IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation

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Summary: Courageous Revelation of Holocaust History
Review: The author and the book had the courage to take on the most powerful corporation of all time, unmasking its conscious involvement with the Hitler regime. I was gripped by the tense storyline and the detail as IBM willing provides Nazi Germany with darker and darker solutions. Clearly, it only begins with census. Eventually, even the Auschwitz tattoo was an IBM-compatible number. This book is a must for those who want to go beyond the atrocities and understand the bureaucratic solutions that made the Final Solution the efficient crime that it was.

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Summary: Powerful Indictment of IBM
Review: Edwin Black has constructed a powerful indictment of IBM's dealings with Hitler, an arrangement that clearly intensified the killing rate. As one who has read numerous Holocaust books--I find Black's book an extraordinary accomplishment on any level.

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Summary: The final solutions company?
Review: Very early in IBM AND THE HOLOCAUST Edwin Black says "knowing that IBM has always billed itself as a 'solutions' company...I promised myself I would one day answer the question: how many solutions did IBM provide to Nazi Germany?" Although he then goes on to say that "the Holocaust would still have occurred without IBM", there is a distinct argumentative structure about the book that strongly implies otherwise. Does Mr Black really believe that IBM provided the Nazis with their long sought for final solution to the Jewish question? To be sure there is a preponderance of data here, sufficient to condemn IBM for doing business with the Nazis. Further, the fees earned by Dehomag (IBM's German subsidiary) and booked as income by IBM in New York are perhaps best described as blood money. There are however other considerations, which, to me, reduce the impact of his book and will ultimately, I think, relegate it to the status of being a sensationalist, short-term bestseller. But, first the indisputable facts:

There is no doubt that Dehomag provided IBM punch card machines and a card sorting system to the Nazis. In so doing, Mr Black says "IBM Germany, using its own staff and equipment, designed, executed, and supplied the indispensable technologic assistance Hitler's Third Reich needed to accomplish what had never been done before - the automation of human destruction." Some of the evidenciary facts supporting this indictment are as follows:

(1) In Auschwitz, the SS tattooed 5 digit card-sorting machine numbers on the arms of prisoners.

(2) In keeping with its origins as a census tabulating company, Dehomag invented the racial census -"listing not just religious affiliation, but bloodline". This allowed the Nazis to more effectively identify Jews and compile their lists.

(3) The card-punching machines were used in helping make the logistics systems of the Wehrmacht and Reichsbahn (state railway) more efficient; the same was true for slave labor concentration camps.

Now for some of the other considerations. There is no doubt that Mr Black put in a lot of time, effort and expense into his research, nor can we fault his sincerity and personal interest. Indeed he recalls the moment when he decided to investigate IBM's role in assisting the Nazis; viewing one of the IBM Hollerith card sorting machines in the Holocaust Museum in Washington he remembers, "I turned to my mother and father who accompanied me to the museum that day and promised I would discover more." He tells us why. "My parents are Holocaust survivors." With all due respect to Mr Black, compassion and righteous indignation are certainly powerful motivators but they are best put aside when writing a history book. Mr Black remains angry throughout and while it means that he largely ignores the role IBM played in assisting the Allies with code breaking activities at Bletchly Park, this is still only a minor issue of objectivity. More serious damage was done to the readability of the book by his hyperbole and worse yet, as you read on, you get the distinct impression that the thesis went something like this:- 'IBM is guilty of heinous crimes,...let's find the evidence'.

Overall the book provides a new perspective on the Holocaust. It is powerful in its depiction of the malevolence of state power; scary in its implications for our cyber age by showing what can happen when technology and information are abused; and sobering in reminding us that corporate motives are seldom humanistic. IBM AND THE HOLOCAUST is a very sad commentary on society and organizational behavior but the main argument of the book - that the IBM Hollerith machines were the key to the effectiveness of the Holocaust - gets lost in a swirl of sensationalism. The final outcome is that I am left with the belief that it's sophistry, not history.

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Summary: Great Book
Review: When you think about it, the thought of IBM participating in the holocast isn't really that shocking. I mean lots of other huge corparations also helped, not because they supporteed the idealogy of Hitler, but there was money involved.

