London: The pioneering Austrian paediatrician whose name came to describe patients with Asperger's syndrome was in fact a Nazi collaborator who sent children to their deaths, new research reveals.

Hans Asperger has for decades been regarded as a hero in the field of autism treatment and research, said to have shielded his young patients from the menace of Hitler's occupation.

Hans Asperger with a child patient in an undated photograph. Credit:File

But analysis of a crucial set of documents, which were previously assumed destroyed, shows he not only collaborated with the Nazis but "actively contributed" to their eugenics program.

Published in the journal Molecular Autism, the study says Asperger referred "profoundly disabled" children to the Am Spiegelgrund clinic in Vienna despite knowing what took place there. The children were murdered through starvation or lethal drugs as part of the Third Reich's goal of engineering a genetically "pure" society through "racial hygiene". Their cause of death was recorded as pneumonia.