Black's book adds some new chilling cases to the already bulging gallery of amoral technicians who willingly served Hitler's murderous regime, apparently without suffering any pangs of conscience.

Edwin Black has moved a mountain of research to demonstrate that IBM, whose German subsidiary Dehomag provided the Nazis with the Hollerith punch-card technology that made the Holocaust's formidable logistics possible, was as big an accomplice as any. The motive, of course, was profit; as Black points out: "IBM's business was never about Nazism. It was never about anti-Semitism. It was always about the money."