Abstract
Ole Ivar Lovaas – a Norwegian-born professor of psychology at UCLA – is considered a pioneer in the development of interventions for autistic children based on Applied Behaviour Analysis. According to previous accounts, Lovaas and his family were forced farm workers during the German occupation of Norway between 1940 and 1945, when Lovaas was 13–18 years old. This article shows that the Løvaas family were in fact members of the collaborationist fascist party Nasjonal Samling. His father, Ernst Albert Løvaas, was a prominent leader in the propaganda apparatus of the German-installed fascist government. Ole Ivar Lovaas himself was an active participant in, and a local leader of, the fascist youth movement. The article concludes by comparing these revelations about Lovaas to previous similar revelations about another important figure in the history of autism, Hans Asperger.
Ole Ivar Lovaas became famous in 1965. In May of that year, Life magazine published an article titled ‘Screams, Slaps and Love: A Surprising, Shocking Treatment Helps Far-Gone Mental Cripples’, about Lovaas’ work with autistic 1 children at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). It featured pictures and descriptions of Lovaas administering electric shocks as a punishment for a nine-year-old girl when she refused to follow his directions; and of his assistant Bernard Perloff slapping a seven-year-old boy in the face as punishment for not paying attention during a ‘speech lesson’ (Moser, 1965). Life magazine thus witnessed the early stages of Lovaas’ experiments in using behaviourist methods with autistic children. Within a few years, an approach developed by Lovaas, based on rewards and punishments, was widely used, not least in his two home countries, the US and Norway. Following a hugely influential, but never successfully replicated, 1987 study, the ‘Lovaas method’ became even more widespread and developed a reputation for being scientific and ‘evidence-based’ (Crowo, 2001; Messel, 2014: 61–3; Silberman, 2015: 408–30).
By this time, the method no longer employed electric shocks and severe physical violence. Lovaas’ followers had discovered that milder punishments, and a stronger emphasis on rewards, were sufficiently effective that ‘painful procedures like those administered in the early applications of aversive contingencies are no longer needed’ (Luce and Dyer, 1996: 347). Despite the discontinuation of the harshest forms of physical punishments, ABA interventions are now more controversial than ever, because of criticism from emerging movements for autistic rights and neurodiversity (Kirkham, 2017). ABA interventions for autistic children have also been likened to ‘conversion’ therapies for queer people (Gibson and Douglas, 2018; Yergeau, 2018). In addition to his leading role in developing ABA for autistic children, Lovaas contributed to conversion therapies for gender-nonconforming people through his participation in ‘The Feminine Boy Project’ in the 1970s (Rekers and Lovaas, 1974). This, together with his prolific role as a proponent of physical punishments, and more generally as a pioneer of ABA interventions for autistic children, have contributed to making Lovaas one of the most despised and controversial figures in the history of autism (Gibson and Douglas, 2018; Kirkham, 2017; Yergeau, 2018).
Ole Ivar Lovaas died in 2010. In Norway, the country of his birth, he had never become well known to the general public, but he was revered by psychologists and social workers who considered themselves ‘behaviour analysts’ (Mørch, 2001). In the US, he was enough of a national celebrity that some of the country’s most influential newspapers published long obituaries of the UCLA professor. The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times both presented Lovaas as a pioneer in the development of treatments for autism. And both recounted a narrative of Lovaas’ teenage years in German-occupied Norway. According to that narrative, Lovaas and his family were forced farm workers during the occupation (Fox, 2010; Zarembo, 2010).
The present article uses Norwegian primary sources to reveal that Lovaas’ actual experiences of German occupation were very different from the narrative that emerged later. The Lovaas family were not forced farm workers but active members of the collaborationist Nazi party Nasjonal Samling (National Unity, NS). Ole Ivar Lovaas held a leading position in the local branch of the NS youth movement, while his father, Ernst Albert Løvaas, played a key role in the propaganda apparatus of the party and its regime at the national level.
As an object of scholarly and journalistic history writing, autism, and attempts at treating it, started to gain traction around the time Ole Ivar Lovaas died. Lovaas is an important protagonist in this emerging literature (Donvan and Zucker, 2016; Kirkham, 2017; Silverman, 2012; Yergeau, 2018), in which many contributions reproduce the narrative of Lovaas as a forced farm worker who had his ideas about human behaviour shaped by observing the Nazi occupiers (Feinstein, 2010: 128; Silberman, 2015: 184–5; Silverman, 2004: 19, 171). One biographical article, however, uses Norwegian primary sources to reconstruct this period of Lovaas’ life. This article shows that he was a school pupil during most of the occupation. Despite the fact that nearly all previous accounts of Lovaas’ teenage years claim that he and his family were forced farm workers during the occupation, the article strangely fails to make any reference to this claim (Özerk et al., 2016).
Whereas the primary sources used by Özerk et al. are character cards and interviews with two of Lovaas’ classmates, the present article draws on newspaper articles as well as documents from the post-war police investigations, for ‘national treason’, of Lovaas, his sister and his parents, and from his father’s trial for national treason, at the end of which he was sentenced to four and a half years of forced labour. The modest aim of this article is to rewrite the history of Ole Ivar Lovaas’ teenage years, not to provide new interpretations of the German occupation of Norway. It thus provides only a minimal amount of historical information necessary to get an idea of the context in which these teenage years were lived. The first section discusses the available sources that shed light on Lovaas’ career as a participant in, and local leader of, the collaborationist Nazi youth movement. The second section outlines the prominent career of Lovaas’ father, Ernst Albert Løvaas, in the leadership of the Nazi propaganda apparatus, as well as the participation of his other family members in the collaborationist fascist movement. The third section discusses the establishment of the narrative of the Lovaas family as forced farm workers during the occupation, and asks how Özerk et al. could have failed – despite apparently making a significant effort to uncover the history of the family before and during the German occupation of Norway – to discover that the entire Løvaas family were Nazi collaborators. The fourth section considers the significance of the revelation of Ole Ivar Lovaas’ Nazi past by comparing it to previous revelations about Hans Asperger, who played a similarly important role in the history of autism.
