The Man Who Believed He Could Have Raised Hitler to Be a Nice Person

Åsmund Borgen Gjerde excavates the link between Ole Ivar Lovaas’s Nazi past and his UCLA-based work on “curing” autistic children.

By Åsmund Borgen GjerdeApril 10, 2025

• Science & Technology

• Biography & Autobiography

OLE IVAR LØVAAS left Norway in 1950 to become a student at Luther College in Iowa. Upon arrival in the United States, the 23-year-old changed his last name to Lovaas. After finishing a bachelor’s degree in one year, he moved to the University of Washington, training as a psychologist and receiving his PhD in 1958. He stayed there as an assistant professor for three more years, during which time he was converted from psychoanalysis to behaviorism by such colleagues as Don Baer and Sid Bijou. In 1961, he moved to UCLA where he was able to test his behaviorist theories on autistic children. His experiments culminated in a 1987 study in which Lovaas described how 47 percent of the children he had treated through interventions based on applied behavior analysis (ABA) had “recovered.” The principles of ABA are simple: children are rewarded for “good behavior” and punished for “bad behavior.” The use of interventions of this sort—sometimes extending to 40 hours per week—exploded in the wake of this study.  

For many parents and professionals, Lovaas’s results represented the best hope for “curing” autism. The autistic rights movement, emerging in the 1990s, rejected the premise, however, that curing autism was even desirable. Later, attempting to bring their rhetoric into agreement with new neurodiversity ideals, many ABA providers ceased describing recovery as the aim of their interventions. This did little to assuage critics, who were particularly troubled by two points: the reliance of ABA interventions on rewards and punishments, and the assumption that inculcating “socially appropriate behaviors,” as the 1987 study put it, was an individual and societal good. According to autistic advocates, the latter forces autistic people to conform to neurotypical normality through pernicious forms of self-suppression; some research does indeed support the notion that being subjected to ABA interventions can be harmful.

Ole Ivar Lovaas provided—through not just his experiments but also his word choices—the autistic rights movement with fodder for its struggle against ABA interventions. Case in point—in a 1974 interview with Psychology Today, he blithely declared:

You see, you start pretty much from scratch when you work with an autistic child. You have a person in the physical sense—they have hair, a nose, and a mouth—but they are not people in the psychological sense. One way to look at the job of helping autistic kids is to see it as a matter of constructing a person. You have the raw materials, but you have to build the person.

And already a decade earlier, in a 1965 article in Life magazine about Lovaas’s early experiments at UCLA, he and his assistants had been described as slapping children in the face and applying electric shocks as punishment.

This early article, incidentally, had propelled Lovaas into the limelight. While there were critics of his approach from the start, he was, for the most part, widely applauded, not least by parents of autistic children, for what they regarded as promising attempts to find a cure. And, just as importantly for the purposes of this essay, with his fame came interest in Lovaas’s personal history. In Psychology Today in 1974, Lovaas described a formative day in his life—April 9, 1940—when German soldiers first landed in Norway: “That afternoon, that very afternoon,” he recounted, “the green-colored men in their funny helmets crawled all over my valley. They were like aphids in a Garden of Eden.” According to the interviewer, Paul Chance, “the war interrupted his education for four years, but Ivar received a high-school diploma anyway.”

In 2004, Los Angeles magazine profiled Lovaas, who was still writing and teaching at UCLA despite having been a professor emeritus since 1994. According to the author, Robert Ito, “students love the class and love Lovaas, because he tells amusing stories about things like the mating habits of the stickleback or about his childhood in Norway.” This article provides more detail about Lovaas’s life prior to moving to the United States:

His father was a journalist at the local newspaper, his mother the daughter of a poor tenant farmer. When the Nazis invaded Norway in 1940, the family was forced to work as farm laborers. Lovaas would cut cabbages and turnips for ten hours a day, until his arms and legs were numb with cold.

This experience, according to the profile, would shape much of the rest of his life. “The allure of behavior therapy,” writes Ito,

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.

Toward the end of his life, Lovaas declared on several other occasions that his ideas about human behavior were shaped by his experience living under Nazi occupation. He also told Los Angeles magazine that “if [he] had gotten Hitler here at UCLA at the age of four or five […] [Lovaas] could have raised him to be a nice person. A humanitarian!” When Lovaas died in 2010, obituaries in the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, and Washington Post all described his years of forced labor under German occupation and his quip about raising Hitler to be a nice person. But what if Lovaas had always thought of Hitler as a nice person?