This book reveals the working relationship between Watson and the Nazis. It tells you that with the punch card machines of Dohomag (IBM's german subsidary), the systematic destruction of Europe's Jews wouldn't have havened on such a large scale. It shows us how genocide and techonology came hand in hand.

Overall, this is a great book. 5 Stars. A MUST READ

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Summary: Hyperbolic and myopic but also careful and facinating
Review: The breathless, purple prose ond overreaching rhetoric are hilarious at times but this represents a history-with-an-eyeglass that fellow technophiles with an interest in the social applications of business structures and technology will love. I am somewhat disturbed that this book might used to argue a prima facie case against the current corporation, though, when in actuallity the web of causation of complicity goes much deeper. When history is this deep and the crime this huge the figure pointed to when 'J'accuse!' is shouted is all of us.

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Summary: How much did we really know?????????
Review: This book was really great. It puts into how the punch card system worked, what the holes meant and more. To make things more interesting, how much did IBM New York know about the things that were going on with their Eurpeon counterpart. IBM blantely knew that hellping Nazi Germany would be a great assest to make money, after alll Business was its middle name. Although everything was leased to the Nazi's rather than bought. This is truel a chilling tail.

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Summary: An Extraordinarily Frustrating Book
Review: This book is an extraordinarily frustrating book to read -- both for what is in it and what is not. It is often extra-hyperbolic, witness its dust jcket which claims "THE Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation" A single alliance is certainly not in evidence, as THE alliance. That IBM was at some time in the 20th Century "America's Most Powerful Company" is also highly debatable. But yes, the strategies of IBM and Nazi Germany did run down parallel tracks and the story promised by the book should be told -- for US Corporations in general and IBM in particular -- but without the hyperbole.

In the book, for an author with a technical background, the words "computer" and "computing" are badly abused. I doubt that a whole lot of computing was going on with the exception of that done by humans. Added to that is a lack of any kind of specifications for the machines (even in an appendix) which are asserted to have been "interconnected" and "high speed" and the lack of the card layouts for the punch cards which are the heart of the story. To include these two "technical" details would have aided me in really judging the contribution of the machines versus plain old Nazi work ethic.

In short, a very important topic badly presented -- looking at 1930s technology through a lens of late 20th century thinking.

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Summary: This Case Not Proved
Review: IBM may be guilty of what the author claims, but he doesn't prove it, and admits at the end that he can't. As far as this book shows, Thomas Watson was not a fascist (by the author's own admission) and his motive was making money, period. There is nothing to show his priorities included killing Jews and others, propagating a "master race", or making the world safe for National Socialism. The technology was in Germany long before Hitler came to power. Watson was certainly amoral and an arch-capitalist who played both sides against the middle to win, but this book did not convince me he was an advocate or an engineer of genocide.

The author also doesn't stick to the point. He retells everything that went on in the world from the 1860s to the 1940s. The point is not what the Nazis did (most people are aware of this), but what IBM did.

One of the biggest problems I had with this book is that so much is written with the benefit of hindsight. He seems to think the entire population of the U.S., all the Jews in Germany, everyone in Europe, and often the whole world "knew" what was going to happen. I can't believe that when Hitler published Mein Kampf in the 1920s (before he was even well known) that the whole world should have foreseen Auschwitz 20 years later. I have trouble with the idea that because a census of the population was taken in 1933 in Prussia that everyone should have envisioned the "final solution" first discussed at Wannsee in 1939.

IBM's relationship with the German company it bought was always adversary. Thomas Watson, after "insulting" Hitler by returning a medal he had earlier been awarded by the Third Reich, was in the author's words, "persona non grata" in Germany. He was certainly not privy to the Nazi government's top secret plans about the destruction of the Jews and the implementation of death camps in Eastern Europe. He may not have been disturbed about it if he had been, but the book doesn't show it. IBM was not IG Farben, at least not based on this material.

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Summary: Important Questions Unraised Before Now
Review: This book is the most important new work on the Nazi era in the last two decades. The book is even more significant for the questions it raises about what the purpose of a corporation is and should be, what role companies and governments should play in directing cutting edge technology, and the danger that misuses of advanced information technology bring to individuals.