Teenage collaborator
On 8 May 1945, Ole Ivar Løvaas 2 turned 18 years old. He lived in Lier, a rural community just outside Drammen. Situated around 40 km south of Oslo with just over 25,000 inhabitants, Drammen functioned as the capital of Buskerud county. Løvaas’ 18th birthday was also the day on which Germany capitulated to the Allies. After five years, the occupation of Norway had ended. Three days later, Løvaas was arrested for his membership in the collaborationist party Nasjonal Samling. 3 NS was a fascist party founded by Vidkun Quisling in 1933. From the beginning, the party was ideologically related to Adolf Hitler's German Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP; Dahl, Hagtvedt, and Hjeltnes, 1982). Historian Hans Olaf Brevig has termed NS ‘a Norwegian version of German national socialism’ (Brevig and Figueiredo, 2002: 65). Quisling was contacted in 1930 by the NSDAP department of foreign affairs, which viewed Quisling as an important asset. According to Brevig, the sources are insufficient to determine the degree of contact and cooperation between the two parties in the years that followed (ibid.: 30–1). During 1939, Quisling visited Berlin several times, meeting twice with Hitler in December. During the meetings with Hitler and others, Quisling envisioned that NS would seize power in Norway with some form of aid from Germany. Quisling and Hitler discussed the possibility of a German occupation of Norway; Hitler promised Quisling that Germany would support NS economically; and immediately after their meeting, Hitler ordered his subordinates to begin researching the possibility of occupying Norway (Dahl, 2024: 176–81).
The ideological similarity between NS and the NSDAP only grew stronger, especially after Germany occupied Norway in 1940 and banned all political parties except NS, which would play a key role in governing the country during the occupation. The party’s antisemitism became more extreme and conspiratorial around the time Germany invaded the Soviet Union, thus coming to closely resemble the antisemitism of the NSDAP (Simonsen, 2022, 2023). NS had its own paramilitary organization, Hirden, modelled after the German Nazi Sturmabteilung (SA) and named after a medieval king's guard (Veum, 2013: 33–55). The party's youth branch, modelled after the German Hitler Youth, was called NS Ungdomsfylking (NS Youth League, NSUF).
After the German capitulation in May 1945, the transition from a fascist occupation regime to a restored parliamentary democracy proceeded in a relatively orderly fashion. Throughout spring 1945, illegal networks anticipating liberation had gathered information on collaborators to be used for post-war prosecutions. And once the occupation ended, numerous people showed up at police stations to volunteer information about collaborators (Jacobsen, 2020: 208–10). On 9 May, the police started arresting collaborators based on a decree given by the Norwegian exile government in London in 1944. According to this decree, not only major acts of assisting the occupiers but even membership in NS was punishable. On the day of his arrest, Ole Ivar Løvaas signed a statement saying he had joined NS in 1941, but not been active in the movement aside from attending meetings. After being interviewed, Løvaas was released. 4 On 13 July 1945, the chief of police in Drammen decided Løvaas would be prosecuted for his membership of NS. 5
The police department did not continue investigating Ole Ivar Løvaas until November 1945, when they interviewed him again. In this interview, Løvaas explained that he had been a member of Guttehirden, and that its activities had been similar to what one would see in the Scout Movement. 6 NSUF and all its local chapters were divided into four branches according to gender and age. Despite being named after Hirden, the four branches of NSUF were not under its command. They were Småhirden for girls between 10 and 14; Guttehirden for boys between 10 and 14; Jentehirden for girls between 14 and 18; and Unghirden for boys between 14 and 18 (Borge, 1995). As Løvaas remained a member of the movement until shortly before his 18th birthday, it seems likely he would have been transferred from Guttehirden to Unghirden, but this is not mentioned in the transcripts of his police interviews.
In November 1945, the director of public prosecutions decreed that people who had left NS before they turned 18, or had not yet turned 18 during the war, should not be prosecuted (Landssvikutvalget, 1962: 453). In his police interviews, Løvaas had explained that he had informed the party in writing in March 1945 that he wanted to leave. His stated reason was that he did not want the obligations that came with the senior membership that one automatically received upon turning 18. He also told the police that he never received any confirmation that his resignation had been approved, and the police did not get confirmation from elsewhere that he had in fact attempted to leave the party in March 1945. As Løvaas turned 18 on the day the war ended, and it was unclear whether he had left NS, it may also have been unclear whether the decree from the director of public prosecutions should apply to his case. However, the Drammen police department interpreted the situation as though the decree applied to Løvaas, and on 1 December 1945, they informed him that in accordance with the new decree, he would not be prosecuted. 7
Due to this decision, the case file on Ole Ivar Løvaas is rather slim, as he was not investigated beyond the two interviews conducted with him. It does, however, also contain documents from a different investigation, opened after the case against Løvaas himself was closed. The investigation in question was opened by the police department at Lillestrøm. While Lier, where Løvaas lived, is situated just south-west of Oslo, Lillestrøm is just north-east of the capital. In late autumn 1946, Lillestrøm police department started investigating the NS førerskole (‘führer school’) at Jessheim, nearby, at which prospective NSUF leaders, among others, were educated. The beginning of the German occupation in 1940 had seen an explosion of the number of members in the NS youth organizations. Moreover, many of the most committed members volunteered for the German war effort. This created an acute shortage of leaders on all levels of the organization, which, aided by the German Hitler Youth, began frantically educating new leaders. Out of all the courses and institutions that educated fascist youth leaders, the führer school at Jessheim was considered the most prestigious (Kvistad, 2011: 374–92).
In the summer of 1942, this school organized two six-week courses for local leaders in the NS youth organizations. While investigating the führer school and its students, investigators from Lillestrøm police department found that Ole Ivar Løvaas had participated in one of these courses. Moreover, they found that at a ceremony to mark the end of the course, he had been appointed führer of a local chapter of Guttehirden, the NS organization for boys between the ages of 10 and 14. Lovaas himself was 15 years old at the time. 8 It would probably have been normal for a leader to have been a few years older than the children he led (Kvistad, 2011: 88–103). This could mean Løvaas told the truth in his police interview when he only mentioned being a member of Guttehirden, not Unghirden, which was for boys between 14 and 18.
