War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race, Expanded Edition

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

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 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

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 Black in this sensational book.

Paul Ranier,
Der Spiegel

FIERCE. A PRODIGIOUS FEAT OF REPORTING
.
War Against the Weak
offers a fierce, compelling, 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. A very persuasive book.

David Plotz,
Mother Jones Magazine

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

Publishers Weekly
in a Starred Review

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

Ray Olson,
Booklist

WELL-DOCUMENTED. COMPREHENSIVE.
An important, well-documented, comprehensive 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

The Books of Edwin Black

www.edwinblack.com

Illustrations

Title page.
Nazi eugenicist Ernst Rüdin, president of the International Federation of Eugenic Organizations and director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics.

Dedication.
Nazi eugenicist Dr. Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer examining the eyes of twins. His assistant, Josef Mengele, continued the experiments at Auschwitz.

Opposite Table of Contents.
Nazi eugenicist Dr. Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer examining twins for height.

Part One.
First Race Betterment Conference Banquet, held in Battle Creek, Michigan, in 1914.
Part Two.
Imprisoned children following eugenic experiments at Auschwitz.
Part Three.
Eugenics Record Office files.

Copyright © 2003, 2012 Edwin Black
Second paperback edition 2012
Printed and published in the United States
Dialog Press, Washington, DC

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a database, or other retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Cover art: Tallgrass Studios, Nancy Percich and Marcia Escobosa

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http://www.waragainsttheweak.com
. Web site addresses (URLs) were accurate as of press time. Neither the author nor the publisher is responsible for URLs that have expired or moved since the manuscript was prepared.

The Library of Congress cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

Black, Edwin

War against the weak : eugenics and America’s campaign to create a master race / by Edwin Black.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN: 1-56858-258-7 (hardcover)

1. Eugenics—United States—History 2. Sterilization (Birth Control)—United States. 3. Human reproduction—government policy—United States. 4. United States—Social policy. 5. United States—Moral conditions. I. Title.

ISBN 978-0-914153-29-0 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-914153-30-6 (ebook)

16 15 14 13 12 5 4 3 2 1

W
here do I begin to express gratitude, when so many people in so many places have lent so many hands to advance the cause of this years-long project? More than fifty researchers in fifteen cities in four countries, assisted by scores of archivists and librarians at more than one hundred institutions, combined to ingather and organize some 50,000 documents, together with hundreds of pages of translation, as well as to review hundreds of books and journals, all to collectively tear away the thickets of mystery surrounding the eugenics movement around the world. I cannot name all who need naming because of space limitations. In many cases, I do not even know them all. Many helped behind the scenes. But if great projects depend upon great efforts by a vast network, then
War Against the Weak
is greatly indebted indeed.

I must begin by thanking my corps of skilled researchers, mostly volunteers. Because the information needed for
War Against the Weak
resided in many out-of-the-way archives as well as major repositories, the challenge was to locate the right person in the right place at the right time, from the hilly back country of southern Virginia to Berlin. Recruits came from the Internet, organizational bulletin boards, word of mouth and my personal website, as well as the devoted research team involved with my previous books,
IBM and the Holocaust
and
The Transfer Agreement.
Some worked for a few days in a strategic location to extract vital information; others worked for months at a time in archives or my office.

Thanks are due to at least eight people in Germany, including Dennis Riffel, Christina Herkommer and Jakob Kort, who worked tirelessly in Berlin, Munich, Heidelberg, Koblenz and Munster at the archives and libraries of the Max Planck Institutes (successor to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes), Bundesarchiv, Heidelberg University, Münster University, the Frei University and many other locations reviewing and summarizing thousands of pages. The laser-like ability of Riffel, Herkommer and their colleagues to identify connections spanning decades between Germans and Americans was indispensable.

In London, Jane Booth, Julie Utley, Diane Utley and several others spent months checking numberless documents, reviewing pamphlets and squinting at microfiche at the Public Record Office, Wellcome Library, University College of London Archives, British Library, Cambridge and other repositories to uncover links across the Atlantic.

In New York, more than a dozen researchers including Max Gross assisted me at the New York Public Library, the archives of New York University, Columbia University, and the Planned Parenthood Foundation. In Virginia, Susan Fleming Cook, Bobby Holt and Aaron Crawford dug through special and restricted library collections, archives, little-known museums, courthouse and institutional records, as well as the files of the ACLU. In California I was assisted by Lorraine Ramsey who worked in Chico, Sacramento and the University of California at Berkeley; Joanne Goldberg at the archives of the Hoover Institution and Stanford University; and others.

No fewer than eight researchers, including Christopher Reynolds and David Keleti, spent long hours at the American Philosophical Society archives in Philadelphia, the country’s most precious eugenic resource. I owe a debt to Ashley and Jodie Hardesty who, among a team of four, scoured the valuable files of Vermont eugenicists, which in many cases were still waiting to be processed. At Truman State University in Kirksville, Missouri, I recruited a cadre of students to scrutinize thousands of pages of documents from the files of Harry Laughlin in the Pickler Memorial Library and its archive, and two of the most helpful were Benjamin Garrett and Courtney Carter. The project was also aided when attorney Charles Bradley volunteered to provide follow-up at the Rockefeller Archives.