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

by Edwin Black

As Hitler’s divisions smashed through Europe, his eugenic ideal would be enforced not only against those in Germany, but also against those in conquered or dominated countries. In country after country, Hitler rounded up the defective Jews and other subhumans, systematically making one region after another judenrein—Jew free. As Hess insisted, “National Socialism is nothing but applied biology.”152 For decades, Hitler’s bloody regime, the Holocaust and the Second World War would be perceived as merely the outgrowth of the unfathomable madness and blind hatred of one man and his movement. But in fact Hitler’s hatred was not blind; it was sharply focused on an obsessive eugenic vision. The war against the weak had graduated from America’s slogans, index cards and surgical blades to Nazi decrees, ghettos and gas chambers.