Given that Lovaas remained a member of NSUF at least until March 1945, and that there was a severe shortage of leaders, it would be very unlikely if Lovaas did not serve as a local leader of Guttehirden, considering he participated in a summer course with that purpose and was officially appointed to such a position at the end of the course. That would also mean Lovaas lied in his police interviews when he claimed he had not been active in the movement beyond attending meetings. Unfortunately, this cannot be confirmed by consulting the movement’s own archives, as no organizational archive materials from NS youth organizations in Lier have been preserved. There are, however, other sources that can shed some additional light on Lovaas’ activities as a Nazi collaborator.
On 11 March 1943, the newspaper Drammens Tidende published a short article titled ‘Lier NSUF Making Great Progress’. Its first lines read, If anyone doubted whether the NS youth is capable of more than marching and showing off their nice uniforms in the streets, the doubts would have evaporated after witnessing the comrade's night at Haugestad on Tuesday. Led by a 14 year old girl, Betty Skogen, and a 15 year old boy, Ivar Løvås, it turned out to be one of the best NSUF meetings held this winter, pulled off with a precision and a program that will not be easy to match. (‘Lier NSUF i sterk framgang’, 1943)
It is extremely unlikely that ‘Ivar Løvås’ referred to someone other than the person later known as Ole Ivar Lovaas, who was 15 years old in March 1943. The term ‘comrade’s night’ was commonly used within NS. It often referred to a semi-private gathering of members, meant to increase internal coherence. However, comrade's nights could also be of a more public character, aiming to recruit new members. This was likely the case with the one led by Løvaas and Betty Skogen in March 1943, and not only because it was reported on by the most widely distributed regional newspaper. One of the speakers at the event was Ragnvald Røed, a county leader of the NS youth organizations. In October 1942, he had distributed a propaganda plan to his subordinates in the county, of which Løvaas would have been one, ordering them to organize comrade's nights where they would invite non-members with the aim of recruiting them. 9
Elisabeth (Betty) Skogen, who led the ‘comrade’s night’ together with Lovaas, left Norway shortly after the war, staying for more than 20 years in France and Paraguay, before returning to Norway as a marketing representative of a multinational cosmetics company. In 1981 she appeared in a four-part documentary on Norwegian television that presented the perspectives of former collaborators on the period of German occupation. In 1982, she published a memoir of her experiences before, during, and after the war. Both in the documentary series and in the memoir, she portrayed life in the fascist youth movement as innocent and akin to scouting, a portrayal for which she was harshly criticized (Baltzrud, 2004). Like Løvaas, Skogen attended leadership courses, and when the former leader of Småhirden, the NS organization for girls between 10 and 14 years, left to volunteer for the German occupation authorities in Poland, the position was given to Elisabeth Skogen (Skogen, 1982: 53–60). Although she does not use his full name, one passage in her memoir is very likely to be about Ole Ivar Løvaas. In a description of a social event for members of NS youth organizations, she writes, ‘The music? Ole provided that, as he was the only one who could master a few little pieces on the violin. White and trembling, he stood in the background fiddling, horribly raspy’ (ibid.: 54). The ‘Ole’ that Skogen refers to seems likely to have been Løvaas as we know he admitted to attending NS youth meetings and he played the violin (Özerk et al., 2016; Silberman, 2015: 370).
According to Skogen, she first came into contact with the fascist youth movement when an older girl telephoned her early in 1941 to invite her to a sporting event in Lillehammer, organized by NSUF and termed ‘winter games’. She accepted the invitation and the experience thrilled her, despite having no talent for skiing and the living conditions being sordid. It was the camaraderie that attracted her, and once she got back home, she applied to join Småhirden (Skogen, 1982: 49–50). Ole Ivar Løvaas was also at the competition in Lillehammer. According to newspaper reports, he came fourth in the slalom competition for boys between 12 and 14 years old (‘N. S. U. F.-ungdommen fører norsk idrett videre’, 1941; ‘Vinterlekene på Lillehammer’, 1941). Unlike Skogen, Lovaas was already a member at the time of the competition in Lillehammer, in April 1941. 10 The youths who competed in skiing at Lillehammer, received several prominent visitors, including NS leader Vidkun Quisling; head of the German occupation authorities Josef Terboven; the NS minister for work and sports, Axel Heiberg Stang; and a German envoy from the Hitler Youth by the name of Karl Petter, who acted as an advisor for NSUF. Before the competitions started, the participants marched through the streets of Lillehammer (Kvistad, 2011: 429–30).
As already mentioned, Elisabeth Skogen presents the fascist youth movement in Lier during the occupation as peaceful and innocent. A recent book about Lier during the occupation, written by a local historian and based on numerous diaries and later recollections, paints a different picture. Here, the young fascists appear to have acted violently and aggressively on several occasions. One incident occurred in April 1941, one month after Ole Ivar Lovaas joined the movement. A diary from that time describes how young fascists were beating up people and violently threatening others into leaving a particular area. The diary describes the perpetrators as being members of Småhirden (Jacobsen, 2020: 113). That, however, is probably not correct, as Småhirden was the NS organization for girls aged between 10 and 14. It is probably more likely that the troublemakers were members of Guttehirden, for boys between 10 and 14, or Unghirden, for boys between 14 and 18. Ole Ivar Løvaas’ 14th birthday was on 8 May 1941.
The family
While Ole Ivar Løvaas’ actions during the war must be gleaned from only a few documents, the same is not true of his father, Ernst Albert Løvaas, whose actions during the war left numerous sources. Özerk et al., in their biographical article on Lovaas, also recount parts of his father's life, from his birth in 1886, to working as a watchmaker at age 14, working at a cellulose factory one decade later, becoming an active member of the labour movement and then working as a journalist in various local labour newspaper. They make no mention, however, of Ernst Albert Løvaas’ career after 1922 (Özerk et al., 2016). This is curious, considering that he would later rise to considerable fame.
In 1923, Ernst Albert Løvaas left the labour movement following a major conflict that saw the movement split into three parties. He would not join another political party until 1940. In 1924, he started working as a journalist for Dagbladet, a left-liberal newspaper that was one of the most widely read in the country. 11 In 1938, however, he began publishing polemical political articles in other newspapers. These articles espoused views that differed significantly from those of the movement he had left 15 years earlier. In several articles published during autumn 1938 in Nationen – a far-right newspaper owned by the Norwegian Farmers’ Association, which regularly published antisemitic content (Simonsen, 2011) – Løvaas argued that democracy was incapable of solving the most pressing issue of the day. The issue he had in mind was youth unemployment. As a solution he proposed a ‘law on work service’ that would require everyone to work for a certain amount of time and would grant everyone the right to paid work after completion of the work service.
