Edwin Black's study of IBM's wartime business relations with the Third Reich has touched off a firestorm of publicity, and the new information Black has unearthed is undeniably bad news for the official IBM version of its role in World War II. Black clearly demonstrates that Nazi Germany employed IBM Hollerith punch-card machines to perform critical tasks in carrying out the Holocaust and the German war effort. He goes on to document that IBM World Headquarters in New York managed to profit from Hitler's state throughout its existence. . . . Some of the evidence is vivid and unsettling. At Auschwitz, for example, the SS tattooed the forearms of prisoners kept for labor with a five-digit IBM Hollerith-machine identification number. IBM's Hollerith tabulators significantly improved the efficiency of racial censuses in much of the Greater Reich and in some Nazi-occupied territories. IBM machines cranked out lists of Jews, which were turned over to the SS to streamline deportations, Black reports. IBM's European subsidiaries also helped modernize the logistics of the German army and the operation of concentration camps while upgrading the efficiency of the Reichsbahn system of railroads. . . . Black establishes beyond dispute that IBM Hollerith machines significantly advanced Nazi efforts to exterminate Jewry.

Christopher Simpson
International Herald Tribune, Great Britain

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
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You thought, perhaps, that there was nothing fresh left to write about the Holocaust. Think, sadly, again. Edwin Black, a dedicated, even driven, researcher, has a new charge sheet to present. It shows, in compelling detail, that IBM, 'the solutions company', was also the company of the final solution. ... There is no scope for doubt. Black has a relentless flow of memos, letters and speeches. ... 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
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Black's meticulous documentation constructs an undeniable fact: after the outbreak of WWII, the IBM corporation knew where each of its leased (not sold) machines was in Europe, and what revenues it could expect from them. Each machine was insured and serviced monthly. Even though Watson, under public pressure, returned his medal to Hitler, he continued to "micromanage" the German and European operations. Further, he fought to keep control of his German subsidiary, knowing full well the profits that would accrue to IBM as a result. He did this with the knowledge, fuller than most, of the purposes for which his machines were deployed. . . . Remarkably, instead of indicting IBM, the Allies saw in these machines and their data a great opportunity to conduct a more efficient occupation of Germany and a rebuilding of Europe. Instead of evidence of crimes against humanity, the machines became and essential tool in the implementation of the Marshall Plan. In this way, IBM evaded any hint of complicity in the Holocaust. At least, until the publication of Edwin Black's book.

Harvard International Review

The pursuit of history invariably begins with questions that really concern the present. Black, who gawped at an IBM sorting machine in the Washington holocaust museum, sought to find the connection between the shiny modern computing brand of today and yesterdays horrors in Auschwitz, Dachau, Belsen. By assembling the data he answers the question that has bothered so many historians: 'How' was the Holocaust so efficient? Answer: just like today's corporate criminals, Hitler had IBM computers and IBM software tailor-made to carry out the task.

The Ecologist

An expert on the commercial aspects of the Third Reich, Black here presents the evidence for IBM's involvement in hastening the aims of Hitler; not for any moral stance but purely for the profit. Deeply researched and at times painful …the stark and incontrovertible facts speak for themselves.

Paul Blezard
Oneword Radio, Great Britain

Volkhard Knigge, Director
Buchenwald Camp Memorial
Suddeutsche Zeitung, Germany

Christian Habbe
Der Spiegel, Germany

H. Dieter Kantel
Der Spiegel, Germany

Gerda-Marie Schoenfeld
Stern, Germany

Helmut Herles
General-Anzeiger, Germany

Michael Heismann
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Germany

ZDF program "History", Germany

Klaus Hildebrand
ZDF program "History", Germany
Author of "The Third Reich"

Norbert Frei
Die Zeit, Germany
Author of "National Socialist Rule in Germany: The Führer State, 1933-1945"

Birgit Weidinger
Suddeutsche Zeitung, Germany

Thomas Maissen
Neue Züricher Zeitung, Switzerland

Bernhard Dotzler
Neue Züricher Zeitung, Switzerland

Here is the clash of two symbols of the Twentieth Century. On one side, the crime of crimes, the annihilation of the European Jews by the repressive Nazi machine; on the other a prestigious American corporation, IBM that by itself incarnates the history of Anglo-Saxon capitalism. Today, thanks to the research of an independent American researcher, Edwin Black, these two legendary images collide. . . . Business is business--with the Nazis, as with the Weimar Republic, the American company ... kept intense relations [with the German government]. Worse still, these relations continued, officially and then unofficially, until 1945. The IBM machines advanced the German war effort. ... And IBM punch-cards served to count the deportees and follow them administratively to their death."

Laurent Joffrin
Le Nouvel Observateur, France

Did IBM collaborate with Hitler's Germany? Did it provide the punch-card machines that allowed the Nazis to file the Jews and set up the 'final solution'? These are the main questions in Edwin Black's 'IBM and the Holocaust', which has immediately provoked controversy ... But in the final analysis, all evidence agrees: Dehomag, the German subsidiary of IBM, played an important role in the organization of war industry and train schedules, including those towards Auschwitz. A fruitful collaboration arose that a satisfied Watson, the president of IBM, could only express with these words: 'Hitler is a precious trading partner'.

Rouge, France

The most interesting aspect of the book is the description of the indifference and complicity of the IBM executives to the rise of Nazism (IBM's boss was decorated by Hitler, in Berlin, in 1937)... This indifference to history ... is a lesson for all times.

Bruno Frappat
La Croix, France

Edwin Black has confronted the American giant IBM with a terrible secret from its past. … in Germany, in the years when Hitler led the country on its manic path to destruction, IBM developed tools to aid governmental control of citizens. …punch-cards were made available to Hitler’s Nazi regime to classify and categorize the system’s “undesirables” for future “processing” in concentration camps. …It was the first program of mass classification ever used in the world. So long as Hitler’s Nazi regime paid, IBM was ready to offer its services. …IBM was ruthlessly effective in every contract that was offered to it in Nazi Germany, be it classification of election results, preparation of lists for deportment to concentration camps, or handling of prisoners within concentration camps. The link between an American multi-national company to the Hitler regime may come as a surprise to some, but not to those who know how to read a history book.

Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey
Pravda, Russia