Nazi child psychiatry

By 1936, Nazi child psychiatry, led by Leipzig’s Paul Shröder (with whom Asperger did and internship in 1934) and his student Hans Heinze (whom Asperger also met and idolized) had replaced politically neutral, therapeutic “curative education.” They developed diagnoses, esp. revolving around Gemüt, for children lacking community connectedness, conditions that resembled and preceded Asperger’s definition of autistic psychopathy, ”For Nazi thinkers, Gemüt referred to one’s fundamental capacity to form deep bonds with other people.. . . Nazi child psychiatrists aimed not to cultivar youths’ Gemüt as an end in itself, but as a way to strengthen the community. . . . Gemüt was instrumentalized, an individualist means to a collectivist end” (Sheffer, 69-71). Asperger attributed “sadistic traits” to autistic children writing of the “primitive spitefulness” and “negativism and seemingly calculated naughtiness of autistic children” who “delighted in malice” (156). Their “wickedness and cruelty speak clearly to poverty of Gemüt”(219).