The idea of mandatory work service had been central to NS from the party was founded, and it was the main cause of its youth wing, NSUF (Kvistad, 2011: 31, 473, 605–91). Løvaas combined his argument for a law on work service with a call for ‘stronger discipline’. According to him, ‘A nation without discipline is like a boat without a helm’ (Løvaas, 1938a). Moreover, he criticized fellow Norwegians for being too critical of Hitler’s Germany. As the German dictatorship had proven far better than Norway and other democracies at exploiting the productive powers of its youth, Løvaas thought, ‘We certainly have no right whatsoever to taunt such a nation and its political system, so long as we ourselves are letting our best youth go under within our own borders’ (Løvaas, 1938c). In his final Nationen article of 1938, Løvaas warned that there were more Nazis in the country than people realized and that if they attempted to seize power, ‘the disappointed hordes of youth will be at the fore among the enemies of democracy’ (Løvaas, 1938b).
Løvaas’ final political article of 1938 appeared in Fredrikstad Dagblad. Here, his main argument was that Norwegians failed to look objectively at events in Germany. He praised the German dictatorship for the way it exploited its productive forces and argued that its actions reflected the will of the German people. This German success, he implied, should have consequences for other countries: It looks like the democratic and liberalist system has had its day in several countries. The question, then, is only how the new system will look and how the transition will play out. Germany has chosen its system. Russia struggles with its system, and the other nations will eventually have to take their turn. We are living in interesting times, even though the new invention we are witnessing is incredibly brutal. We ourselves [in Norway] will quite certainly also need to take our turn. The disintegrative tendencies caused by a lack of discipline are clearly appearing while at the same time our country’s productive forces are not capable of meeting the ever-increasing demands. (Løvaas, 1938d)
This could be read as implying that democracy in Norway would soon come to an end and be replaced by a system resembling the German Nazi dictatorship, and that this would be a good thing, considering Germany’s superior handling of its work force.
Less than a year and a half later, democracy in Norway did indeed end, albeit not because of an internal process, as Løvaas had seemed to envision, but because of a German invasion on 9 April 1940. Oslo and Bergen fell immediately, and the government evacuated northwards. By summer, German forces had conquered the entire country and the government fled to Britain. During spring and summer, the occupation authorities negotiated with members of the parliament, Stortinget, about how Norway would be governed under German occupation. The negotiations did not yield any agreement, and on 25 September 1940, Josef Terboven, the head of the German occupation authorities, dictated a new order. No political parties would be allowed to function, except one, the pro-German fascist party NS.
Just prior to the announcement of the new order, on 22 September, Ernst Albert Løvaas had applied for NS membership. In January 1941, Løvaas was granted leave from his position at Dagbladet and accepted a position as ‘political editor’ of Norsk artikkeltjeneste, a newly founded agency that would distribute articles to hundreds of Norwegian newspapers that would be pressured into publishing them. As political editor, Løvaas’ job was to ensure the articles conformed to the ideological tenets of Nazism. He thus became one of the country’s most important and influential Nazi propagandists. Most newspapers were allowed to keep publishing, with the same journalists and editors as before the war, so long as they refrained from criticizing NS and the occupation authorities. The majority of the content in most newspapers, therefore, became largely ‘apolitical’, neither supporting nor criticizing Nazism and the occupation. Norsk artikkeltjeneste, then, was perhaps the most important instrument of ideological Nazification. By forcing newspapers to publish its ideologically tailored articles, NS and the occupation authorities used Norsk artikkeltjeneste to influence the minds of the populace to accept a Manichean world view in which a powerful Jewish conspiracy was the enemy of all mankind (Westlie, 2019).
Shortly after accepting the position as political editor, Løvaas also accepted an invitation to join NS kamporganisasjon, a group of the most ideologically committed Nazis within the movement. From summer 1941 until February 1944, Løvaas held positions as ‘propaganda leader’ and ‘ideological leader’ in the party. He also functioned as ‘national speaker’ and held several talks on national radio and at various events. 12
In addition to ensuring the ideological conformity of others, Ernst Albert Løvaas wrote several articles and talks himself. He gave his first radio talk in December 1940. It was titled ‘The Labour Movement and the Anti-Comintern Pact’ and was an attempt to explain what had gone wrong for the international labour movement, such that it now failed to support the only truly emancipatory movement: National Socialism. This, he explained, was due to the influence of ‘Jewish philosophers’ over the labour movement and to the fact that the Soviet Union and ‘the red internationals’ were controlled by ‘international Jewry’. He apparently wanted listeners to understand that NS, rather than the Labour Party, which had governed Norway for five years prior to the German occupation, was the true representative of Norwegian workers. In order to avoid the pitfalls that had ruined the international labour movement, he said that NS wanted to ‘seek cooperation with our own people’s tribe, the Germanic, and fiercely combat any mixing of blood with other races. This explains why we struggle against the Jews’ bastardisation of our strong people.’ 13
In February 1942, several newspapers printed an article by Løvaas where he praised those Norwegian youths who had volunteered to participate in the German invasion of the Soviet Union, and scolded those Norwegians who failed to appreciate the sacrifices these soldiers made: In spite of terror from the agents of Jewish-plutocratic exploiters, the uncorrupted parts of Norwegian youth will feel a wake-up call when they read about the effort of these boys and their deaths in service of the cause of the fatherland.… Whatever the rest of us can sacrifice and contribute as helpers of the Führer are like nothing compared to what these idealistic youths achieve. (Løvaas, 1942b)
This was among the articles the prosecutor would place particular emphasis on in Løvaas’ trial after the war, not for its justification of the ongoing genocide against the Jews but for its glorification of Norwegians who volunteered for the German war effort. Another article published by Løvaas in the same month was also emphasized by the prosecutor, not for its blatant antisemitism but for its appeals for Norwegians to be friendlier to the German occupiers: ‘Our compatriots need only to think for an hour and realize that they are tied by blood to the Germans. They need to immediately realize that the Germans today are defenders of our country, whose real enemies are the Jewish plutocrats’ (Løvaas, 1942a).
