Edith Sheffer - Asperger’s Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna

In Deep with Angie Coiro: Interviews

Show #213 | Guest: Dr. Edith Sheffer | Show Summary: Hans Asperger, for whom Asperger syndrome was named, has been celebrated for his compassionate defense of children with disabilities. Prize-winning historian Edith Sheffer’s new book, Asperger’s Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna, exposes that Asperger was not only involved in the racial policies of Hitler’s Third Reich, he was complicit in the murder of children.
Dr. Sheffer is a historian of Germany and central Europe, and a Senior Fellow at the Institute of European Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her prize-winning book Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain challenges the moral myth of the Berlin Wall, the Cold War’s central symbol — revealing how the Iron Curtain was not simply imposed by Communism, but emerged from the everyday actions of ordinary people.