We recoil in horror from Joseph Mengele’s and the Nazis’ barbaric Holocaust experiments, but how many know his work was based on the principles of the American eugenics movement? Based on Edwin Black’s book of the same name, War Against the Weak traces the efforts of American eugenicists to breed a Nordic master race through the elimination of those deemed “unfit.” With an eerie blend of both historical and first-hand accounts, the film makes chilling connections between Ivy League scientists funded by the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Harriman Railroad fortune and German racial scientists at the William Kaiser Institute; between mass sterilization and sometimes even euthanasia in the U.S. and Hitler’s horrifying genocide. As one Nazi asks, “What is the difference?” With questions of genetic engineering closer at hand than ever, War Against the Weak is not just fascinating history—it’s timely warning.

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