War Against The Weak

View the intense 2-minute trailer - play loud

War Against the Weak is the gripping chronicle documenting how American corporate philanthropies launched a national campaign of ethnic cleansing in the United States, helped found and fund the Nazi eugenics of Hitler and Mengele — and then created the modern movement of "human genetics."

In the first three decades of the 20th Century, American corporate philanthropy combined with prestigious academic fraud to create the pseudoscience eugenics that institutionalized race politics as national policy. The goal: create a superior, white, Nordic race and obliterate the viability of everyone else. How? By identifying so-called "defective" family trees and subjecting them to legislated segregation and sterilization programs. The victims: poor people, brown-haired white people, African Americans, immigrants, Indians, Eastern European Jews, the infirm and really anyone classified outside the superior genetic lines drawn up by American raceologists. The main culprits were the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harriman railroad fortune, in league with America's most respected scientists hailing from such prestigious universities as Harvard, Yale and Princeton, operating out of a complex at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island. The eugenic network worked in tandem with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the State Department and numerous state governmental bodies and legislatures throughout the country, and even the U.S. Supreme Court. They were all bent on breeding a eugenically superior race, just as agronomists would breed better strains of corn. The plan was to wipe away the reproductive capability of the weak and inferior. Ultimately, 60,000 Americans were coercively sterilized — legally and extra-legally. Many never discovered the truth until decades later. Those who actively supported eugenics include America's most progressive figures: Woodrow Wilson, Margaret Sanger, and Oliver Wendell Holmes who ruled on the infamous Carrie Buck trial and declared "three generations of imbeciles is enough."

American eugenic crusades proliferated into a worldwide campaign, and in the 1920s came to the attention of Adolf Hitler. Under the Nazis, American eugenic principles were applied without restraint, careening out of control into the Reich's infamous genocide. During the pre-War years, American eugenicists openly supported Germany's program. The Rockefeller Foundation financed the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute and the work of its central racial scientists. Once WWII began, Nazi eugenics turned from mass sterilization and euthanasia to genocidal murder. One of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute doctors in the program financed by the Rockefeller Foundation was Josef Mengele who continued his research in Auschwitz, making daily eugenic reports on twins. After the world recoiled from Nazi atrocities, the American eugenics movement — its institutions and leading scientists — renamed and regrouped under the banner of an enlightened science called human genetics.

THE BEST BOOK ON EUGENICS. Edwin Black has written what may well be the best book ever published about the American eugenics movement and the horrific events it spawned. Combining exhaustive research, a very readable style, and just the right touch of moral outrage, Black splendidly conveys the evil depth and breadth of eugenics philosophy, the pseudo-science and social theory that unleashed a half-century of war against society's most vulnerable citizens.

Wesley Smith
National Review

COMPELLING WITH THE ZEAL OF AN AVENGER. Investigative journalist Edwin Black compellingly argues that the ethnic-cleansing movement that culminated in Nazi Germany's death camps during World War II was the realization of a particularly ugly American dream. Black, whose mother lived under Nazi rule in Poland, writes here with the zeal of an avenger,

Gregory Mott
Washington Post Book World

A BOMBSHELL. In this bombshell of investigative journalism, Black reveals that eugenics was extensive, systematic, well-funded, and supported by major political and intellectual leaders; perhaps most startling, it directly inspired the rise of Nazism in Hitler’s Germany … This chilling and well-researched book is highly recommended.

Gregg Sapp
Library Journal

CHILLING. Chilling in its exposure of the shameless racism, class prejudice and cruelties of eugenic attitudes and practices in the United States.

Daniel Kevles
New York Times Book Review

SCARY AND NECESSARY. Edwin Black is a dangerous man. He tells us things we don’t want to hear. His groundbreaking new book, War Against the Weak...is a scary and necessary book.

Adrienne Miller
Esquire Magazine

SHOCKING AND GRIPPING. An impressive job, and the resulting story is at once shocking and gripping.

Starred Review
Publishers Weekly

IMPRESSIVE. Impressive, probably the history of eugenics for the foreseeable future.

Ray Olson
Booklist

AMBITIOUS. RICHLY DETAILED. War Against the Weak is a much more ambitious undertaking. Edwin Black is on a mission ... He's written a serious, thoroughly documented study. The scope of the book is impressive—it spans 150 years and reaches into the archives of four countries—and it contains some remarkable new data and sharp insights … Black has the right credentials to "tear away the thickets of mystery surrounding the eugenics movement around the world." … The author brings a critical sensibility to his work, morally anchored in his parents' harrowing escape from the Nazis.

Tony Platt
Los Angeles Times Book Review

FIERCE. A PRODIGIOUS FEAT OF REPORTING War Against the Weak offers a fierce, compelling, overlong account of how American ideas helped inspire -- if that's the right word -- Hitler's Reich. … War Against the Weak is well told and extraordinarily sad. It represents a prodigious feat of reporting, as Black has trolled every archive and read every letter (and published excerpts from far too many of them). And it is a very persuasive book.

David Plotz
Mother Jones Magazine

SENSATIONAL. At the beginning of the last century, American scientists, politicians and livestock breeders decided to "create a superior Nordic race." Sixty-thousand men and women, most of them poor or of color, underwent compulsory sterilization - an idea that stimulated the Nazi's eugenics program. The full extent of this medical crime has been described by American journalist Edwin Black in a sensational book.

Paul Ranier
Der Spiegel

HAIR-RAISER AND EYE OPENER. A hair-raiser and an eye-opener ... contains details so vivid and horrid that one can hardly believe them or bear to read them. ... This is an important book, filled with little-known facts about how some of our most esteemed institutions and professionals have funded and practiced very bad science, if it was science at all, and how this pseudoscience permeated much of the world's thinking and led to the atrocities of a world war.

Nancy Schapiro
St. Louis Post-Dispatch

MOST CHILLING. War Against the Weak is filled with tale after tale of arrogance, ignorance, and cruelty — accounts that Black wisely allows the eugenicists to relate in their own words…. Perhaps most chilling, though, were the ways in which American eugenicists influenced their German counterparts.

Carl Zimmer
Discovery

MINDBLOWING. Mindblowing ... Combining gripping narrative with corroborating facts and figures, Black connects the dots to what many know, at best, piecemeal: that the racist American pseudoscience of eugenics, pioneered in the first three decades of the 20th century, provided the basis of Hitler's quest for a so-called Master Race.

Cynthia Dettelbach
Cleveland Jewish News

WELL-DOCUMENTED. COMPREHENSIVE. An important, well-documented, comprehensive exposition of a story not known to most Americans, about a perversion of the pursuit of knowledge in the interest of race and social superiority.

Steve Courtney
Hartford Courant

CHILLING AND THOROUGHLY RESEARCHED. Chilling and thoroughly researched … it is a book whose message must be made known … for those who say “It can’t happen here.”

Mark Lewis
Tampa Tribune

VALUABLE CONTRIBUTION. It is apparent from Black’s research that American eugenicists contributed to Nazi racial hygiene policy. The Nazi experiments with X-rays to sterilize their victims, euthanasia and even the gas chamber were all at one time oranother proposed by American eugenicists as a means of eliminating the unfit from American life. To the extent that Black’s research documents this connection between early 20th-century eugenics policy and its extreme escalation by the Nazis in the death camps, the book is a valuable contribution to our understanding of the evolution of the Holocaust.

Jack Fischel
The Forward

SOBERING ACCOUNT. War Against the Weak is a sobering account of what can happen and has happened even in a free country like the United States, and is an important historical witness as we move into a new genetic age. It will surprise many readers to know what has happened in just the past century, but Black's account is fair and well documented throughout. It is, at times, very difficult to read, particularly in the sections regarding the Nazi experiments, but it is a valuable book for anyone interested in the history of eugenics and genetic discrimination and is a much-needed resource forthose seeking to prevent such discrimination in the future.

Amy DeBaets
Ethics and Medicine