The Autistics Holocaust

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[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jINig9kJC7o[/youtube] Here is a video regarding information on Hitlers holocaust not too many people knew about, pretty frightening and makes me glad this man is no longer alive even more. Any person disabled mentally or genetically was to be sterilized and put to death its really sickening how some societies still think like this to this day. So pretty much Hitler didnt only want gays blacks and jews exterminated but also people with disabilities as well.

You know not only was Asperger autistic he served under the Wehrmacht.

Irony? Could this be the precursor to Autism Speaks?

My understanding is that rather than being seen as 'undesirable' the nazis actually made an exception with autism regarding it as a benign evolutionary phenomenon than as a disability per sae. In any case, it wouldn't have been well understood during the peak of Hitler's administration. I doubt it registered on their list of priorities.

It could also partly to do with German culture. Within Europe, the Germans always struck me as the most 'autistic like'.

Whichever is the case, clearly Asperger's traits weren't deemed worthy of him being Aktion T4'd. It would certainly be ironic for autistics to be included in the targeted groups for the concentration camps since Hitler himself was probably aspie.

Well, the higher functioning ones at least. The lower functioning austistics that couldn't speak or use the toilet would probably have been in a lot more danger.

Last edited by thomas81 on 14 May 2014, 1:20 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I dont think that would be the case for those with classic autism in the medium to low functional level.

Yes well like i say it depends on the level of functionality. Could also be the case that they would make an exception with people with demonstratable strong savant skills. Especially in maths or something they could use to build weapons.

Although during those days its unlikely that they referred to lower functioning autistics as being autistic. They probably just got tarred with the same brush as the mentally ret*d.

Wheres the irony?

His country of Austria merged with Germany.

The Wermacht was not the SS, nor the Gestapo, it was the regular German Army.

Everybody in the USA worked for the US armed services during WWII because it was a total war ( If you worked for Disney, or GM, you served the armed services). So of course Dr. Asperger worked the German Army (just like in the USA there wouldve been no other employer but the nation's war machine).

Perhaps so, but under Hitler's rule it was still a tool of the nazi ideology.

Anyone in it with any kind of trait deemed undesirable would have been quickly weeded out.

Yes people with mental/physical disabilities/disorders where seen as inferior as well and many of them where killed to. Not exactly new news, though usually when reading up on the holocaust they focus more on the deaths of jews but aside from them they also killed mentally/physically disabled people, communists and essentially anyone who was either seen as unfit or who dared question the nazis.

No, none of this is news, but i'm wondering if the question that the OP is wrestling with is whether or not the nazis targeted autistics specifically as victims?

My suspicion is that some were regarded as gifted subjects therefore good aryans, others were probably viewed in the same light as the mentally ret*d and therefore fair game to be liquidated.

^^^^

The Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler first coined the term "autism" in 1911 as a form of schizophrenia. He advocated to sterilize such schizophrenics to stop "racial deterioration." People with autism and similar disabilities were not exterminated, but only sterilized, because Hitler's regime thought it wasn't useful to carry the program out until wartime. When WWII broke out, the euthanasia programs happened in the psychiatric hospitals (the decree was backdated to the start of the war).

So anyone who was labeled with "autism" in that time was going to be killed eventually. Because autism is now known (and not then) that it is a spectrum disorder and people with autism can show signs of "recovery" (in terms of symptoms of course, not autism itself), the bias of what was considered "autism" during the period was going to execute whoever got the diagnosis.

I believe I read in one of Dr.Redfield's book that the people with bi-polar were also studied,for the creativity and energy that comes with mild hypo-mania.Some of them were not sterilized,maybe they thought to try to refine it thru selective breeding.Anyway,I would have been toast most likely.

I don't think they really targeted autistics specifically, probably saw some as gifted and some as useless.

Hitler wanted to kill everyone who wasn't a blonde-haired, blue-eyed, white-skinned, heterosexual, non-disabled, National Socialist, Christian of German ancestry. People often think that he just wanted to kill the Jews or non-white people or communists, but the fact is that he wanted to kill EVERYBODY who didn't conform to his narrow set of specifications.

I don't think this is true. Firstly, he would have needed to send himself to a death camp to achieve that!

My understanding is that the Nordic Aryans. The other peoples of Western Europe (including Italians, Spaniards, and probably Greeks) would form the working classes, and would essentially "serve" the purest Aryans. Indians, Iranians and Afghans would have been Aryan, and they'd probably have segregated Africa rather than bothering to exterminate them - black Europeans were generally sterilised by the Nazis and weren't systematically killed. The Japanese were considered "honorary Aryans" because they were allies.

Good point. I think I should do more research.