The core of the story is how a key IBM technology, the Hollerith-based card tabulating machines, became available for the Nazi war and Holocaust efforts. Although the details are murky (and may remain so), it is fairly clear that the use of this technology was sustained during the war years in part by shipments of customized (for each end user) tabulating cards from IBM in neutral countries for everything from blitzkriegs to slave camp scheduling to transportation to the death camps. There was not enough paper capacity to make the cards in Europe (that the Nazi and IBM records show were used), and there is no evidence that Nazis created substitutes for these essential supplies.

As Mr. Black warns, "This book will be profoundly uncomfortable to read." I agree. My sleep will not be the same for some time after experiencing this powerful story.

Mr. Black makes an even stronger statement. "So if you intend to skim, or rely on selected sections, do not read the book at all." I took him at his word, and did not even read the book quickly. I also arranged to read it in several sittings, so I could think about what I had read in between. I recommend that you do the same.

The reason for my recommendation is that your thinking will change very fundamentally through reading the book. Having read dozens of books by fine historians about the Nazi period, and knowing a great deal about the history of data processing, I assumed that there would be little new to the story here. But the title intrigued me. By the fourth time I saw the book, I could no longer resist it.

What I found inside the book surprised, shocked, and amazed me.

First, many authors claim that it was not clear in the United States that Jews were losing their lives in Europe during the Nazi years until just before the end of the war. This book documents many articles that appeared in the New York Times that certainly seemed to be saying that this systematic killing was going on from very near the time when it began. Anyone who ignored these reports just didn't want to know.

Second, the book makes many connections between Thomas Watson, Sr. and Nazi Germany. Many things surprised me about this. One, he was there once or twice a year until just before World War II began. The horrible human abuses were probably observed first hand by him then. Two, he had friends who were victimized by the Nazis. Three, he accepted a very prestigious medal from Hitler in 1937 (which he returned in June 1940). Four, he spoke in favor of making U.S. policy pro-German until just before the United States entered World War II. Five, it appeared that he had a lot more concern about IBM's profits and machines in Europe than about any people there.

Third, although I was very familiar with the improvements in industrial and transportation effectiveness in Germany during the Nazi years, I did not realize that IBM's design of Hollerith machines for card tabulation was a breakthrough technology that enabled this progress.

Fourth, I had always been amazed that the Nazis had such detailed records of the geneologies of European Jews. What I did not realize was that much of this information was provided by Jewish citizens in government censuses, and was quickly processed into records used by oppressors on Hollerith machines leased from IBM or its subsidiaries.

In France, where the use of these machines was subverted by the Resistance, the percentage rate of Jewish deaths was one-third of what occurred in Holland where this technology was well applied. It is hard to avoid the feeling that millions of people died because these machines were available and kept supplied with parts and punch cards for the Nazis.

One cannot help but draw the comparison between this historical example and the companies and countries (including, apparently, the United States) that have more recently allowed critical nuclear, rocket, and satellite technology to become available to repressive regimes. It seems that by not asking questions about IBM and the Holocaust, we may be continuing to make many of the same mistakes today.

I salute the incredible imagination and back-breaking effort that went into assembling this astonishing set of documents and perspectives. I hope that many people will read the book, that scholars will look for more information to expand our understanding, and that the fundamental questions raised by this book will be debated wherever free people live.

Remember: Your freedom is only as good as that of the least free person, who is most vulnerable.

"Ask not for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee."

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Summary: Good read of a bad deed
Review: This book explores the role IBM had in helping to support the Nazi regime. The author may place a little too much emphasis on the reliance the Nazi's had on I.B.M.

However, as some of the past reviews have indicated, this topic has pulled some intense strings. I read this book immediately after rereading THE classic book on World War two espionage "A Man Called Intrepid". Much of this latter book documents how the the British and Canadians were trying to covertly and overtly stop American companies from dealing with the Nazis from 1939-41.

Both books demonstrate the lack of national affiliation or interest in peace & humanity held by the largest corporations in America.

Crown's book is good to remind us of what a large corporation will do to make money.