War Against The Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race

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—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, author Edwin Black reveals that eugenics was extensive, systematic, well-funded, and supported by major political and intellectual leaders. Perhaps most startling, eugenics directly inspired the rise of Nazism in Hitler’s Germany … This chilling and well-researched book is highly recommended.
–Gregg Sapp, Library Journal

UNIQUE AND DISQUIETING. Edwin Black has again written a unique and important book. Until now eugenics in the US 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 Müller-Hill, Institute of Genetics, Cologne University, Germany, author, Murderous Science

A BLOCKBUSTER. Edwin Black has written a phenomenal book in War Against the Weak. Black has taken all the skeletons from America’s eugenics history out of the closet and exposed them at a time when advances in genetics are leading some scientists down a similar path. At times I was reading the book with my jaw on the ground, astonished to read the racist and anti-Semitic views of scientific luminaries. The fact that “American eugenics had always sought a global solution” was a chilling statement suggesting that the seeds of eugenics practiced so brutally in Nazi Germany were planted firmly in the United States decades earlier. Quite simply, War Against the Weak is a blockbuster.
– S. Jay Olshansky, School of Public Health, University of Illinois at Chicago; associate editor, Social Biology (successor to Eugenical News)


War Against The Weak is a gripping that chronicle documents 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.” Some 60,000 Americans were sterilized under laws in 27 states.

This expanded edition includes two new essays on state eugenic programs in North Carolina and Connecticut.


Several reviewers have attempted to cast doubt on the facts and conclusions presented in War Against the Weak. When their statements were challenged, they issued public retractions. Here are some—but not all—of those retractions.


War Against The Weak is available from the author (optionally autographed), Amazon, Amazon-CA, Amazon-UK, B&N, and other fine booksellers worldwide. Investigative journalist and historian Edwin Black is the author of Banking on Baghdad, BP and the Redline Agreement, The Farhud, Financing the Flames, IBM and the Holocaust, Internal Combustion, Nazi Nexus, The Plan, The Transfer Agreement, War Against the Weak, and a 1999 novel, Format C: