The current research is going in the opposite direction on Asperger that Silberman in the linked NPR piece asserts. Silberman seems to be falling into older historiographies that contended the medical profession was less complicit and lass Nazified outside of a few hardcore believers. Most of this narrative originated with German medical professionals themselves in the postwar period who were adamant that their actions were in keeping with medical ethics and their personal ethos. This narrative has crumbled under the weight of detailed scholarship over the past twenty years which has shown a degree of self-coordination among medical professionals and greater radicalization of the professions as Nazism offered the promise of a research unrestrained by ethics.

In the case of Asperger, the historian Edith Sheffer has done a lot of research into his work and how he was complicit with the regime. Her book, Asperger's Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna is set to come out next year and she has given various lectures and interviews showing his engagement with Nazism. Although it is difficult to say exactly what her research has uncovered given Norton still has not printed it, there are signs it does not paint a pretty picture of Asperger. For example, she gave an interview in Austrian Studies Newsmagazine (pdf warning) and this exchange is noteworthy:

ASN: His career began in 1937. The Nazis took control of Vienna in 1938,
and then—

ES: He wrote that there is a group of children whom he’d call autistic psychopaths, which in German psychiatry is a pejorative term for children who might grow up to be criminals. It was not a neutral term; his clinic had been using the term autism before, but he was the one to call it a psychopathy, where they had meant it as a descriptive, neutral term. In 1938, he described children as autistic psychopaths who were contained within themselves. He was still using non-normative language, but he was observing a difference. In 1940, he used language of abnormality to describe these children, saying that they have an emotional defect. Because of this, he said, they don’t form relationships. In 1944, his language became progressively sharper and he spoke about children who fall outside of “the greater organism of the Volk.” That phrase was common in Nazi ideology and writing, so you can really see a rapid transition to fascist language from 1937 to 1944.

ASN: In light of that I find it very interesting that, as you’ve speculated, he wrote his diagnoses in increasingly Nazi rhetoric in order to keep his job.

ES: Not to keep his job, to get a promotion! He was 26 when he was hired at the Curative Education Clinic. Franz Hamburger was his mentor, and he was a Nazi while it was still illegal in Austria. He was a hardcore radical. The children’s hospital was world renowned; it was run by Clemens von Pirquet; and it was a very liberal institution with a lot of Jewish doctors. Hamburger assumed directorship of the children’s hospital, purged liberals and Jews, and installed his own people. Asperger was one of his first hires. Asperger was fresh out of medical school and was very grateful for the job. After two years, Franz Hamburger made him head of the clinic at the age of 28, over and above doctors who had been working there for years, even decades. This speaks volumes about how politically reliable Hamburger thought Asperger was. If you look at Hamburger’s students, they were all fervent Nazis and involved in the euthanasia program. He had a cohort of about nine fellows, and if you go down the list, it’s really striking what they were up to, and what was involved in medical experiments. One wound up running Spiegelgrund, the child and adult euthanasia center in Vienna.

ASN:When Asperger and other doctors recommended that children be sent to Spiegelgrund for observation, did they know that this meant euthanasia?

ES: Yes. In my talk, I showed the quote from Ernst Illing that said that a lot of institutions would like to rid themselves of children that they believed incurable and would send them to Spiegelgrund with the knowledge that this was happening. I didn’t get into the details of this, but curative education, with the purging of Jewish and liberal psychoanalysts, really became the main field of psychiatry in the Reich, especially in Vienna. Asperger cofounded the Society of Viennese Curative Education with Hamburger and Jekelius, who ran Spiegelgrund; he was one of three partners to found this thing; he was second vice president. Jekelius gave an inaugural address that is very explicit about getting rid of the ballast that’s in our institutions, really bordering on murderous sentiment. It is speculated that this society was to coordinate child development practices in the city. It was supposed to unify education, medical treatment, and psychiatric treatment, and so all of these people were to come to their assemblies and listen to these psychiatrists talk. It is suspected that this was a mechanism to disseminate a euthanasia directive, to get these people to then refer children to Spiegelgrund and that that would be verbally what was conveyed in the talks.

Now the caveat is that it remains to be seen if Sheffer's research stands up once the book is available, but Sheffer's assertions are pretty damning and her prior work has been well-reviewed. Moreover, this portrait of Asperger is very much in line with the current state of research on medical profession during the Third Reich. The weight of this scholarship means that to assert a German doctor behaved both ethically and against the regime there is a high burden of proof needed. The NPR piece really falls short on these grounds.