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Asperger's Children

The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna

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Asperger's Children

By: Edith Sheffer
Narrated by: Christa Lewis
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About this listen

In 1930s and 1940s Vienna, child psychiatrist Hans Asperger sought to define autism as a diagnostic category, aiming to treat those children, usually boys, he deemed capable of participating fully in society.

Depicted as a compassionate and devoted researcher, Asperger was in fact deeply influenced by Nazi psychiatry. Although he did offer individualized care to children he deemed promising, he also prescribed harsh institutionalization and even transfer to Spiegelgrund, one of the Reich's deadliest killing centers, for children with greater disabilities, who, he held, could not integrate into the community.

With sensitivity and passion, Edith Sheffer's scrupulous research reveals the heartbreaking voices and experiences of many of these children, while also illuminating a Nazi regime obsessed with sorting the population into categories, cataloging people by race, heredity, politics, religion, sexuality, criminality, and biological defects - labels that became the basis of either rehabilitation or persecution and extermination.

©2018 Edith Sheffer (P)2018 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books 20th Century Europe History & Commentary Mental Health Military Psychology War Colonial Period

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Profile Image for Milzy

A great nonfiction book

Such amazing but scary history for the disabled community! Would 100% recommend you to listen and read it!!

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Profile Image for zico

Nazism and Psychiatry a fascinating Insight

This book is a fascinating expose of the impact on Nazism on medicine and psychiatry and the involvement of Hans Asperger in the Nazi Euthanasia program and the treatment of disabled and socially undesirable children in the Third Reich. The writer goes out of her way to give Hans Asperger a fair hearing but concludes he was complicit in the Nazi Eugenics program and indirectly sent children to their deaths. Thinking about this it was interesting how Nazism impacted every segment of society and how Asperger was a conformist in Nazi society who appeared to be most interested in advancing his career in line with prevailing Nazi ideology concerning the worth of certain individuals in society. The various conflicts are discussed in detail, especially how Asperger favourably treated some autistic children he thought redeemable and how he wrote off those he thought irredeemable. It was interesting he developed a strong gender bias in this respect. This is a fascinating listen with respect to how intelligent individuals can be corrupted by a totalitarian state and how societal values such as those that existed in Nazi Germany can overide an individuals natural sense of morality. Asperger reflects the complexity of how someone (in this case a medical professional) might behave in a society like Nazi Germany and how it is not all black and white. It seems Asperger was not a committed Nazi killer but was sucked in to the accepted "mainstream" Nazi ideas of how individuals must be subservient to the greater collective good and how defective individuals should be removed from society. In this sense the book has chilling lessons for the future with respect to how easy it is for the state to convince its citizens that some individuals have no worth. Well worth a read/listen!

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Profile Image for Andrew

frightening but awesome

i really enjoyed this book although startling and downright evil in places it gave a great insight into the horror of childhood psychology in the nazi era

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