Aside from his leading role in creating and disseminating Nazi propaganda, one event in particular would receive much attention during the trial against Ernst Albert Løvaas. This event revolved around his son, Ole Ivar. In spring 1941, Ole Ivar Løvaas graduated from elementary school. In June, the local newspaper published the names of those pupils who had been accepted to Drammen Middelskole (middle school / junior high school) after sitting for admission examinations. Ernst Albert Løvaas was shocked not to see his son’s name on the list. Shortly thereafter, he sat down to write a letter to the NS-controlled Ministry of Church and Education. In this letter he wrote that several teachers at the school, and one in particular, had ‘from the beginning of the war, agitated and spread propaganda against NS, the Germans and the führer of Germany’. He therefore alleged that this teacher had given Ole Ivar a failing grade as a punishment for being the son of a Nazi collaborator.
While it was the anger at not seeing his son’s name among those accepted to the middle school that provoked Ernst Albert Løvaas to write to the Ministry of Church and Education, he also raised an issue regarding his daughter, Nora Løvaas, that had occurred six months earlier. At a mid-year examination, Nora Løvaas, who was three years Ivar’s senior and had joined NSUF in autumn 1940, had received a failing grade. In his letter, Ernst Albert Løvaas alleged that the failing grade resulted from several years of harassment of his daughter by teachers who opposed NS and Nazism. He concluded his letter by making a series of demands: one of the teachers should be prosecuted for engaging in political propaganda against NS and Germany; several other teachers along with the headmaster should receive a ‘final warning’; Nora Løvaas should be given a passing grade and Ole Ivar Løvaas should be admitted to middle school. 14
Shortly thereafter, Ernst Albert Løvaas learned that Ole Ivar Løvaas had in fact been admitted to middle school, even though his name had been left out, by mistake, from the list of names published in the local newspaper. Three days after sending his letter, he contacted the Ministry of Church and Education again, asking them to disregard it.
15
While he thus refrained from persecuting individual teachers at his children’s school, Ernst Albert Løvaas remained angry at teachers and others whose opposition to Nazism were expressed in aggression towards youths who were members of NSUF or whose parents were members of NS. In October, he spoke at an event in Lier where he announced that throughout the country, this [the alleged harassment of youths associated with NS] is being brought to an end. The schools are receiving particular attention. Several un-national teachers have already been brought into more suitable employment, and particularly evil jøssing
16
children are being permanently removed from schools.… Some of our local branches have organized a defence for the children, and brutally pursue those who try to terrorize the youngest among us to leave NS. This is a great responsibility for all of us: First of all toward the children as human beings, but last and not least toward the Führer and NS. (‘N. S. ungdommen skal ikke lenger være jaget vilt’, 1941)
After the war, when a police interrogator asked him about the letter to the Ministry of Church and Education, Ernst Albert Løvaas said that in the period prior to writing the letter, ‘his children often came home from school crying, speaking of the different ways in which they had been harassed’. 17 Out of these children, Ole Ivar Løvaas was not the only collaborator. His younger brother joined NSUF some time in 1941. As he was only 14 years old at the time of the liberation, the younger brother was not investigated for national treason. 18 His mother, Hildur Løvaas, joined NS in early 1942. 19 There is nothing to indicate that Hildur Løvaas or the younger brother were particularly active members or held any positions beyond ordinary membership. As punishment for her membership, Hildur Løvaas received a fine of 1000 kroner in December 1945. 20
The older sister, Nora Løvaas, however, played a more active role in NS, as an employee of its cultural section. In 1943, she participated as a dancer in a tour of 25 concerts through central and northern Norway. From 1942, as part of civic resistance efforts, a large share of the population had boycotted all concerts and performances by musicians and artists associated with NS and the German occupiers. Whereas musicians not associated with NS consistently played to full houses, hardly anyone would come to see a concert if any of the performers were known to be associated with NS. In 1943, the prominent NS musician Jim Johannessen received funding from the Ministry for Culture and Enlightenment to organize a large tour to counteract the boycott. The concerts would be free of charge and feature a program of traditional dance and music. Nora Løvaas was one out of five performers (Herresthal, 2019: 318–19). Documents in her case file show Nora Løvaas being employed by NS Hirden in August 1944 as a ‘musician’ 21 and signing a contract to become ‘disponent’ – the highest administrative leader – for Hirden’s musicians from September 1944. 22 Despite her more active role in the fascist movement, Nora Løvaas also only received a fine of 1000 kroner, for her membership of NS and for pledging allegiance to Vidkun Quisling. 23
Ernst Albert Løvaas’ case came before the court in Lier in October 1946. After hearing five witnesses and seeing numerous documents, the court sentenced him to four and a half years of forced labour, minus the 533 days he had already spent in detention. He also lost his voting rights and the right to public employment for 10 years. Moreover, the court decided that Erstatningsdirektoratet could recover 19,000 kroner from Løvaas. The fine was set to correspond with the wages he had earned from his position at Norsk artikkeltjeneste, minus taxes. 24 Erstatningsdirektoratet was a directorate created by the Norwegian government shortly after liberation with the sole purpose of handling the recovery of economic assets from convicted collaborators. While the court set the maximum amount the directorate would be allowed to recover from each convict, the directorate could decide to recommend that the amount be reduced. Such recommendations would then need to be approved by the Ministry of Justice (Harper, 2023: 149).
The sentencing of Ernst Albert Løvaas had severe psychological and economic consequences for other members of his family. Their previously relatively comfortable economic situation ended, but a protracted process regarding the amount Løvaas Sr would have to pay to the state, ended in 1951 with a decision that allowed the family to keep the home they owned in Lier (‘Eiendoms-salg’, 1968). 25
A conveniently forgotten past
What, then, about Lovaas’ own account of having been a forced farm worker during the war? As already mentioned, the fact that he was in school during most of the occupation made it unlikely Lovaas would have spent a significant amount of time as a farm worker. Unlikely, but not impossible. The use of forced labour in Norway has until recently been largely neglected within the vast literature on various aspects of the German occupation. This is no longer true, due to recent work by Gunnar Hatlehol and other historians. Numerous laws and decrees on forced labour were enacted during the occupation, and tens of thousands of Norwegian civilians, in addition to even larger numbers of prisoners from other occupied countries, were forced workers in Norway during the occupation. However, the vast majority of these Norwegians were over 18 years old (Hatlehol, 2018).
