IBM and the Holocaust

IBM and the Holocaust

by Edwin Black  · 30 Jun 2001  · 735pp  · 214,791 words

IBM AND THE HOLOCAUST THE STRATEGIC ALLIANCE BETWEEN NAZI GERMANY AND AMERICA’S MOST POWERFUL CORPORATION * * * CROWN PUBLISHERS NEW YORK CONTENTS Cover Page Title Page Acknowledgments Introduction PART ONE

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took a historic bravery and literary fearlessness that many lacked. At the head of the line is Philip Turner, formerly of Times Books, who acquired IBM and the Holocaust for Random House. Then, for almost eight months, I was closely supported—hour to hour—by Crown vice president and senior editor Douglas Pepper, who

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millions so swiftly, and identify the crucial role of automation and technology. Accountability is needed. What made me demand answers to the unasked questions about IBM and the Holocaust? I confronted the reality of IBM’s involvement one day in 1993 in Washington at the United States Holocaust Museum. There, in the very first

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letter confirming the company was moving machinery from war-torn Poland into Romania to aid Romanian census operations. In the truest sense, the story of IBM and the Holocaust has been shattered into thousands of shards. Only by piecing them all together did I erect a towering picture window permitting me to view what

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special agent with expertise in financial crimes. I wanted the prismatic view of all. Changing perspective was perhaps the dominant reason why the relationship between IBM and the Holocaust has never been explored. When I first wrote The Transfer Agreement in 1984, no one wanted to focus on assets. Now everyone talks about the

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and examine technology’s wake. Unless we understand how the Nazis acquired the names, more lists will be compiled against more people. The story of IBM and the Holocaust is just a beginning. I could have written twenty books with the documents I uncovered, one for every country in Europe. I estimate there are

I You We Them

by Dan Gretton

concerning the total number of Jews to be taken into consideration in this ‘Final Solution’ – some 11 million. We know from Edwin Black’s work IBM and the Holocaust that the Nazis had used the most advanced information-gathering techniques on their opponents since coming to power in 1933. This includedthe now infamous Hollerith

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Cologne had manufactured trucks for the Nazi war effort, and profited from the use of slave labour. In 2001 Edwin Black published his explosive work IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation, which showed that IBM’s Hollerith machine, created by their German subsidiary company

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Holocaust survivors. * Why had it taken more than fifty years for such a work to emerge? To get from The Diary of Anne Frank to IBM and the Holocaust? To move from focussing on individual perpetrators like Himmler to judging the responsibility of entire sectors of business such as banking? Much can be explained

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Finkelstein publishes his critique The Holocaust Industry. 2000: Ian Kershaw publishes the second volume of his biography – Hitler 1936–1945: Nemesis. 2001: Edwin Black’s IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation is published. 2001: The historian Jan Gross publishes Neighbors: The Destruction of the

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memoirs and discussed it with his grandson, the coauthor of this book.5 Several years after Tom Jr.’s death, a best-selling 2001 history, IBM and the Holocaust, appeared. Its author, Edwin Black, claimed, according to the book’s attention-grabbing subtitle, that Watson Sr. oversaw The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and

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a war-inflamed, ideologically enraged, nationalist tyrant. He was unable to look past his personal perspective to perceive a larger, dangerously volatile reality. In his IBM and the Holocaust book, author Black strikes at the wrong target when he baselessly proclaims, “IBM did not invent Germany’s anti-Semitism, but when it volunteered solutions

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.: My Life at IBM and Beyond (New York: Bantam Books, 1990), 53–56; Thomas J. Watson Jr., conversations with Ralph W. McElvenny. 6. Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation, expanded paperback ed. (New York: Crown Publishers, 2012). 7. See Gabriel Schoenfeld, “The

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Punch-Card Conspiracy,” review of IBM and the Holocaust, by Edwin Black, New York Times, May 18, 2001. 8. Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World

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. Donald W. McCormick and James C. Spee, “IBM and Germany 1922–1941,” Organization Management Journal 5, no. 4 (2008): 208–213. 11. Translation, in Black, IBM and the Holocaust. 12. Longerich, Hitler: A Biography, 447–452. 13. Friedrich W. Kistermann, “Locating the Victims: The Nonrole of Punched Card Technology and Census Work,” IEEE Annals

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of the History of Computing 19, no. 2: 31–45. 14. Black, IBM and the Holocaust, 59. 15. Kistermann, “Locating the Victims”; see also “Locating the Victims,” Holocaust Encyclopedia, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article

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/locating-the-victims. 16. Black, IBM and the Holocaust, 103. 17. Kistermann, “Locating the Victims,” 42, 37. 18. Michael Allen, “Stranger than Science Fiction: Edwin Black, IBM, and the Holocaust,” review of IBM and the Holocaust, by Edwin Black, Technology and Culture 43, no. 1 (2002): 150–154. 19. “Salute for

