How IBM helped Nazi Germany

David Jardine, Contributor, Jakarta

IBM and the Holocaust; How America's Most Powerful Corporation Helped Nazi Germany Count The Jews; By Edwin Black

International Business Machines (IBM) is described on the front of this book as "America's Most Powerful Corporation". Few will refute that assertion.

The thrust of Edwin Black's work is that IBM, like Krupps and IG Farben, not to mention various Swiss banks, has much blood on its historical hands, primarily the blood of European Jews, Gypsies, Slavs and all the other untermenschen; that the Nazis sought to rid the world of.

IBM, through its German proxy Dehomag, made possible the most extensive, most thorough census ever undertaken anywhere in the world in Nazi Germany in the 1930s. IBM, in short, was a major collaborator in the destruction of German Jewry and the anti-Nazi elements of German society, and then, by extension, the rest of European Jewry, the continent's Gypsies, where they could be found, not to mention a whole raft of 'undesirables' that included cripples, the mentally ill, socialists and so on.

That, more or less, is Edwin Black's main assertion. Black has marshaled an impressive array of evidence to support this.

Central to the story is the figure of Thomas Watson (certainly not to be confused with a later American of the same name, the great golfer of fame), president of IBM and a man whose ruthlessness in shaping a business empire had become a by-word long before the rise of the Nazis. (One is tempted to say that he makes Henry Ford look like a shrinking violet.)

Watson might be regarded as the epitome of 'can-do' American capitalism. Starting out as a backwoods salesman in up-state New York 's Finger Lakes region, Watson became known as the type who would both go the extra mile to secure a sale and would 'steal' his rivals' customers. From this inauspicious start he went on to not only head IBM but also become president of the International Chamber of Commerce.

Thomas Watson surrounded himself with sycophants and suffused his organization with a 'Hail to the Chief' cult of personality that makes it little wonder he later greatly admired Hitler, which, of course, gave him something in common with Walt Disney and the Duke of Windsor.

IBM's development of automated punch card technology was tailor-made for the Nazis, bent as the latter were on hunting down both religious and so-called 'ancestral' Jews as well as other 'undesirables'. The central item of technology that made this possible was designed by Herman Hollerith and came as boon to such marrow-of-the-bone Nazis as Friedrich Zahn, head of the German Statistical Society, who spoke of the Third Reich's great need for "scientific soldiers".

"Small wonder," Zahn declared, "In its very essence statistics is very close to the National Socialist movement." Zahn went on to call German statistics "the creative co-conspirator of the great events of time."

Very shortly after coming to power, the Nazis ordered a census be drawn up. This took place in an atmosphere of the greatest terror when the whole world could see that the regime would stop at nothing to destroy its opponents. IBM, despite the wave of very vocal anti-Nazi sentiment in the US and elsewhere, saw only economic opportunities.

Thomas Watson could hardly claim ignorance. American newspapers, in particular the New York Times, were daily reporting anti-Jewish outrages: March 21, 1933 Nazis Hunt Arms in Einstein Home; April 15, 1933 10,000 Jews Flee Nazi Persecution. One needed to have one's head firmly embedded in the sand not to know that the Nazis were not simply an organization full of hot air and that they were an incredibly energetic force bent on new and extremely sinister aims.

To achieve their monstrous goal of hunting down the "ancestral" Jews, the Nazis and their scientific soldiers were combing every available civil and church record going back more than 150 years. If it could be proven in this way that someone was so much as 1/16th Jewish by ancestry, then they were marked as Jewish, regardless of confessional matters such as conversions to Christianity or lapsed faith, and thus for destruction.

Many German Jews successfully clung to anonymity for a time but they were unequal to the maniacally methodical methods of the Nazis. Equally they were innocents where IBM's technology was concerned. It would reach into every pore of German society.

Thomas Watson's rise to the leadership of the International Chamber of Commerce provided him with a belated opportunity to make a moral stand. By 1937 a very great deal was known about the character of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime. After all, the Olympics has been held a year earlier in Berlin in a blaze of publicity.

As an American, Watson can hardly have been ignorant of Hitler's infamous display of petulance over Jesse Owens. But, Watson was determined that the ICC congress would take place in the German capital and it did.

If this does not qualify him as a moral neuter, then his correspondence with senior Nazi figures surely does. The official files of IBM reveal him writing to Reich Economics Minister Hjalmar Schacht thus, "I have felt a deep personal concern for Germany." And this in November 1937.

IBM technology enabled the Nazis to carry out the anti-Jewish genocide that we now know as the Holocaust as well as much else besides. Other monstrous aspects of Nazi rule were facilitated, among them mobilization of slave labor -- it might be remembered here that the loss of life in slave labor schemes such as Dora was higher even than the rate of extinction in the concentration camps.

Other famous names do not come out of this very well either. Price Waterhouse was commissioned by IBM to make investment recommendations, and this after Hitler's rise to power and the systematic stripping of Jewish assets. Watson himself chose heavily discounted Berlin apartment blocks.

Black has done a major service to the history of this awful period. What it tells us about the amorality of one of America's major players in the darkest episode in modern history and the way it has finally been uncovered is, in my view at least, yet another argument for the free flow of information.