Director Justin Strawhand uses every known documentary trick in the book (as well as some tricks not in the book) to translate Edwin Black’s The War Against the Weak from 600-page doorstop of exhaustive, collaborative research into a smooth-moving filmed horror show that’s shocking, inventive, and seductive in the most disturbing sense imaginable.

Black’s basic thesis — and slogan on his book’s website — ominously portends that “it began on Long Island and ended at Auschwitz…and yet it never really stopped.” “It” is the scientific study of hereditary genetics, named “eugenics” by Charles Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton, developed by American academic elitists to serve their inherently racist and discriminatory fear of the other, and eventually adopted by the Adolf Hitler, who, already obsessed with the notion of denerate peoples like Jews and Gypsies as a threat to Aryan supremacy, became obsessed with American eugenics literature whilst in prison in the 1920s, even writing “amateur anthropologist” Madison Grant a fan letter describing Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race as Hitler’s “bible.” Eugenics theory first resulted in questionable U.S. laws governing the civil rights of the blind, the epileptic, the feeble minded, and the generally lowborn, and ultimately the sterilization or euthanasia of the same. “Eventually,” Black writes, these same theories “led to the Holocaust, the destruction of the Gypsies, the rape of Poland and the decimation of all Europe.”

In his review of Black’s book for Mother Jones, David Plotz noted that while some historians “have made a cottage industry of finding new ways to blame the Germans for the Holocaust, Black, by contrast, keeps finding new ways to put the onus on the Americans.” Weak was in fact his third book exploring ties between American history and Nazi war crimes. Strawhand’s film doesn’t shy away from exposing the direct lines between the American political establishment of the early 20th century (and even the personal discriminatory statements of some historical heroes, including Theodore Roosevelt and Oliver Wendell Holmes), but through a variety of stylistic choices, he steadily increases the horror as he’s marking fifty years of time, making the American mission to breed out the “submerged tenth” (ie: those destined for poverty and/or criminal behavior as a consequence of hereditary low birth) look quaint and relatively impotent next to the madness of Mengele and the Nazi’s attempted genocide of the Jews. The main theoretical thread is not really common thirst for extermination, but a common conception amongst one group that they have god-like rights and the power to determine the destiny of another.
As Strawhand explained after a screening of Weak at True/False, his goal was to make the viewer feel like they were “inside” the story, and at that he suceeds. Various different styles of animation and text design, multiple narrators, talking head interviews with modern day Americans who would have been euthanized or sterilized if born in the wrong place at the wrong time — and one surviving German woman who was –– and reenactments are woven seamlessly together to recount the historical evidence. The result is a film that manages to unfold like a surprisingly linear stream-of-consciousness, one which builds to some of the most unsettling staged images I’ve ever seen in a nonfiction film. That The War Against the Week is incendiary in its subject matter is a given. But if we’re still arguing over whether or not any sort of use of reenactments in documentary is “dubious,” then Strawhand has fired an explosive round into that debate. This is a film that could exist based on archival material and talking heads alone, but I find it hard to believe that anyone who sees The War Against the Weak as stands would maintain that it should.