At the turn of the twentieth century, scientists and politicians in the United States, Germany, and the Soviet Union pursue the same idea from different directions: that human heredity can be managed like livestock breeding. The film assembles archival footage rather than narrating a thesis, cutting between American fitness pageants and "better baby" contests, Soviet gymnastics parades, and German propaganda reels that move from public health campaigns to sterilization programs and, finally, to the camps. Forced sterilization laws, passed first in the United States and later copied in Germany, appear in the footage as bureaucratic routine rather than atrocity, which is part of the point. Filmmaker Peter Cohen lets the images from each country argue with each other: gymnasts, eugenics posters, medical exams, and mass rallies build toward the same conclusion about where the science of human improvement was always going to lead. There is almost no voiceover to soften it. The footage itself, sourced from the very governments that produced it as propaganda, becomes the evidence for how ordinary and popular this ideology once was.