While I’m fairly familiar with the term Asperger’s syndrome, I don’t actually know anything about the history behind it. So I was a bit shocked when I saw the cover of this book and found out that the origin of this diagnosis has its roots in Nazi Vienna.

The term “Asperger Syndrome” was popularised by Lorna Wing in 1944, who based it on Hans Asperger’s description of “Autistic Psychopathy”. She opted to change it because of the negative connotations of “psychopathy” but what that did was to remove historical context from it. The truth is, while Hans Asperger may have saved a few children from the Nazis, he was also complicit in their euthanasia programmes, sending many more children to clinics where most of them would die (a statistic in the book says that twice as many children died at one particular clinic compared to those who left alive).

While Asperger himself portrays his years in Nazi Vienna as some kind of victim or some kind of resistor, the truth is that “while knowing of the euthanasia program, Asperger publicly urged his colleagues to send children to Spiegelgrund; he participated in numerous Reich offices that sent children to Spiegelgrund; and he sent children to Spiegelgrund directly from his clinic.” If you read the book, you’ll realise just how horrible and terrifying a place Spiegelgrund was – it’s a clinic where children were abused and put to death under arbitrary decisions, where they were humiliated and dehumanised, where they couldn’t even find support among one another.

Sheffer puts together a clear history of Asperger’s career and how he ended up as someone considered “reliable” by “high ranking Nazi-Party officials and colleagues”. He might have managed not to join the Nazis officially, but he definitely knew about what they were doing. Asperger seems to have bought into their racial purity program, emphasising emotion over logic, and hence was able to send children without enough Gemüt (a German term) or would be dangerous to the future of the Volk as a whole to their deaths.

The book is full of chilling information. The chapter on Spiegelgrund is genuinely disturbing (contrast the letters the children wrote with the diagnoses they received), and so is the one about the ways boys and girls were evaluated differently. It seems that Asperger was more likely to spend time and effort on boys and see their answers as better, while girls were more readily dismissed and generally not even thought of as autistic. Even today, boys are more likely to be diagnosed as autistic (one statistic say that boys are three times as likely to receive a diagnosis of autism) and it is disturbing to see how an idea that started with very strict gender ideas during Nazi rule is still influential today.

While the book says that “[t]he aim of this history is not to indict any particular figure, nor is it to undermine the positive discussion of neurodiversity that Asperger’s work has inspired”, it’s pretty clear that Asperger’s actions and inactions have led to the deaths of many children.  He may have saved a few lives, but it is clear that he is no hero – at best, he is someone complicit in the Nazi’s euthanasia programs while not being the actual architect or actually killing the children.

This is an important book for anyone interested in neurodiversity and the history of it. Apart from the history of Asperger, Sheffer also includes information about the development of the Nazi’s eugenics/euthanasia programmes, including the evolution of the word gemüt, that will help you understand how Asperger formed his theories of what is now Asperger’s Syndrome.

Featured Image: Photo from Canva Library