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Berlin and Paris,” Life, July 26, 1937, 68–69. 23. “‘No War,’ Says Hitler to American Caller,” New York Times, June 30, 1937. 24. Black, IBM and the Holocaust, 111. 25. Peter Preston, “Six Million and Counting,” Guardian (UK edition), February 17, 2001. 26. Watson Jr., Father, Son & Co, 58. 27. Watson Jr., Father

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Papers, William Breman Jewish Heritage Museum, Correspondence, 1921–1928 File, Box 1, Folder 2. 33. Maney, Maverick, 216–217. 34. Maney, Maverick, 218. 35. Black, IBM and the Holocaust, 73. 36. In 1918, a socialist revolutionary had briefly taken power in Bavaria in a series of events witnessed by Hitler. See Longerich, Hitler: A

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-and-papers/german-administration-of-american-companies.html. 50. Maney, Maverick, 213. 51. Black, IBM and the Holocaust, 9–10; Cortada, IBM: The Rise and Fall and Reinvention of a Global Icon (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019), 142. 52. Black, IBM and the Holocaust, “Afterward,” 427–439. 53. Cortada, IBM, 141. 54. The Secret Diary of Harold L

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. 31. Christopher Simpson, The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, And Genocide in the Twentieth Century (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1995), 73. 32. Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation (Westport, CT: Dialogue Press, 2008). 33. Messersmith to Geist, December 8, 1938. Special

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: Berghahn Books, 2004. Bird, Kai. The Chairman: John J. McCloy and the Making of the American Establishment. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992. Black, Edwin. IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation. Westport, CT: Dialogue Press, 2012. Borkin, Joseph. The Crime and Punishment of I

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Space Race (New York: William Morrow, 2016). 9. Meredith Broussard, Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018). 10. Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust (New York: Crown Books, 2001), and Clyde W. Ford, Think Black: A Memoir (New York: Amistad, 2019). 11. Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance

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enough pages to fill a Russian novel.) Less than five minutes after calling the session to order, Chris Smith was praising a recent book entitled IBM and the Holocaust, which had documented with devastating detail how Big Blue had sold the Germans technology that had allowed them to murder 6 million Jews and other

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ramps.” Götz Aly and Karl Heinz Roth, The Nazi Census: Identification and Control in the Third Reich (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004). 51. Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation (New York: Crown, 2001). 52. Robert Sproull, former director of ARPA, stated in

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-Taking, Tabulation Technology and Persecution in Nazi Germany,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 16, no. 3 (Autumn/Fall 1994): 35. 2. Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation (New York: Crown, 2001). 3. Götz Aly and Karl Heinz Roth, The Nazi

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Anderson, “The Dark Side of Numbers: The Role of Population Data Systems in Human Rights Abuses,” Social Research 68 (2001), pp. 481–513. [>] On IBM and the Holocaust—Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust (Crown, 2003). On the amount of data smart meters collect—See Elias Leake Quinn, “Smart Metering and Privacy: Existing Law and Competing Policies; A

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/H94-1100.pdf). Berk, Richard. “The Role of Race in Forecasts of Violent Crime.” Race and Social Problems 1 (2009), pp. 231–242. Black, Edwin. IBM and the Holocaust. Crown, 2003. boyd, danah, and Kate Crawford. “Six Provocations for Big Data.” Research paper presented at Oxford Internet Institute’s “A Decade in Internet Time

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by Söderberg, Johan; Söderberg, Johan;

Taking a Seat in Your Den” CNetNews.com (January 5, 2005). 15. For a less cosy account of IBM’s political legacy, see Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation (London: Little, Brown & co, 2001). IBM’s modern-day political stand can be

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, Cambridge Mass., MIT Press, 2003. Bijker, Wiebe. Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs—Towards a Theory of Sociotechnical Change, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995. Black, Edwin, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation, London: Little, Brown & co, 2001. Bollier, David. Silent Theft—The Private Plunder of

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that infatuation with high-tech social sorting emerges most aggressively in countries riven by severe inequality and governed by totalitarians. As Edwin Black reports in IBM and the Holocaust, thousands of Hollerith punch card systems—an early version of computer software—allowed the Nazi regime to more efficiently identify, track, and exploit Jews and

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POORHOUSE Published Literature Automating Apartheid: U.S. Computer Exports to South Africa and the Arms Embargo. Philadelphia: NARMIC/American Friends Service Committee, 1984. Black, Edwin. IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation. New York: Crown Publishers, 2001. Brennan, William J. “Reason, Passion, and ‘the Progress

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