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  • Asperger's Children

  • The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna
  • Written by: Edith Sheffer
  • Narrated by: Christa Lewis
  • Length: 9 hrs and 33 mins
  • 3.3 out of 5 stars (6 ratings)

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Asperger's Children

Written by: Edith Sheffer
Narrated by: Christa Lewis
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Publisher's Summary

In 1930s and 1940s Vienna, child psychiatrist Hans Asperger sought to define autism as a diagnostic category, aiming to treat those children, usually boys, he deemed capable of participating fully in society.

Depicted as a compassionate and devoted researcher, Asperger was in fact deeply influenced by Nazi psychiatry. Although he did offer individualized care to children he deemed promising, he also prescribed harsh institutionalization and even transfer to Spiegelgrund, one of the Reich's deadliest killing centers, for children with greater disabilities, who, he held, could not integrate into the community.

With sensitivity and passion, Edith Sheffer's scrupulous research reveals the heartbreaking voices and experiences of many of these children, while also illuminating a Nazi regime obsessed with sorting the population into categories, cataloging people by race, heredity, politics, religion, sexuality, criminality, and biological defects - labels that became the basis of either rehabilitation or persecution and extermination.

©2018 Edith Sheffer (P)2018 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

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Historical Fantasy

The author keeps insisting NAZI-ism is a far-right wing ideology when it is common knowledge the NAZIs are far-left. The topic of Hans Asperger is filler for the author’s hit piece on right wing politics and conservatives. The author does document how the Left treats undesirables but covers it up by blaming the Right.

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