Écoutez la suite du récit consacré au psychiatre Hans Asperger, raconté par l’historienne Virginie Girod. De 1938 à 1940, Hans Asperger sillonne les campagnes d’Autriche pour diffuser de bonnes pratiques de soins et d’alimentation pour les enfants… Mais aussi pour dresser un registre d’enfants handicapés physiques, ou mentaux. En 1940, le Spiegelgrund ouvre ses portes. Cet hôpital pour enfants est destiné à accueillir des enfants considérés comme "problématiques". C’est au même moment que le programme Aktion T4, qui visent à euthanasier les personnes handicapées ou dites comme "inutiles" est mis en place par le régime nazi. Le Spiegelgrund devient le lieu où sont "euthanasiés" les enfants "inutiles", d’Autriche et d’Allemagne. Dans ce processus de mise à mort, Hans Asperger participe au tri des enfants à euthanasier. Si son passé le rattrape aujourd’hui, le psychiatre réussit à le faire oublier au sortir de la Seconde Guerre mondiale.
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00:00 Welcome to the heart of history, I am Virginie Giraud.
00:04 In the first episode of this story dedicated to Hans Asperger,
00:08 this promising young psychiatrist joined the service of curative pedagogy in Vienna
00:13 for children with social issues.
00:15 This service is largely composed of Nazi doctors
00:19 who promote a racial hygiene supposed to heal the population.
00:23 Episode 2
00:25 Euthanasia of the bad children
00:28 The first Nazi doctors of the war
00:33 Between 1938 and 1940,
00:37 just after the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany,
00:41 Hans Asperger drives the program of motorized counselling to the mayors.
00:45 It is a squad of doctors and psychiatrists
00:48 who go to the countryside to meet the mothers.
00:51 Their goal is to prevent rachitism
00:55 and to reduce infant mortality
00:58 by spreading the good practices of care and nutrition.
01:01 A priori, it is a good social measure.
01:04 But motorized counselling has a second function.
01:08 It keeps records of physically and mentally disabled children.
01:11 These children begin to be considered as burdens,
01:15 first for their families, then for society.
01:18 Finally, they are considered as waste.
01:23 And waste is eliminated.
01:25 At first, the service of Hans Asperger can remove the children
01:33 with social issues or with disabilities from their families
01:35 and send them to rehabilitation centres
01:37 or to a service of healing pedagogy,
01:40 that is, to a psychiatric hospital.
01:42 This means that the fate of hundreds of children
01:46 rests on the diagnosis of Hans Asperger.
01:50 And then, in 1940, an institution specializing in problematic children
01:55 opens its doors in Vienna.
01:57 It is a sanatorium for children called Spiegelgrund.
02:01 It is part of the psychiatric hospital of Steinhof.
02:04 It consists of a set of coquettish pavilions in a green screen.
02:09 First of all, it is very pretty.
02:12 The first director of Spiegelgrund is a friend of Hans Asperger.
02:18 It is Erwin Jekelius, the one who works with Hitler's sister.
02:22 But before I tell you what happens at Spiegelgrund,
02:25 I have to tell you about the Action T4 program.
02:28 You know that the Nazis worship you with perfect and athletic bodies,
02:37 with the ideal Aryan, blond with blue eyes,
02:40 who serves his homeland with his work or his military commitment.
02:43 A physical handicap with atrophied limbs
02:47 or an idiot, a word used by the Nazis to talk about mental disabilities,
02:51 will never serve the Reich.
02:53 Worse, it will be a burden for the rest of the community.
02:57 Those who transmit genetic defects are not better off,
03:00 since they contribute to corrupt the population
03:03 with a descendance carrying diseases or malformations.
03:06 This way of thinking of the handicap
03:09 is typical of the eugenicist theories in vogue at the time
03:12 that really want to improve the human race.
03:15 They go far beyond the framework of Nazism.
03:17 However, until then,
03:20 no one really pushed this eugenicist logic to the end
03:23 by practicing the euthanasia of the useless,
03:25 those whose life would not deserve to be lived.
