Edwin Black - IBM and the Holocaust

—Richard Pachter, Miami Herald

“More than 15 million people have visited the Holocaust Museum and seen the IBM machine there. Surely some have raised the question: How could this prestigious corporation possibly be linked to such a heinous stain on human history? With empirical evidence, Edwin Black has supplied the answer. IBM and the Holocaust makes an empirical statement. Edwin Black has made his case.”

— Louisville Courier-Journal

“This damning chronicle of IBM’s collusion with the Nazis exposes, in horrific detail, the corporation’s opportunistic ride on Hitler’s tail.”

—Charles Winecoff, Entertainment Weekly

“This is the stuff of corporate nightmare. IBM, one of the world’s richest companies, is about to be confronted with evidence of a truly shameful history. Edwin Black reveals Big Blue’s vital role in the Holocaust.”

— Sunday Times, Great Britain

“Black… shows, in compelling detail, that IBM, ‘the solutions company’, was also the company of the Final Solution…. It is a distinctive contribution to the history of the time. It wholly justifies Black’s years of toil… a terrible warning from this brilliantly excavated past.”

—Peter Preston, The Guardian, Great Britain

“The computer group IBM is haunted by its past. Edwin Black’s book now reveals the company’s involvement in the Holocaust…. Previously the Nazi past of ‘Big Blue’… was hardly ever a topic…. But now IBM is in the dock. Black’s meticulous research documents just how precisely IBM managers were kept informed about the whereabouts of their machines.”

—Christian Habbe, Der Spiegel, Germany

“Black’s … book is the first to give the general public a detailed account of how an American corporation profited from intimate ties with the Nazis. It strips the veneer from the cherished myth of the purity and patriotism of American business.”

—Marilyn Henry, Jerusalem Post

“ IBM and the Holocaust raises startling questions about the technology giant’s involvement with Nazi government officials—and throws the company’s wartime ethics into serious doubt.”

—Jessica Reaves, Time.com

“Black … documents IBM’s sins with chilling discipline…. IBM and the Holocaust lays out in numbing detail the terrible deeds of bureaucrats and business leaders…. In the end, though, this book has a subtler story to tell, one frighteningly relevant to our lives today. IBM and the Holocaust isn’t about evil men at a particularly bloody point in recent history so much as it’s about the dawn of the modern information age.”

—Douglas Perry, Fort Worth Star-Telegram

“Edwin Black has put together an impressive array of facts which result in a shocking conclusion never realized before: IBM collaborated with the Third Reich. This book should be read by everyone interested in the ‘under history’ of the Second World War.”

—Simon Wiesenthal, director, Jewish Documentation Center, Vienna

“Black’s great contribution is that he has tenaciously collected a lot of information and combined it in an original way. Few others have thought to place this information in the same context, to see what inferences can be drawn. Black’s history makes two chilling observations. The first is that the Holocaust was possible because the Nazis had access not only to guns and gas but also to cutting-edge census technology. The second is that the Nazis had access to this technology because IBM, in its paranoid zeal, worked very hard to maintain its market dominance of the global market in data processing.”

—Anthony Sebok, CNN.com

“A shocking account of IBM’s complicity with the Nazis is a reminder that people bear moral responsibility for the actions of the corporation—a point that critics have failed to grasp.”

—Jack Beatty, The Atlantic Online

“ IBM and the Holocaust is a story that must be read if one is to understand how Hitler and the Nazis were able to implement their Final Solution to exterminate European Jewry…. Once again, Edwin Black has hit the mark.”

—Abraham H. Foxman, national director, Anti-Defamation League

“A tremendous, timely work. Neglected for more than 50 years, the sordid records dis closing IBM’s collaboration with the Nazi regime have now been exhumed by Edwin Black.”

—Robert Wolfe, former chief National Archives expert for captured German records and Nuremberg documentation

“Leaves no room for deniability.”

—Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman, Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations

“Edwin Black’s groundbreaking book, IBM and the Holocaust, made a great impression on me. It documents, for the first time, that an American company, IBM, bears a good deal of the moral responsibility for the preparation of the persecution of the Nazi victims. IBM and the Holocaust confirms the belief that the Holocaust was not only a cruel, unprecedented crime, but also an enormous bureaucratic undertaking.

—Franclszek Piper, historian, Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum

Copyright © 2001, 2002, 2009 by Edwin Black

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Published by Dialog Press, Washington, DC

Originally published in hardcover by Crown Publishers in 2001

Printed in the United States of America

DESIGN BY BARBARA STURMAN

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Black, Edwin.

IBM and the Holocaust: the strategic alliance between Nazi Germany and America’s most powerful corporation / Edwin Black.—1st ed.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. International Business Machines Corporation—History. 2. Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen Gesellschaft m.b.H.—History. 3. Germany—Statistical services—History—20th century. 4. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)—Germany—Data processing. 5. Jews—Germany—History—1933-1945. I. Title.

HD9696.2.U64 I253 2001

940.53’18—dc21

2001028201

ISBN 9780914153108

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

Second Paperback Edition