In other words, despite the prevalence of forced labour during the German occupation of Norway, it is unlikely that Ole Ivar Løvaas was ever among those who were forced to work. His own position, and especially that of his father, within the fascist, collaborationist NS movement, makes it even less likely. However, rather than simply inventing his experiences as a forced farm worker, he may instead have misrepresented a memory of something he could actually have participated in: idealistic, voluntary farm work. From the beginnings of the NS youth movement in the early 1930s, voluntary farm work had been an integral part of its activities. In her memoir of a childhood spent among fascist youths in Lier, Elisabeth Skogen wrote that ‘most of us felt a call of duty to participate [in the voluntary farm work organized by NS] for a couple of weeks each summer’ (Skogen, 1982: 57). According to the most thorough account yet written of the fascist youth movement in Norway, NS’ devotion to voluntary farm work was driven by fascist ‘Blut und Boden’ ideology (Kvistad, 2011: 605–45). While there may have been considerable social pressure for fascist youths to participate in the voluntary farm work, it was nevertheless voluntary (ibid.: 634). I am not aware of any sources directly indicating that Ole Ivar Løvaas participated in voluntary farm work. However, considering what is generally known about forced labour in Norway during the German occupation, and about the fascist youth movement's devotion to voluntary farm labour, it seems much more likely Løvaas participated in the latter rather than in the former.
After graduating from Drammen Latin School in 1947, Ole Ivar Løvaas served in the Norwegian Air Force and worked at Protan, a factory in Drammen that produced alginates and plastic-covered textiles (Özerk et al., 2016: 249–50; ‘Ung psykolog fra Lier blir professor i U. S. A.’, 1959). He migrated to the US in 1950 to become a student at Luther College, which had offered him a violin scholarship (ibid.: 250).
After finishing a bachelor’s degree in one year, Lovaas moved to the University of Washington in Seattle where he trained as a psychologist and got a PhD in 1958, staying on as an assistant professor until 1961, when he moved to UCLA (Özerk et al., 2016: 251–3). During his first 15 years in the US, Ole Ivar Lovaas did not have much of a public profile. This all changed, however, after his appearance in Life magazine. Rising to fame as the man behind a potentially successful treatment for autism meant that his personal story would also, occasionally, be the object of some public interest. A long 1974 feature on Lovaas in Psychology Today featured what seems to have been the first account of his youth printed in a major US publication: His voice thickens when he recalls growing up in Norway. ‘In 1939 Oslo was like a strangely beautiful and unrealistic dream. We used to take the train up into the mountains into this fairyland, all white and shiny, beautiful diamonds everywhere. Then one morning a voice came on the radio and said that Norway had been occupied. I remember going to school that morning and the teachers were standing there, crying, and told us to go home. That afternoon, that very afternoon, the green-coloured men in their funny helmets crawled all over my valley. They were like aphids in a Garden of Eden.’ The war interrupted his education for four years, but Ivar received a high-school diploma anyway. There was no way for him to finance a college-education in Europe, so he applied for and won a scholarship to Luther College in Iowa. (Chance, 1974b)
While the article incorrectly states that ‘the war interrupted his education for four years’, it mentions neither forced labour nor the idea that Lovaas’ experiences of living under Nazi occupation shaped his ideas about human behaviour. Judging from published accounts, these elements seem to have been added to Lovaas’ background story towards the end of his life.
During a talk in Washington, DC in November 2003, Lovaas said that ‘his approach’ had ‘grown out of his experience of the Second World War in Norway’ and ‘claimed that his experiences [of the Second World War] taught him to reconsider ideas about the innateness of evil or personality, and to conclude that any harmful or beneficial activity could be learned or conditioned’ (Silverman, 2004: 95, 171).
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And according to a 2004 article in Los Angeles magazine, The allure of behavior therapy was understandable for a man who had lived through the horrors of the Nazi occupation and seen many of its evils firsthand. The behaviorists seemed to hold the answer to the question of human evil: People were not inherently bad but merely conditioned to act badly by their environments. (Ito, 2004: 54)
The 2010 obituaries in the LA Times and NY Times followed Los Angeles magazine in stating that the Lovaas family had been ‘forced to become agricultural laborers’ (Fox, 2010) or ‘forced to work the fields during the Nazi occupation of the 1940s’ (Zarembo, 2010), and both stated that his experiences under Nazi occupation had been formative for Lovaas. The obituary in the NY Times ended by quoting the 2004 Los Angeles magazine article, in which Lovaas said, ‘If I had gotten Hitler here at U.C.L.A. at the age of 4 or 5 … I could have raised him to be a nice person’ (Fox, 2010).
The obituaries in the LA Times and NY Times were not alone in pointing to Lovaas’ experiences under Nazi occupation as formative. When the Association for Psychological Science published numerous ‘Memories of Ole Ivar Lovaas’ after his passing, Lovaas’ longtime collaborator Tristram Smith said that ‘Lovaas developed an interest in understanding human nature when he experienced the privations of the Nazi occupation of his native country during World War II’ (‘Memories of Ole Ivar Lovaas’, 2010). An obituary in The Behavior Analyst by two of his colleagues at The Lovaas Institute in Los Angeles explained that ‘when asked about his motivation, he consistently returned to his experience growing up under the deprivations of Nazi occupation in Norway during World War II’ (Larsson and Wright, 2011).
When the history of autism began to be written in the 2010s, Lovaas was given a major role in this history. Steve Silberman’s 2015 book Neurotribes stands out, both because it has been widely read and talked about, and because it goes a long way in rejecting traditional understandings of autism as a disease or disorder and sympathetically portrays emerging movements for neurodiversity and autistic rights. In line with this approach, Silberman’s treatment of Lovaas is largely critical, but his account of Lovaas’ youth merely reproduces the by now established narrative: ‘For the next five years, Lovaas and his family were forced to work as migrant laborers, eating only what they could grow themselves, picking cabbages and turnips in the frigid air ten hours a day until their arms and legs felt numb’ (Silberman, 2015: 370). None of the other histories of autism used other sources to shed light on Lovaas’ early life than articles built around interviews with the man himself (Donvan and Zucker, 2016; Silverman, 2012), and those that mentioned his Norwegian background reproduced the narrative of him being forced to work as a farm labourer (Feinstein, 2010: 128).