03:28 Hitler is therefore particularly careful
03:32 when he begins to mature the Action T4 program,
03:35 the program of euthanasia of the handicapped.
03:37 As the historian Christian Ingrao underlines,
03:40 it is war that allows the accomplishment of this fateful project.
03:44 Yes, because war has a purging function
03:47 that allows to eliminate the weakest.
03:49 Does it seem cynical to you?
03:51 It is.
03:52 This is how things will happen.
03:55 From October 1, 1939,
04:06 Hitler authorizes doctors to give death to incurable patients.
04:09 The thing is presented as an act of mercy, of humanity.
04:13 In reality, it has been six months
04:15 since Nazi doctors have put in place
04:17 euthanasia measures for handicapped children between 0 and 3 years old.
04:20 There, the project becomes official
04:23 and now includes adults.
04:25 The Action T4 program aims to free
04:29 20% of the hospital beds occupied by the useless.
04:32 That's 70,000 people to eradicate.
04:35 At the end of 1939,
04:39 psychiatric hospitals receive forms to fill
04:41 to sort their patients.
04:43 Two hospitals, one in Germany and one in Austria,
04:46 will take care of euthanasia.
04:48 For children, it is Spiegelgrunen in Austria
04:51 who will take care of this task.
04:53 The idea is that these euthanasia do not cost too much.
04:57 Hitler's cynicism has no limits.
04:59 It is therefore for the Action T4 program
05:02 that gas chambers are invented.
05:04 They will then be extended to the Jewish extermination program
05:07 because the choice per bullet is expensive.
05:10 And it is too slow for the Nazis.
05:12 At Spiegelgrunen, led by Dr. Erwin Jekelius,
05:22 nine pavilions are devoted to handicapped or asocial children.
05:25 Number 17 is the anti-chamber of hell,
05:29 where these days are only suspected of being desperate.
05:32 It is often a waiting room for pavilion number 15,
05:35 where children are euthanized.
05:39 Does Hans Asperger know what is happening at Spiegelgrunen?
05:42 Objectively, he cannot ignore it.
05:45 Does he monitor what is happening there?
05:48 No historian can guess that.
05:51 What is certain is that Hans Asperger
05:54 is involved in the sorting of children for euthanasia
05:56 and that he has the power to send children
05:58 to pavilion 15 of Spiegelgrunen.
06:01 On what criteria does he make these morbid selections?
06:05 Heavy, physical or mental disabilities
06:07 are not a problem for children.
06:09 Their fate is sealed.
06:11 They must alleviate their family from the burden they represent.
06:13 But what about the others?
06:15 These famous children, considered autistic at the time?
06:18 How does Asperger and his team sort them?
06:21 Well, they sort them on the basis of a simple concept.
06:27 The Gemüt.
06:29 The Gemüt is a German concept
06:31 that cannot be translated literally into French.
06:33 It is an ability to make links with others
06:36 and to live a rich inner life.
06:38 It is also an ability to integrate moral values
06:41 such as patriotism or altruism.
06:43 According to Nazi theory,
06:45 asocial children,
06:47 small grass criminals, if you will,
06:49 are deprived of Gemüt
06:51 or, in some cases, they do not have enough of it.
06:54 There are two options.
06:56 Either a rehabilitation centre
06:58 or a service of curative pedagogy
07:00 only includes the Gemüt.
07:02 Either way, these children are good for Spielberg's Pavilion XV.
07:06 Hans Asperger continues to deal with autistic children.
07:14 But the study of the archives shows
07:16 that his diagnosis is plagued by several cognitive biases.
07:20 For example, he is much more severe with girls than with boys.
07:24 He begins to sketch the idea
07:26 that autistic disorders are extreme variations
07:29 of male intelligence.
07:31 But that's not all.
07:33 Asperger shows more leniency
07:35 towards young boys from rich families
07:37 than towards those from poor families.
07:40 Let's not forget one thing.
07:42 Asperger comes from a modest background.
07:44 He was raised by his father to have a social upliftment.
