We recoil in horror from Joseph Mengele’s barbaric Holocaust experiments, but how many know his work was based on the principles of the American eugenics movement?  Based on Edwin Black’s book of the same name, The War Against the Weak traces the efforts of American eugenicists to breed a Nordic master race through the elimination of those deemed “unfit.”  With an eerie blend of both historical and first-hand accounts, the film makes chilling connections between Ivy League scientists funded by the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Harriman Railroad fortune and German racial scientists at the William Kaiser Insititute; between mass sterilization and sometimes even euthanasia in the U.S. and Hitler’s horrifying genocide.  As one Nazi asks, “What is the difference?”  If we were ever in danger of forgetting, War Against the Weak brings the atrocity unnervingly close to home.  ST