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In 2016, a biographical academic article about Lovaas appeared in the International Electronic Journal of Elementary Education. Its four authors had interviewed two of Lovaas’s former classmates, visited the archives of the schools he attended, and traced his parents’ lives through censuses as well as in literature on the Norwegian labor movement; Lovaas’s father, Ernst Albert Løvaas, was active in that movement until a conflict over its relationship with the Soviet Union split it into three parties in the early 1920s. The authors give a detailed account of Ole Ivar Lovaas’s school years, indicating that he was continually in school throughout the German occupation. They do not mention any forced labor, nor do they mention that their findings about Lovaas being in school throughout the occupation disproves the story Lovaas himself told about working 10-hour days as a forced farm laborer.

In 2006, the National Library of Norway began a project of digitizing all books, journals, and newspapers ever published in the country. Today, in 2025, this effort is quite close to being completed, and the Nettbiblioteket site has become an invaluable resource for scholars researching Norwegian history. The searchable database was less complete in 2016 but was already a useful tool. After reading the article in the IEJEE a few years ago, I searched Nettbiblioteket for information on Ernst Albert Løvaas. It did not take me many minutes to discover that, during the German occupation, he had been a high-ranking member of the collaborationist Nazi party Nasjonal Samling (NS, National Unity) and served as “political editor” of Norsk Artikkeltjeneste (Norwegian Article Service), a propaganda organ that distributed articles defending Nazism and the occupation, which newspapers throughout the country were forced to publish. Ernst Albert Løvaas wrote several such articles himself, including ones that were virulently antisemitic. I also found a results list from a winter sports event in 1941 for members and sympathizers of the NS youth movement; one “Ivar Løvaas” was listed as having come in fourth in a slalom race for boys between 12 and 14 years old. Ole Ivar Lovaas would turn 14 later that spring.

I then filled in an online form from the National Archive, where one can enter any name to see if it matches someone who was investigated for “national treason”—collaborating with the German occupiers—after the war. After a short while, I received notice that national treason files on both Ernst Albert Løvaas and Ole Ivar Lovaas were available and could be consulted at the archive building in Oslo. The file on Ole Ivar Lovaas revealed that he had been arrested shortly after the German capitulation for his membership in the NS youth organization. He admitted to having been a member and to attending meetings. After his police interview, he was released. In July 1945, the chief of police in Drammen, the capital of the region where Lovaas lived, decided to prosecute him for national treason. In November 1945, however, the director of public prosecutions decreed that people who had left NS prior to turning 18, or had not yet turned 18 during the war, should not be prosecuted. Ole Ivar Lovaas turned 18 on May 8, 1945, the day Germany capitulated. He said in his police interview that he had left the movement in March 1945, but there was no evidence to confirm the veracity of his claim. His case was nevertheless dropped following the decree.

Ole Ivar Lovaas’s file also contains documents from an investigation of “NS Førerskole,” an institution that educated leaders in the NS youth movement. According to these documents, Lovaas attended a six-week leadership course in the summer of 1942, at the end of which he was appointed leader of his local chapter of the NS youth movement. In March 1943, a local newspaper published an article about a recruitment meeting organized by this movement. It was led by two youngsters, one of whom was “a 15-year-old boy, Ivar Løvås.” The local branch of the movement had approximately 25 members, and Ole Ivar Lovaas was 15 years old in March 1943, which makes it very unlikely that the person referred to in the newspaper article was anyone other than the future UCLA professor.

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There is little doubt, then, that Ole Ivar Lovaas was a member of a collaborationist fascist movement. He almost certainly lied when he claimed that he and his family had been forced into farmwork during the German occupation. He may have told the truth when he told Los Angeles magazine that the Nazis taught him how “people were not inherently bad but merely conditioned to act badly by their environments,” as the journalist put it in a paraphrase of Lovaas’s words. However, considering his membership in a fascist youth movement, this appears more like an excuse than profound insight.

This is not the first time that a prominent figure in the history of autism is revealed to have lied about his connections to Nazism. The now discontinued diagnosis of “Asperger’s syndrome” owed its name to work conducted in the 1930s and ’40s by Austrian pediatrician Hans Asperger. After the war, Asperger claimed to have defended children from Nazi persecution. However, in 2010, the Austrian historian Herwig Czech revealed that he had found documents indicating that Asperger may have contributed to the murder of disabled children during the war. The subsequent decade saw further revelations and debates over Asperger’s Nazi ties. In Asperger’s Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna (2018), the American historian Edith Sheffer argues that Asperger and his work on “autistic psychopathy” (Asperger’s term) were intimately entangled with Nazi ideology. Without saying so directly, Sheffer’s book could be read as implying that the whole diagnostic category of autism was tainted by Asperger’s Nazi associations. According to a New York Times review of the book, Sheffer “wants to upend notions of autism as a legitimate diagnostic category by locating its source in Nazi notions of mental health and sickness.”

