The National Book Review
In her original, compelling new book, Stanford University history professor Sheffer establishes a link between autism and Nazism and provides a new way to understand the Third Reich, and the diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder. Impeccably researched through medical notes and contemporaneous accounts, Sheffer’s book focuses on pediatrician Hans Asperger, once championed for his work with children lacking social skills, who absorbed the Nazi regime’s obsession with purity and perfection. Psychiatry and “sociability” became categories of persecution, and Sheffer, in well-documented detail, relates how Asperger sent “inferior children” to a Vienna clinic where the treatment was euthanasia.