For these broad histories of autism in a mostly American context, it is understandable that they would base their accounts of Lovaas’ past on sources previously published in the US. It is more of a mystery how the one biographical article about Lovaas that actually used Norwegian sources to shed light on his youth nevertheless failed to uncover the fact that he and his family were Nazi collaborators. This article – published in 2016 by four Norwegian researchers – bases its account of Lovaas’ youth on interviews with two of his former classmates as well as archival documents from the schools he attended. Moreover, they use various archive documents to trace his parents’ lives. They thus prove that Lovaas was in school throughout the German occupation, yet they do not mention that this finding disproves the established narrative. The article quotes general literature to shed light on how the people of Lier experienced German occupation. However, as for Lovaas’ own attitudes and/or actions towards the German occupiers, the authors rely entirely on Psychology Today’s 1974 article on Lovaas, quoting his description of German soldiers as ‘green-colored men in their funny helmets’ who were ‘like aphids in a Garden of Eden’ (Özerk et al., 2016: 245).
It seems surprising that Özerk et al did not discover Lovaas had been a Nazi collaborator, considering they interviewed two of his classmates. As a local leader and regular participant in meetings, it seems likely that everyone in his class would have known about his role in the NS youth movement, not least considering the actions taken by his father to protect Ole Ivar Lovaas from alleged discrimination by an anti-fascist teacher, and his post-war statements about his children being bullied because they and their parents were Nazi collaborators. And considering that Özerk et al. were able to uncover information about Ernst Albert Løvaas’ early life, from a time when he was completely unknown, it is very surprising that they were not able to uncover that he was a prominent Nazi propagandist, considering that his name appeared in hundreds of newspaper articles during the occupation, and considering that Ernst Albert Løvaas is mentioned in numerous more recent books on the history of Norwegian fascism and the German occupation (Kierulf and Schiøtz, 2004: 89; Sørensen, 1983: 208, 212; 1989: 401; Veum, 2013: 205).
Özerk et al. are not historians but researchers and practitioners in pedagogy and related disciplines. Özerk and Özerk (2020) have authored a Norwegian-language book on ‘Autism and pedagogy’, which presents Lovaas’ work in a highly favourable way. Another co-author, Svein Eikeseth, is an editor of an introductory book on Applied Behaviour Analysis (ABA) and of articles defending ABA against criticisms from neurodiversity activists (Eikeseth, 2022a, 2022b; Eikeseth and Svartdal, 2010). According to an article in a Norwegian journal of behaviour analysis, on the Norwegian connections of Lovaas and B. F. Skinner, ‘Svein Eikeseth is probably the one Norwegian who was most completely trained by Ivar [Lovaas], even though Svein also trained for long periods under Don Baer in Kansas’ (Mørch, 2001: 42). Eikeseth has co-authored at least two publications with Lovaas (Eikeseth and Lovaas, 1992; Eikeseth, Lovaas, and Holden, 2006), and when Lovaas died in 2010, Eikeseth authored and co-authored three different obituaries (Eikeseth, 2010a; Smith and Eikeseth, 2011). In one, he wrote, ‘For me personally, Lovaas was a hero, a mentor, an inspiration, a model, a personal friend, a father figure, and a “normal” person like you and me. He was always available to give advice when I needed to make important professional or personal choices’ (Eikeseth, 2010b). Even the 2016 article by Özerk et al. has a title that resembles that of a eulogizing obituary: ‘Ole Ivar Lovaas – His Life, Merits and Legacy’.
In his obituaries of Lovaas, Eikeseth demonstrated a willingness to bend reality to service the legacy of his hero and father figure. He suggested that Lovaas had only used painful physical punishments on rare occasions and that he had only used electric shock as punishment in cases of ‘life-threatening self-injury or aggression’ and discontinued its use entirely in the late 1960s. However, the 1965 Life article described Lovaas using electric shock as a punishment for a girl who refused to follow his instructions, with nothing to suggest her behaviour was even close to being life-threatening for herself or others (Moser, 1965). And in his 1974 interview with Psychology Today, Lovaas describes the use of electric shock as a frequent, still ongoing practice: ‘What typically happens is this – we shock the child once and he stops for about 30 seconds and then he tries it again. It is as though he says, “I have to replicate this to be sure.” Like a scientist. He tries it once more and we punish again and that is pretty much it.’ He also confirmed that other forms of brutal violence was a routine part of the ‘Lovaas method’, and that their use was not confined to cases of life-threatening self-injury or aggression. Asked by the interviewer, ‘How do you get rid of behaviors like that – biting a teacher?’, Lovaas answered, ‘Spank them, and spank them good. They bite you and you just turn them over your knee and give them one good whack on the rear and that pretty well does it. This is what we do best; we are very good at controlling these kinds of behaviors’ (Chance, 1974a).
Lovaas, Asperger, and the significance of a Nazi past
What is the significance of the revelation that the young Ole Ivar Lovaas was not a victim of Nazism but a local leader of a fascist and collaborationist youth movement? One way of approaching an answer to this question may be to compare the case of Lovaas with a similar revelation about another important figure in the history of autism. Hans Asperger was an Austrian pediatrician, after whom Asperger’s syndrome was later named. Immediately after his graduation in 1931, Asperger was appointed to his first job, at the University of Vienna Children’s Hospital. He joined the hospital’s Clinic for Curative Education (Heilpädagogik) in 1932 before becoming its leader in 1934 (Sheffer, 2018a: 46–7). In a 1938 talk subsequently reprinted in a medical journal, Asperger introduced the term autistic psychopathy. In his development of this concept he is likely to have been influenced by colleagues at the Clinic for Curative Education, where the term autistic had apparently been part of common parlance for several years already (ibid.: 62–8). He elaborated on the diagnosis of ‘autistic psychopathy’ in several subsequent publications, of which his 1944 postdoctoral dissertation was the most detailed (ibid.: 272).
