10/05/2026
I named my son after a N**i doctor and I didn't know it until I read this book, and I have not been able to sleep right since.
That's the sentence that came into my head when I finished "Asperger's Children: The Origins of Autism in N**i Vienna" by Edith Sheffer, and I know that sounds dramatic, but if you have a child on the spectrum, or you know a child who was ever called Asperger's, you need to read this.
I picked up this book because my nephew was diagnosed two years ago and my sister said, "They said Asperger's, but they don't use that word anymore." I wanted to understand why. Edith Sheffer, a historian and a mother, wanted to understand the same thing.
What she found in the archives in Vienna will break your heart.
We all grew up thinking Hans Asperger was a kind pediatrician who protected autistic children, a Schindler of sorts. Sheffer shows you, with letters, case files, and N**i medical records, that the story is not that simple. In 1930s and 40s Vienna, Hans Asperger worked inside the Third Reich's child euthanasia system. He was part of a clinic that decided which children were "educable" and worth saving and which children were "uneducable" and sent to Spiegelgrund, a killing center where hundreds of disabled children were murdered.
Sheffer follows two groups of children. The ones Asperger called his "little professors," the verbal, clever boys he thought could be useful to the Reich, he protected. The other children, the more disabled ones, the ones he labeled as lacking "Gemüt" or social feeling, he referred. He signed the papers.
It's not an easy book. I read it as an auntie, as a mom, as someone who loves a kid who stims and doesn't make eye contact sometimes, and I had to stop every chapter.
These are the lessons that have been sitting heavy on my chest since I closed it:
1. A diagnosis is never just a diagnosis, it has a history. We think of Asperger's as just a word on a form, but words come from somewhere. This word was born in N**i Vienna where a doctor's definition of who had "value" decided who lived and who died. In 2013, we stopped using Asperger's and folded it into autism spectrum disorder, and now I understand why that matters. Names matter because they tell us who we choose to see as human.
2. The danger of deciding which children are "useful." Asperger saved the children he thought could become productive citizens — the ones good at math, the little professors. He did not save the others. It made me think about how we still do this today in our schools and churches and playgrounds. How we value the "high-functioning" kids and pity or hide the others. Sheffer made me check my own heart. Do I celebrate my nephew only when he's being "smart"? Do I value all of him?
3. We must listen to the children who were not allowed to speak. The most powerful part of this book is not about Asperger at all, it's about the children — Ernst, Erwin, Anni, and so many others whose files Sheffer found. Children who were labeled defiant or feebleminded, who were killed because they didn't fit. She gives them their names back. As a Facebook mama who posts about my kids, it wrecked me to think of mothers in Vienna who were told their children were being sent to a nice clinic and never saw them again.
If you are a parent, a teacher, a therapist, if you ever used the word Asperger's with love — please read "Asperger's Children." It's not about canceling history, it's about telling the truth so we can do better. I finished it and I looked at my nephew and I said thank you for exactly who you are, not who the world thinks you should be to be worth saving.
