Was Nazi eugenics created in the US?

Abstract

War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create A Master Race by Edwin Black Four Walls Eight Windows, New York, NY, USA 550 pages, $27/£15 ISBN 1568582587 ![][1] Edwin Black's War Against the Weak was well known before the book ever hit the bookstores. Not only did it receive a large amount of advance publicity from the publisher and the author, but it had already become a cause celebre among historians of science working in the field of the history of eugenics, many of whom had been contacted by Black during the course of the book's preparation. It was billed as a far‐reaching revision of our understanding of eugenics that would “tear away the thickets of mystery surrounding the eugenics movement around the world.” The author's central thesis is that Nazi racial hygiene and its ultimate manifestations in the Holocaust were imported lock, stock and barrel from the USA, and that, indeed, it was US ruling elites who hatched the idea of creating a master Aryan race by selective breeding and then passed it along to the Nazis. More specifically, Black argues that the Rockefeller Foundation … [1]: /embed/graphic-1.gif