For several decades after the Second World War, Asperger’s work on ‘autistic psychopathy’ had little impact and he was largely unknown outside the German-speaking countries. This began to change in 1981, when British psychiatrist Lorna Wing used Asperger’s 1944 thesis to propose a new diagnosis: Asperger’s syndrome (Wing, 1981). The diagnosis became widely used, even before its 1994 inclusion in DSM-IV (Donvan and Zucker, 2016: 327). As Wing had intended, it helped usher in the idea of an ‘autism spectrum’ (Silberman, 2015: 335–53). Echoing several previous pronouncements by various researchers (Donvan and Zucker, 2016: 331–2), Steve Silberman’s 2015 book Neurotribes described Hans Asperger in a positive light and accepted Asperger’s post-war narrative of himself as an anti-fascist who had developed his concept of autism in order to defend the youths he described from Nazi persecution (Silberman, 2015: 82–139). However, among autism researchers, rumours had been circulating since the early 1990s that Hans Asperger, who had died in 1980, had not been entirely honest in presenting himself as an opponent of Nazism. Concrete evidence to that effect was first presented in a 2010 talk in Vienna by Austrian historian Herwig Czech, who had found documents showing that Asperger had written evaluations of patients that he very likely knew would increase the likelihood of those patients being murdered (Donvan and Zucker, 2016: 338–41).
Czech first published a preliminary version of some of his findings in a brief chapter in a German anthology on Hans Asperger and Asperger’s syndrome in 2015 (Czech, 2015). He then published a fuller account in English in 2018 (Czech, 2018), the same year in which Edith Sheffer published her book Asperger’s Children, which presented Asperger as a well-integrated participant in ‘Nazi psychiatry’ and a witting accomplice to murder (Sheffer, 2018a). Czech’s and Sheffer’s dismantling of the heroic image of Asperger gave rise both to scholarly debate and to significant attention in popular and social media (Davies, 2024; Sher 2020; Silberman, 2016). The debate and controversy focused largely on whether Asperger knowingly contributed to the murder of children (Czech, 2019; Falk, 2020; Tatzer, Maleczek, and Waldhauser, 2022). Edith Sheffer, however, wanted to do more than shed light on Hans Asperger’s life and deeds. According to a New York Times review of Asperger’s Children, Sheffer ‘wants to upend notions of autism as a legitimate diagnostic category by locating its source in Nazi notions of mental health and sickness’ (Mnookin, 2018). While Sheffer’s book is less explicit than the review about her opposition to ‘autism as a legitimate diagnostic category’, this is hardly a far-fetched interpretation of her work (Sheffer, 2018a: 320–1). And in an article in Time, Sheffer described her findings about Asperger as a cautionary tale about the ‘dangerous power of labeling people’ (Sheffer, 2018b). Herwig Czech, who was otherwise Sheffer’s ‘ally’ in the ‘Asperger debates’, argued that ‘Edith Sheffer's attempt to define the concept of autistic psychopathy as intrinsically tarnished by an affinity to National Socialist ideology is conceptually and methodologically weak’ (Czech, 2019: 3883).
Whereas the revelations about Asperger entered into ongoing debates about whether Asperger’s syndrome was a legitimate diagnosis, the present revelations about Lovaas are likely to enter into the heated debates about whether ABA interventions are legitimate treatments. Even though Lovaas’ connections with Nazism are less ambiguous than Asperger’s, this does not necessarily mean that the relevance of his past to his later role in developing ABA interventions is any clearer than the relevance of Asperger’s Nazi connections to the later development of ‘Asperger’s syndrome’. However, there are some notable parallels between the two men when it comes to potential links between their Nazi connections and their role in the development of diagnoses of, and treatments for, autism. For Sheffer, the goal of normality and becoming a productive soldier or worker is an integral part of her argument that Asperger’s work on autism was a product of Nazi ideology: just like his Nazi colleagues, Asperger saw normality as an unquestionable ideal and he wanted to differentiate between those autistic psychopaths who could become productive citizens of the Reich and those who could not (Sheffer, 2018a: 16–17, 71–7, 82–5, 117–18, 128–36, 151). Normality and productivity were similarly the main goals that Lovaas and many other behaviour analysts wanted their subjects to achieve (Chapman, 2023: 89–95; Roscigno, 2023). Lovaas summed this up in his advice to the parents of the children his programs were intended for: ‘No one has the right to be taken care of, no matter how retarded he is.… [Children] have no right to act bizarrely, many professional opinions notwithstanding. On the contrary, you have a right to expect decent behavior from your children’ (Lovaas, 1981: 4).
Similarly to Sheffer’s work on Asperger, which links the Nazi context of his work on ‘autistic psychopathy’ to the ‘dangerous power of labeling people’ more generally, it could be tempting to consider Lovaas’ violence against, and dehumanization of, autistic people as remnants of his Nazi past. However, Lovaas was 18 years old when the fascist movement he had participated in collapsed. At 21 he embarked on studies in the US. In his early 30s, working as an assistant professor at the University of Washington, he was introduced to ‘the principles of behavior analysis’ (Larsson and Wright, 2011). He was 38 when Life magazine made him famous for his brutal methods in 1965. When he was interviewed by Psychology Today in 1974, he espoused anti-intellectual views and said that ‘politics as we know it will cease to exist. Politicians are bad for you’ (Chance, 1974a). Such views align well with fascist ideology (Brevig and Figueiredo, 2002: 123, 197; Hagtvet, 2012: 118; Kershaw, 1983: 163–70; Mosse, 1981: 66), but also with the technocratic liberalism that was widespread in ‘the West’ in the early post-war era and which behaviourism has been seen as an exponent of (Carr, 2020; Chapman, 2023: 89–95).
This illustrates the difficulty of determining whether and/or how Lovaas’ Nazi past influenced his later work. It also brings to mind a major problem with Sheffer’s suggestion that the Nazi context in which Asperger developed the concept of ‘autistic psychopathy’ somehow taints autism as a diagnostic category: similar work was done a few years previously in Soviet Kyiv by Grunya Sukhareva and concurrently with Asperger by Leo Kanner in the US. Sheffer never explains how she can argue that the Nazi context of Asperger’s work taints autism as a diagnostic category, when similar concepts of autism were developed simultaneously in non-Nazi contexts. Ultimately, the purpose of this article has been to establish a correct set of facts about the teenage years of Ole Ivar Lovaas. Although the significance of these years to his later career as a pioneer of ABA interventions for autistic children is unclear, the fact that Ole Ivar Lovaas was a local leader of a fascist and collaborationist youth movement, and the son of a major Nazi propaganda official, is likely to be of interest to students of the history of autism and of behaviourism.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