07:47 He is therefore undoubtedly a little fascinated by the elites
07:50 and despises those who fail to rise.
07:53 In the end, we see that he is very interested
07:56 in children who look like him,
07:58 original and intelligent children
08:01 whose social disorders can be erased
08:03 by appropriate therapies.
08:05 What interests him are the children
08:07 who will later be called "Asperger's Autists",
08:10 little boys who look like him when he was little.
08:13 What the DSM-5, the Bible of psychiatry,
08:18 today calls Asperger's syndrome,
08:21 is translated by a lack of communication
08:23 and social interaction.
08:25 Asperger's often have very particular centers of interest
08:28 but no intellectual deficiencies.
08:31 Asperger's misogyny and class contempt
08:34 explain his aversion to young Christine Berka,
08:37 a 14-year-old asocial teenager from a modest family.
08:41 The teenager behaves badly in her school,
08:43 she can't make friends
08:45 and steals her classmates' business.
08:47 The director demands that Christine see a psychiatrist.
08:50 This is how she arrives in the service of Hans Asperger.
08:54 Although he finds her dangerous,
08:56 Asperger doesn't sentence her to death.
08:58 He sends her to a rehab as long as possible.
09:01 He believes in the virtues of group life
09:04 to improve asocial characters.
09:06 That's why during the war
09:08 he admires so much the Hitler Youth,
09:10 this movement of training children and teenagers
09:12 of Adolf Hitler's party.
09:14 Christine Berka won't be euthanized
09:17 by Dr. Erwin Jekyllus
09:19 who hesitates between two barbiturates
09:21 to kill children.
09:23 Jekyllus, like his brother Mengele,
09:25 the doctor from Auschwitz,
09:27 does experiments on his little guinea pigs.
09:29 Sometimes he tests various amounts of vitamin D
09:32 to fight against rachitism.
09:35 Other times he inoculates them with diseases
09:37 like tuberculosis to test the effectiveness of vaccines.
09:41 And then the children, victims of unnameable violence,
09:44 die of poor care.
09:46 Officially, they die of pneumonia,
09:48 a real epidemic is happening in Spiegelgrund.
09:51 All deaths are registered in a record
09:53 ironically called "The Book of the Dead".
09:56 In 1941, Asperger and Dr. Erwin Jekyllus
10:06 founded the Society of Curing Pedagogy of Vienna.
10:09 They share the same medical ideas.
10:12 The following year, Dr. Ernest Hilling
10:15 replaces Dr. Jekyllus
10:17 at the Spiegelgrund.
10:19 This pediatrician is very involved in the T4 campaign.
10:22 Hans Asperger now collaborates with him.
10:25 Until the end of the war,
10:27 he held various positions
10:29 with the same objective,
10:31 to sort out the children
10:33 and choose those who will end up euthanized.
10:35 Today, we consider that Hans Asperger
10:38 would have sent about thirty children to their deaths.
10:48 In 1945, the war ends.
10:51 The psychiatric asylums in Austria
10:53 are liberated by the Russian army.
10:55 Some of the Spiegelgrund survivors
10:57 remember that the soldiers
10:59 offered them apples and cigarettes,
11:01 a luxury after so much bad treatment.
11:03 The T4 action program
11:05 has killed more than 70,000 people, as planned.
11:08 It has even exceeded a few hundred
11:10 its initial objectives.
11:12 To this number,
11:13 it is necessary to add the 789 euthanized children
11:15 to the Spiegelgrund.
11:18 The end of the war announces the chase against the Nazis.
11:21 Dr. Erwin Jekelius
11:23 is sentenced to prison by the Russians.
11:25 He died of cancer in detention in 1952.
11:28 His co-detainees have mourned a man
11:30 who was always at the little care for them.
11:32 Hans Asperger, on the other hand,
11:34 is not worried.
11:36 He has never been charged with NSDAP.
11:39 He is not a Nazi
11:41 and has never been one officially.
11:43 This is what saves his reputation.
11:45 It does not matter that his work and his actions
11:47 prove that he was in favor of the euthanasia
11:49 of children considered incurable.
