book, Judy Sasha Rubinsztein says she is "convinced not to use the term 'Asperger's Syndrome' because it raises the spectre of that barbaric time when medical values were distorted to support Nazi ideology".

[30] Simon Baron-Cohen states that, in light of Czech and Sheffer's findings, "we now need to revise our views, and probably our language as well", by no longer referring to "Asperger's syndrome" but only to "autism".

[48] In contrast, the American journalist Seth Mnookin does not agree with Sheffer's conclusion, which he analyzes as an attempt to deconstruct the notion of autism by falsely making it sound like a "Nazi invention".

[136] Czech points out that "the potential obstacles to his [Hans Asperger's] support for National Socialism were his religious convictions, his humanistic background, and his elitist and cultured habitus.