How IBM helped Nazi Germany

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.