Unfortunately, his strategy of accentuating the positive to his Nazi superiors—shaped by the knowledge that the lives of his young patients were at stake—would contribute to widespread confusion in the coming decades. On the basis of the four prototypical boys in Asperger’s thesis, many clinicians and historians have assumed that he saw only “high-functioning” children in his practice, which ended up obscuring his most important discovery. The autism that he and his colleagues learned to recognize in prewar Vienna was “not at all rare,” was found in all age groups, and had a broad range of
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