Inside Jacket

The explosive true story of America's century-long attempt to create a master race -- by the author of the New York Times bestseller IBM and the Holocaust.

In War Against the Weak, award-winning investigative journalist Edwin Black connects the crimes of the Nazis to a pseudoscientific American movement of the early twentieth century called eugenics. Based on selective breeding of human beings, eugenics began in laboratories on Long Island, but it ended in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. Ultimately, over 60,000 "unfit" Americans were coercively sterilized, a third of them after Nuremberg declared such practices crimes against humanity.

It started in 1904, when a small group of U.S. scientists launched an ambitious new race-based movement that was championed by our nation's social, political, and academic elite. Funded by America's leading corporate philanthropies, such as the Carnegie Institution and the Rockefeller Foundation, and entrenched in classrooms across America, eugenicists sought to eliminate social "undesirables. Their methods: forced sterilization, human breeding programs, marriage prohibition, and even passive euthanasia. Perhaps more shocking -- eugenics was sanctioned by the Sup0reme Court. Cruel and racist laws were enacted in twenty-seven U.S. states, and the supporters of eugenics included such progressive thinkers as Woodrow Wilson, Margaret Sanger, and Oliver Wendell Holmes.

The victims of eugenics were poor white people from New England to California, immigrants from across Europe, Blacks, Jews, Mexicans, Native Americans, epileptics, alcoholics, petty criminals, the mentally ill, and anyone else who did not resemble the blond and blue-eyed Nordic ideal the eugenics movement glorified. Through international academic exchanges, American eugenicists exported the movement worldwide. It eventually caught the fascination of Adolf Hitler.

To write War Against the Weak, Edwin Black led a team of fifty researchers in dozens of archives in four countries, generating some 50,000 documents. In this rigorous, comprehensive, brilliantly told story that spans a century, readers will discover the chilling truth of how the scientific rationales that drove Nazi doctors were first concocted by "scientists" at the Carnegie Institution in New York; how the Rockefeller Foundation's massive financial grants to German scientists culminated in Mengele's heinous experiments at Auschwitz; how, after World War II, eugenics was reborn as human genetics; and why confronting the history of eugenics is essential to understanding the implications of the Human Genome Project and twenty-first-century genetic engineering.

Edwin Black is the award-winning and New York Times-bestselling author of IBM and the Holocaust and The Transfer Agreement, as well as a novel, Format C:. He lives near Washington, D.C. His website is www.edwinblack.com.

Jacket design by Archie Ferguson

Cover photo by Philip Gendreau © Bettmann/Corbis

Author photo by Lloyd Wolf

Back Cover:

"Edwin Black has again written a unique and important book. Until now eugenics in the U.S. and in Germany have not been analyzed together. One assumed they had little in common. This was not so. Their joint past was bloody and their future is disquieting."
-- BENNO MULLER-HILL, Institute of Genetics, Cologne University, author of Murderous Science

"A gripping account of the evils of eugenics. Edwin Black brings home the misery inflicted by the eugenic zealots."
-- PAUL WEINDLING, Department of History, Oxford Brookes University, author of Health, Race and German Politics Between National Unification and Nazism, 1870-1940

"Black has conclusively shown that Nazi eugenics was derived from notions espoused by a self-chosen American elite --- Hitler and his fanatics further perverted this iniquity in their attempt to exterminate all Gypsies and all Jews, whom they considered racially inferior -- that is eugenically inferior. The American antecedents in this book were a revelation to me."
-- ROBERT WOLFE, former chief archivist for captured German records, National Archives, Washington, D.C.

"A triumph of historical research and storytelling. It provides new information and insights on the pseudoscience that brought humanity to the brink of creating a monstrous master race."
-- J. DAVID SMITH, provost and senior vice chancellor, University of Virginia-Wise, author of The Sterilization of Carrie Buck

"[Black] carefully documents the links of the American eugenics movement to the horror of the crimes of Nazi Germany ... Black's careful scholarship will have to make [readers] reconsider the innocence of the acceptance of any simple racist notions by elites."
-- WILLIAM E. SPRIGGS, executive director, National Urban League Institute for Opportunity and Equality

"An astonishing history ... and a gripping narrative. This is a must-read."
-- ABRAHAM H. FOXMAN, national director, Anti-Defamation League

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