Asperger's Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna
by Edith Sheffer
This is a serious work of history, and it deserves to be approached as one. Published by W. W. Norton in 2018, Asperger's Children is historian Edith Sheffer's account of Hans Asperger — the Viennese pediatrician whose name became attached to a diagnostic category still in wide use — and his role in Nazi-era Vienna's child "euthanasia" program.
Content note: this book deals directly with the murder of disabled children under the Nazi regime, including detailed historical documentation of the killing center Am Spiegelgrund. It is not an easy read, and it isn't meant to be.
Drawing on newly available clinic records, Sheffer argues that Asperger — long remembered as a compassionate advocate for children with what he called "autistic psychopathy" — knowingly referred children he judged "untreatable" to Am Spiegelgrund, one of the regime's deadliest child-killing centers, while working to shape more "promising" children into productive citizens by the Reich's standards. Her broader thesis connects this history to the Nazi concept of Gemüt, a demanded sense of communal belonging, arguing that the diagnostic distinctions which eventually fed into the modern autism spectrum were shaped inside that ideological framework.
It's worth knowing that this thesis is genuinely contested. The book prompted real debate among historians and autism researchers — it was widely covered (including prompting fresh public discussion about the use of "Asperger's" as a diagnostic term), but other scholars have published detailed rebuttals arguing that Sheffer selectively quotes and decontextualizes Asperger's writings, and that his own case notes show more ambivalence and compassion than the book credits him with. Sheffer is an established historian — her prior book, Burned Bridge, covered Cold War Germany — and this isn't a fringe work, but it's also not the final, uncontested word on Asperger's life.
I'd recommend it to readers with a serious interest in the history of medicine, the history of autism as a diagnostic category, or Nazi-era medical ethics, and I'd recommend reading it alongside some of the critical responses to Sheffer's argument rather than taking it as settled. This isn't a casual read, in subject matter or in the scholarly debate surrounding it — go in prepared for both.
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