11:51 By prudence, he takes his distance
11:53 with the concept of "gay mute".
11:55 He only participates in a few research conferences
11:57 and does not really delve into his work on autism.
12:00 Anyway,
12:02 at the end of the war,
12:04 Austria lacks psychiatrists,
12:06 so Asperger quickly becomes a professor
12:08 and successively leads several pedopsychiatry services
12:11 until the 1970s.
12:13 His co-detainees have very divergent opinions
12:15 on his subject.
12:17 For some, he is a formidable psychiatrist,
12:19 listening to children,
12:21 respectful of their singularity.
12:23 For others, he is a violent man
12:25 who mistreats patients,
12:27 especially patients,
12:29 as Anna-Theresia Kimmel,
12:31 one of his patients in the 1950s,
12:33 testified.
12:35 Asperger would have established the diagnosis
12:37 of the teenager after giving her,
12:39 by surprise, a punch in the face.
12:41 Anna did not scream.
12:43 She only disfigured the psychiatrist
12:45 with a black look.
12:47 Asperger deduced that she was aggressive.
12:49 These two versions of Hans Asperger,
12:51 the good therapist
12:53 and the cold monster,
12:55 are not irreconcilable.
12:57 He was apparently very different
12:59 depending on the profile of his patients.
13:01 Later, when Asperger evokes war,
13:03 which is rare,
13:05 he ends up presenting himself
13:07 in a nutshell as a "child schindler",
13:09 a doctor caught in the clutches
13:11 of a murderous Nazi system
13:13 who, on his scale,
13:15 saved as many children as possible.
13:17 Recent work by American historian
13:19 Edith Schaeffer
13:21 shows that the diagnosis of the child
13:23 is not a diagnosis of the child,
13:25 but a diagnosis of the child.
13:27 The diagnosis of the child
13:29 is a diagnosis of the child.
13:31 The diagnosis of the child
13:33 is a diagnosis of the child.
13:35 The diagnosis of the child
13:37 is a diagnosis of the child.
13:39 The diagnosis of the child
13:41 is a diagnosis of the child.
13:43 The diagnosis of the child
13:45 is a diagnosis of the child.
13:47 The diagnosis of the child
13:49 is a diagnosis of the child.
13:51 The diagnosis of the child
13:53 is a diagnosis of the child.
13:55 The diagnosis of the child
13:57 is a diagnosis of the child.
13:59 The diagnosis of the child
14:01 is a diagnosis of the child.
14:03 The diagnosis of the child
14:05 is a diagnosis of the child.
14:07 The diagnosis of the child
14:09 is a diagnosis of the child.
14:11 The diagnosis of the child
14:13 is a diagnosis of the child.
14:15 The diagnosis of the child
14:17 is a diagnosis of the child.
14:19 The diagnosis of the child
14:21 is a diagnosis of the child.
14:23 The diagnosis of the child
14:25 is a diagnosis of the child.
14:27 The diagnosis of the child
14:29 is a diagnosis of the child.
14:31 The diagnosis of the child
14:33 is a diagnosis of the child.
14:35 The diagnosis of the child
14:37 is a diagnosis of the child.
14:39 The diagnosis of the child
14:41 is a diagnosis of the child.
14:43 The diagnosis of the child
14:45 is a diagnosis of the child.
14:47 The diagnosis of the child
14:49 is a diagnosis of the child.
14:51 The diagnosis of the child
14:53 is a diagnosis of the child.
14:55 To the production, Camille Bichler.
14:57 To the production, Clément Ibrahim.
14:59 To the artistic direction,
15:01 Julien Tharaud and Adèle Imbert.
15:03 To the composition of the original musics,
15:05 Julien Tharaud and Sébastien Guidice.
15:07 To the communication and the broadcast,
15:09 Kelly De Croix and Romain Vintillas.
15:11 And I, the author of this story,
15:13 I give you an appointment very quickly
15:15 on your favorite listening platform.
15:17 See you soon.
15:19 [MUSIC PLAYING]