IBM and the Holocaust is the award-winning, New York Times bestselling shocker--a million copies in print--detailing IBM's conscious co-planning and co-organizing of the Holocaust for the Nazis, all micromanaged by its president Thomas J Watson from New York and Paris. This Expanded Edition offers 37 pages of previous unpublished documents, pictures, internal company correspondence, and other archival materials to produce an even more explosive volume. Originally published to extraordinary praise in 2001, this provocative, award-winning international bestseller has stood the test of time as it chronicles the story of IBM's strategic alliance with Nazi Germany. IBM and the Holocaust provides nothing less than a chilling investigation into corporate complicity. Edwin Black's monumental research exposes how IBM and its subsidiaries helped create enabling technologies for the Nazis, step-by-step, from the identification and cataloging programs of the 1930s to the selections of the 1940s.
IBM and the Holocaust
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Was IBM, "The Solutions Company," partly responsible for the Final Solution? That's the question raised by Edwin Black's IBM and the Holocaust, the most controversial book on the subject since Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners. Black, a son of Holocaust survivors, is less tendentiously simplistic than Goldhagen, but his thesis is no less provocative: he argues that IBM founder Thomas Watson deserved the Merit Cross (Germany's second-highest honor) awarded him by Hitler, his second-biggest customer on earth. "IBM, primarily through its German subsidiary, made Hitler's program of Jewish destruction a technologic mission the company pursued with chilling success," writes Black. "IBM had almost single-handedly brought modern warfare into the information age [and] virtually put the 'blitz' in the krieg."
The crucial technology was a precursor to the computer, the IBM Hollerith punch card machine, which Black glimpsed on exhibit at the U.S. Holocaust Museum, inspiring his five-year, top-secret book project. The Hollerith was used to tabulate and alphabetize census data. Black says the Hollerith and its punch card data ("hole 3 signified homosexual ... hole 8 designated a Jew") was indispensable in rounding up prisoners, keeping the trains fully packed and on time, tallying the deaths, and organizing the entire war effort. Hitler's regime was fantastically, suicidally chaotic; could IBM have been the cause of its sole competence: mass-murdering civilians? Better scholars than I must sift through and appraise Black's mountainous evidence, but clearly the assessment is overdue.
The moral argument turns on one question: How much did IBM New York know about IBM Germany's work, and when? Black documents a scary game of brinksmanship orchestrated by IBM chief Watson, who walked a fine line between enraging U.S. officials and infuriating Hitler. He shamefully delayed returning the Nazi medal until forced to--and when he did return it, the Nazis almost kicked IBM and its crucial machines out of Germany. (Hitler was prone to self-defeating decisions, as demonstrated in How Hitler Could Have Won World War II.)
Black has created a must-read work of history. But it's also a fascinating business book examining the colliding influences of personality, morality, and cold strategic calculation. --Tim Appelo --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Booklist
The publisher has ordered a print run of 100,000 copies, indicating that they expect high demand for this contentious expose. The author asserts that a collusion existed between IBM Corporation and the government of the Third Reich, wherein IBM supplied the technology enabling Nazi authorities to systematize their persecution of European Jews. Expect much discussion in the press and on the street about this very controversial book. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Historians should argue their positions with passion, but they should not let that passion override their entire work. That is the glaring fault I found in this otherwise well-done work. The author is so caught up in proving the essential "evilness" of IBM and its chairman, Thomas Watson, that he overreaches himself, at one point comparing IBM employees to Hitler's Brownshirts. Once he did that, he started losing me. From beginning to end there is a snide and not so subtle painting of everything IBM did as inherently evil, and condoning of the Nazi regime. If this is correct, many many companies and organizations (not to mention entire governments) from that time were complicit in the same situations. There's just too much of the "evil corporation" style of writing contained in this book to enable the unbiased reader make his or her own judgments about the evidence presented. When an author tries too hard to convince the reader, it tends to get my back up, and that's what happened here. He may be quite correct, for all I know, but his style just put me off.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Edwin Black's book on IBM and the Holocaust is a monument to thorough, historical research and documented fact-finding. He left no stone unturned. I tried to get IBM to dispute any part of it and they did not do so. Investigative journalism at its best.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
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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4.4 out of 5 stars
Most recent customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
First Rate Research--Even a Widget has its Evil Side
Who would have anticipated that a speedy card-sorter, the Hollerith machine, would evolve into a tool of one of the most evil schemes of all time? Read more
Published on May 5 2003 by Dr. Victor S. Alpher
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Sober, Courageous Look at IBM's Sordid WW II Past
To what end should profit be more important than morality? This is the main question readers should ask after reading Edwin Black's thoughtful, thorough look at IBM's economic... Read more
Published on Dec 14 2002 by John Kwok
5.0 out of 5 stars
Gripping, Chilling Documentation IBM Complicity
I am astonished that Holocaust research has advanced so far and no one has yet detailed or even mentioned the involvement of IBM in organizing the Holocaust--from identification to... Read more
Published on July 15 2002 by Harry Churchill
4.0 out of 5 stars
Makes me UNproud to be former IBM employee
The book is very well written and the author obviously did his homework. I think it is a bit wordy and describes events and conversations contributing little to the overall story.
Published on May 24 2002 by Spook
3.0 out of 5 stars
Not the WHOLE Truth,
The bottom line here is simple. After reading this book, I will never purchase or have any part of an IBM product.
This book is not the best I have ever read. Read more
Published on May 14 2002 by Patrick Graham
5.0 out of 5 stars
IBM Should Come Clean
Edwin Black's book has unveiled a whole new understanding of the Holocaust era. I was alternately driven to rage, tears and appreciation as I read his book. Read more
Published on May 6 2002 by Leona Hyde
4.0 out of 5 stars
IBM and the Holocaust
This book is one of the most interesting factual books I have ever read. It is worth the read, but not for the assumptions made in it, to say that IBM can be held as a responsible... Read more
Published on April 9 2002
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Banality of Evil Given a New Face
For a scholar of Nazi Germany, there is an unending series disquieting relizations when yet another horrifying fact becomes crystal clear. Read more
Published on April 2 2002 by Katherine Keirns
2.0 out of 5 stars
A one-sided account
"It was an irony of the war that IBM equipment was used to encode and decode for both sides of the conflict" (p. 344). Read more
Published on Feb 4 2002 by The BPR Reference Guide
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Crushing Indictment Against Corporate America
While reading this book, I shared it with co-workers.
I'm amazed that two people's first reaction was to ask me
"Sure, IBM helped Hitler build his Nazi war machine,... Read more
I'm amazed that two people's first reaction was to ask me
"Sure, IBM helped Hitler build his Nazi war machine,... Read more
Published on Jan 20 2002 by Lynn Whitaker
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