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The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna
by Edith Sheffer
A groundbreaking exploration of the chilling history behind an increasingly common diagnosis.
Hans Asperger, the pioneer of autism and Asperger syndrome in Nazi Vienna, has been celebrated for his compassionate defense of children with disabilities. But in this groundbreaking book, prize-winning historian Edith Sheffer exposes that Asperger was not only involved in the racial policies of Hitler's Third Reich, he was complicit in the murder of children.
As the Nazi regime slaughtered millions across Europe during WWII, it sorted people according to race, religion, behavior, and physical condition for either treatment or elimination. Nazi psychiatrists targeted children with different kinds of minds - especially those thought to lack social skills - claiming the Reich had no place for them. Asperger and his colleagues endeavored to mold certain "autistic" children into productive citizens, while transferring others they deemed untreatable to Spiegelgrund, one of the Reich's deadliest child-killing centers.
In the first comprehensive history of the links between autism and Nazism, Sheffer uncovers how a diagnosis common today emerged from the atrocities of the Third Reich. With vivid storytelling and wide-ranging research, Asperger's Children will move readers to rethink how societies assess, label, and treat those diagnosed with disabilities.
"Starred Review. This is a revelatory, haunting biography of a gifted practitioner who chose to fall in line with the Nazi regime and the far-reaching consequences of that choice, for his own patients and for those still using and being labeled with the diagnostic concepts he originated." - Publisher's Weekly
"A compelling picture of the evils of the Nazi regime and of the perversion of Nazi psychiatry." - Kirkus
"A tragic yet thought-provoking and extensively researched account that vividly portrays the child victims. This remains a cautionary tale of the influences on diagnoses and how dangerous they can be." - Library Journal
"This book is sensational, although its author does not seek sensation. It is a careful work of history, connecting the career of a physician with the intellectual, medical, and political contexts of Austria in the 1930s and 1940s...In restoring history to psychology, Sheffer helps us to understand why we classify our children the way we do, and helps us to ask, as we must, just what kind of world we are making for them." - Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny and Bloodlands
"Asperger's Children brings conceptual clarity and badly needed historical depth to a contemporary topic of ever-widening resonance and concern. Her careful and illuminating treatment deserves the fullest of public attention." - Geoff Eley, Karl Pohrt Distinguished University Professor of Contemporary History at University of Michigan and author of Nazism as Fascism
"This gripping book is a valuable contribution to the relatively neglected history of Austria in the Third Reich, and perhaps more important, to the inadequacies of medical diagnosis." - Michael Burleigh, author of The Third Reich: A New History and The Best of Times, The Worst of Times: A History of Now
"With insightful, meticulous historical research Sheffer uncovers how, under Hitler's regime, the profession of psychiatry became the eyes and ears of the Third Reich. This important book should be read by anyone interested in psychology, psychiatry, or medicine, so that we learn from history and do not repeat its terrifying mistakes." - Simon Baron-Cohen, director of the Autism Research Centre, Cambridge University; author of Zero Degrees of Empathy: A New Theory of Human Cruelty
"Meticulously documented, and chilling in its detail, Asperger's Childrenreveals the consequences of the most extreme abuses of clinical power and authority. In the current age of neurodiversity, this essential work will help to ensure that the human rights of people with disabilities will never be disregarded again." - Barry M. Prizant, PhD, author of Uniquely Human: A Different Way of Seeing Autism
"In what will now be considered the definitive study of Asperger and his relationship to the most nefarious aspects of Nazi eugenics, one of our most original historians has laid out the case against our idealizing of any physician without truly understanding their embeddedness in the complex scientific and political world of their time. An important, well-written, and extremely timely book." - Sander L. Gilman, author of Seeing the Insane
This information about Asperger's Children was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Edith Sheffer is a historian of Germany and central Europe, and a Senior Fellow at the Institute of European Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
Sheffer's prize-winning Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain, challenges the moral myth of the Berlin Wall, the Cold War's central symbol -- revealing how the Iron Curtain was not simply imposed by Communism, but emerged from the everyday actions of ordinary people.
Asperger's Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna investigates Hans Asperger's creation of the autism diagnosis in the Third Reich, and is forthcoming in May 2018. It examines Nazi psychiatry's emphasis on social spirit and Asperger's involvement in the euthanasia program that killed children considered to be disabled.
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