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Recent allegations that pediatrician Hans Asperger legitimized Nazi policies, including forced sterilization and child euthanasia, are refuted with newly translated and chronologically-ordered information that takes into account Hitler’s deceptive ‘halt’ to the T4 euthanasia program in 1941. It is highly unlikely that Asperger was aware of the T4 program when he referred Herta Schreiber to Am Spiegelgrund or when he mentioned that institution 4 months later on the medical chart of another (unrelated) girl, Elisabeth Schreiber. Asperger campaigned vigorously from 1938 to 1943 to have his specialization, Curative Education, take priority in the diagnosis and treatment of disabled children over other fields that promoted Nazi racial hygiene policies. He neither disparaged his patients nor was he sexist. By 1938, he had identified the essentials of Asperger syndrome and described an unnamed boy whom he later profiled (as Ernst K.) in 1944. Rather than doing ‘thin’ research, Asperger made discoveries that were prescient, and some of his activities conformed to definitions of “individual resistance.”

Czech’s claims that my paper abounds with mistranslations, misrepresentations, and factual errors are refuted point-by-point, as is his declaration that the paper contains no relevant or new evidence. Asperger’s statements that Franz Hamburger saved him from the Gestapo are reaffirmed and supported with a personal communication from Asperger’s daughter, Dr. Maria Asperger Felder. Czech’s criticism of anonymous peer reviewers and his call for retraction of my paper are, at best, unconstructive. In light of the current resurgence of authoritarian governments that promote xenophobic and racist ideology in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere, it is essential that details about the Nazi euthanasia program continue to be recalled and deliberated, as they are in this exchange. I stand by my paper.

Herbert Mehrtens‘ work and the implications of the historical ideas he advanced went beyond the history of any single discipline. The article therefore addresses three broad issues: (1) Mehrtens‘ reconceptualization of mathematical modernism, in his field-changing book Moderne—Sprache—Mathematik (1990) and other works, as an epistemic and cultural phenomenon in a way that could potentially reach across and also beyond the sciences and also link scientific and cultural modernisms; (2) the extension of his work to the history of modernity itself via the concept of “technocratic modernism”; (3) his seminal contributions to the historiography of the sciences and technology during the National Socialist period, focusing on his critique of claims that mathematics, the natural sciences and technology were morally or politically “neutral” during or after the Nazi era, and on his counter-claim that mathematicians and other scientists had in fact mobilized themselves and their knowledge in support of Nazism’s central political projects. Taken as a guide for understanding science-politics relations in general, Mehrtens‘ work was and remains a counterweight to the political abstinence adopted by many who have followed the “cultural turn” in history of science and technology. In the broadest sense, the article is a plea for the culturally relevant and politically engaged historiography of the sciences and humanities that Mehrtens himself pursued.

The United Kingdom (UK), like other countries, has made strong commitments to tackling the illicit trade in objects and those that were taken during the Nazi Era. Yet, admitting objects with such questionable provenance into the category of UK national treasures and attempting to keep them in the UK by seeking institutional support to make them available to the public would be at odds with these worthy policies. The main analysis in this paper is focused on the issues raised by the 2017 decision in the UK to designate as a national treasure a Meissen figure that was formerly owned by Emma Budge, whose heirs lost possession of her collection during the Nazi Era in a forced sale. Using the trope of “tarnished treasures” this paper argues that admitting objects with tainted provenance into the category of national treasures tarnishes the entire category of national treasures. Recognizing the need to retain the integrity of this special category, this paper sets out ways in which the UK export licensing process can more fully take into account provenance before admitting tainted cultural objects into the canon of national treasures, and thus avoiding tarnishing the entire category.

Born in Vienna in 1906 to a wealthy, assimilated Jewish family, the painter Marie-Louise von Motesiczky enjoyed a lively social life among the prominent figures of intellectual and cultural Vienna in the closing years of the Habsburg dynasty. She studied at art schools in Vienna, Paris, and the Netherlands, including with German painter Max Beckmann in Frankfurt. The Nazi rise to power cut short Marie-Louise Motesiczky’s career in Central Europe. She fled Vienna for permanent refuge in England. Like her mentor, Beckmann and her contemporary and fellow émigré artist, Oskar Kokoschka, Motesiczky considered the artistic practice of the self-portrait an occasion for self-questioning, self-affirmation, and self-discovery. Unlike her mentors, from early in her career, Motesiczky’s self-portraits had to negotiate the representation of a female subject. This article will investigate the ways in which Motesiczky’s emigration compelled her to reexamine the gendered parameters of the self-portrait and how that reassessment manifests itself specifically in regard to her engagement with the spectatorial gaze. Her position as an émigré artist will not be analyzed as a burden to be overcome but, rather, as the impetus for reexamining techniques and strategies of female self-portraiture.