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.”

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