The notion, however, that the Nazi context of Asperger’s work delegitimizes autism as a diagnostic category has one inherent weakness—Asperger’s contribution to the development of autism diagnoses was relatively minor, and more important work was done in non-Nazi contexts. The spread of autism diagnoses in the early postwar era relied on work carried out concurrently to Asperger’s in Baltimore by Leo Kanner, a Jew who had left Germany the year after Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch. Similar work was carried out a few years earlier in Kyiv by Grunya Sukhareva. And when Asperger’s syndrome finally became a diagnosis and well-known cultural label in the 1980s and ’90s, this was primarily due to the work of the British psychiatrist Lorna Wing, who used Asperger’s name to support her own goal of redefining autism into a spectrum.

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When Lovaas was spotlighted by Ito in Los Angeles magazine, the lead read: “For Ivar Lovaas, UCLA’s controversial autism pioneer, a life’s work is now facing a crucial test”—through two attempts, explains the article, to replicate the results of his 1987 study, which had found that 47 percent of the children examined “achieved normal intellectual and educational functioning” after being subject to “the Lovaas method,” or “the UCLA model” of ABA intervention as it was also called. Ito, however, exaggerated the significance of these two studies. In fact, debates over the replicability of the 1987 study began shortly after its publication and are still ongoing. There have been significant criticisms of the methods Lovaas used. Many studies have produced results that point in the same direction but with wobblier numbers. Whereas many have argued that the 1987 study has not been replicated, behavior analysts tend to conclude that replication attempts support the continued use of the method, albeit without making clear statements about whether the 1987 study has indeed been replicated.

One person involved in several attempts to replicate the 1987 study is Svein Eikeseth, a psychology professor at what is now called Oslo Metropolitan University. Eikeseth was also among the authors of the 2016 biographical IEJEE article about Lovaas, which failed to mention Lovaas and his father’s Nazi past, despite going to great lengths to find Norwegian primary sources about their lives. Eikeseth trained as a behavior analyst in the United States under Lovaas himself and Don Baer at the University of Kansas. He has co-authored at least two publications with Lovaas, and when Lovaas died, Eikeseth wrote or co-wrote three different obituaries. In one of those, 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 also downgraded the electric shocks Lovaas applied in his early experiments to “mild,” and claimed Lovaas only used them to “remove serious, often life-threatening self-injurious behavior and acting out” and, in any case, stopped using them in the 1960s.

Not only fellow behavior analysts excused and minimized Lovaas’s violence. According to the 2004 Los Angeles article, in Lovaas’s early experiments, “staffers would sometimes slap a child; in extreme cases, shock treatment was administered.” Such descriptions are at odds with contemporaneous statements by Lovaas himself and first-hand observers. The 1965 Life magazine article described electric shocks used not in “extreme cases” or to “remove serious, often life-threatening self-injurious behavior and acting out” but to punish harmless acts of disobedience. And in the 1974 Psychology Today profile, Lovaas made it clear that electric shocks were still used regularly, and that “we know the shocks are painful.”

People who do not want “to know” usually find a way not to know. That has been amply shown in histories of Nazi Germany. In terms of the histories of autistic people and those who treat them, most of us have chosen not to know.

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When Hans Asperger’s Nazi ties were revealed, the debate that followed was not only about the extent of those ties, but also about their relevance to the practice of diagnosing autism in general and Asperger’s syndrome in particular. As for Lovaas, the extent of his Nazi ties are straightforward: unlike Asperger, he was a card-carrying member of a fascist party that collaborated with the German Nazi occupiers. The relevance of Lovaas’s Nazi past to his later work developing ABA interventions, however, is admittedly open to differing interpretations.

Those who work in the multibillion-dollar ABA industry will undoubtedly deny the relevance of his Nazi past. It is not far-fetched, however, to see some ideological continuity between Lovaas’s teenage years and his adulthood. Consider how Lovaas addressed parents of autistic children in his 1981 book: “No one has the right to be taken care of, no matter how retarded he is.” Children, Lovaas insisted, “have no right to act bizarrely, many professional opinions notwithstanding. On the contrary, you have a right to expect decent behavior from your children.”

The Nazi occupiers with whom Lovaas collaborated during his teenage years also believed that “retarded” people had no right to be taken care of. Hence, 200,000 disabled people were murdered between 1940 and 1945, including epileptics and those with varying degrees of mental illness and of autistic traits. Rather than murder the latter, Lovaas wanted to “train” them, with electric shocks and slaps in the face, to not be “retarded.”

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Featured image: Photo of Ole Ivar Lovaas by Michael Kelley for Los Angeles magazine, 2004. Image has been cropped.