The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most
Powerful Corporation

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.

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