Thank you for sharing that fragment of your family history. Bettelheim’s advice sounds ominous, though I don’t, of course, know what your brother’s experience was like. However, shutting people away in institutions is generally an admission that we don’t have a good solution for dealing with them. Even today, in the UK, many people with severe autism are effectively imprisoned in care homes that offer inadequate care. Abuse within the ‘care’ system still occurs. I’m aware of one journalist in particular who writes on this issue: http://www.ianbirrell.com/tag/autism/.

I dare to hope that your brother didn’t suffer as some have, but being removed from your home at 5 years old is a suffering itself, whatever the reason, good or bad.

My brother was institutionalized from the age of 11 until the institutons closed and he now lives in a group home.

It’s an interesting point you raise about the attitude of countries beyond Germany to refugees and particularly Jews. The enormity of what the Nazis did tends to obscure the complicity of the wider world in their prejudice. Hannah Arendt talks about this in Eichmann in Jerusalem, noting that far fewer Jews died in Denmark and Bulgaria than in other Nazi occupied countries. That was purely because the local populations refused to cooperate with, and actively opposed, the rounding up and incarceration of their neighbours. In some countries the locals were enthusiastic participants. My nation, the United Kingdom, has very fine thoughts of itself in relation to WWII, but I think this has been enabled by the fact that when the Nazis steamrolled the Allied armies in the early stages, they were prevented from occupying the UK, as they did the rest of Europe, by the sea. Had Britain been occupied, its inhabitants would have faced some hard moral choices, and there’s no guarantee that most would have made good ones.