"Some laud Asperger’s language about the 'special abilities' of children on the 'most favorable' end of his autistic 'range'..."

"...speculating that he applied his diagnosis to protect them from Nazi eugenics — a kind of psychiatric Schindler’s list. But this was in keeping with the selective benevolence of Nazi psychiatry; Asperger also warned that 'less favorable cases' would 'roam the streets' as adults, 'grotesque and dilapidated.' Words such as these could be a death sentence in the Third Reich. And in fact, dozens of children whom Asperger evaluated were killed.... At least 5,000 children perished in around 37 'special wards.'... Killings were done in the youths’ own beds, as nurses issued overdoses of sedatives until the children grew ill and died, usually of pneumonia. Asperger worked closely with the top figures in Vienna’s euthanasia program.... He would probably have been a footnote in the history of autism research had it not been for Lorna Wing, a British psychiatrist who tracked down Asperger’s 1944 article on autistic psychopathy. She thought it lent important context to the narrower definition of autism then in use, and by the early ’80s, 'Asperger syndrome,' and the idea of a broader autism 'spectrum,' had entered the medical lexicon.... Naming a disorder after someone is meant to credit and commend, and Asperger merited neither.:

From "The Nazi History Behind ‘Asperger’" by Edith Sheffer, author of "Asperger’s Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna."