NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity

by Steve Silberman

In Mein Kampf, the manifesto that Hitler dictated to his deputy Rudolf Hess while incarcerated in Landsberg, the future Führer put forced sterilization at the core of his vision of a new society while framing it as a compassionate defense of the lives of children yet unborn. The state, he wrote, “must declare unfit for propagation all who are in any way visibly sick or who have inherited a disease and can therefore pass it on, and put this into actual practice . . . Those who are physically and mentally unhealthy and unworthy must not perpetuate their suffering in the body of their children.” A 1913 textbook by Géza Hoffman called Die Rassenhygiene in den Vereinigten Staaten von Nordamerika (Racial Hygiene in the United States) became the seminal guide to applied eugenics for German biology students. As the National Socialist party rose to power in the 1930s, the body of American eugenic law became the blueprint for Nazi policies to defend Nordic—rechristened “Aryan”—Blut und Rasse (“blood and race”) from dysgenic influences.