Asperger, in other words, was a key node in the system of sorting who would live and who would be murdered, an apparatus that would soon be expanded into a murder machinery capable of killing millions of people who did not fit the Aryan ideal in other ways. For Sheffer, this taints not only the diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome but also, potentially, the much broader autism spectrum diagnosis that Asperger did so much to shape. Based on these writings, it clearly had far less to do with medical science than with fascist thought: the Nazis required submission to a supremacist groupthink in order
...more
