Cleveland Plain Dealer

Review--IBM and the Holocaust

Author: Karen Sandstrom

Crown Publishers let loose a surprise last week with "IBM and the Holocaust," Edwin Black's secret, exhaustively researched book about the relationship between America's premiere technology company and the Third Reich.

In the publishing world, surprises equal hype. This book - important, if not uniformly fascinating - lives up to the hype because it addresses necessary questions about the Nazis' efficiency in their 12-year effort to eradicate the Jews of Europe.

"After decades of documentation by the best minds, the most studied among them would confess that they never really understood the Holocaust process, "Black writes at the book's end. "Why did it happen? How could it happen? How were they selected? How did the Nazis get the names? They always had the names."

The answer, Black writes, was IBM punch-card technology, a precursor to the computer that allowed the regimentation-happy Nazis to be more regimented than even they might have dreamed.

Black is the son of Holocaust survivors and the author of the 1984 book "The Transfer Agreement," about the deal-making that saved 60,000 German Jews from the Holocaust. His new work represents three years of research into the activities of New York-based International Business Machines, its German subsidiary, Deutsch Hollerith Maschinen Gesellschaft or "Dehomag," and IBM's enigmatic leader, Thomas Watson.

As Black writes it, Watson bears primary responsibility for enabling Adolf Hitler to automate his "Final Solution." Profit, Black says, was Watson's only motivation.

"IBM and the Holocaust" presents a convincing argument, though the corporation has declined to comment on the book and, Black writes, refused to cooperate in his investigation in any way. In an extensive (and sometimes bombastic) introduction, he writes that, "In the truest sense, the story of IBM and the Holocaust has been shattered into thousands of shards. Only by piecing them all together did I erect a towering picture window permitting me to view what really occurred."

If you believe that a vase has less integrity after it has been broken and reassembled, you would do well to keep Black's simile in mind. As well foot noted and endlessly detailed as this story is, the careful reader must wonder what information might have escaped through the cracks of time.

Still, Black makes a case that shames the IBM of the mid-20th century. In more than 400 pages of text and an additional 100 pages of notes, he describes the flowering of Watson's checkered career; the creation of IBM from a business begun by Herman Hollerith, inventor of the first punch-card tabulating machine; and the distribution of these machines in Eastern Europe from the time the Nazis took power in 1933 until after the war ended in 1945.

"The dawn of the Information Age," Black writes, "began at the sunset of human decency."

Black doesn't pretend that IBM invented the evil that killed 6 million Jews. Rather, he asserts that IBM sold the Nazis the technology that allowed them to swiftly and systematically identify their victims, seize their assets, move them with clockwork precision and track their activities in labor camps until their deaths.

"IBM NY [New York] always understood - from the outset in 1933 - that it was courting and doing business with the upper echelon of the Nazi party," Black writes.

In the first of the book's three sections, Black paints Watson as a born salesman, a man who both enjoyed selling and whose ethical compass always pointed to P for profit. In 1913, before his IBM career had begun, an Ohio jury convicted Watson and several dozen executives at National Cash Register on anti-trust charges. The controversy led to Watson's firing, which in turn led to him joining CTR, the company that would eventually become, under his rule, International Business Machines.

Here, too, Black examines the brittle but necessary relationship between Watson and Willy Heidinger, who was in charge of the German subsidiary Dehomag. From the first days of Hitler's reign, the Nazis sought to create a definition of "Jewish" and to ascertain the number of Jews in Germany.

Through Dehomag, IBM leased the Hollerith tabulating machines to the Germans to process the results of a massive census, and sold them millions of patented punch cards for the same process. The relationship between Watson and Heidinger becomes a tedious but necessary part of understanding the IBM-Holocaust story, as Black tells it, because the politics of business and the politics of politics became so interrelated just before and during World War II.

Black's story continues into the late '30s and 1940, when worldwide understanding of Nazi atrocities grew, along with boycotts and trade embargoes. While Tom Watson presumably read stories of persecution and violence in his daily New York Times, behind the scenes he continued to court favor with the Nazis because he saw how their goals to vanquish would make him rich. Watson's IBM wasn't the only company making punch-card tabulators, but it had cornered the market. Black points out that because IBM leased its machines rather than selling them and was the only supplier of the punch cards, the Nazis became dependent on the company as they found more and more uses for its technology.

Hitler rewarded Watson for his loyalty in 1937 by giving him the Merit Cross of the German Eagle with Star, a special medal given to foreigners who "made themselves deserving of the German Reich."

Watson liked the prestige. Even after Kristallnacht on Nov. 10, 1938 - the infamous "night of broken glass," when Nazi Brown Shirts raided dozens of towns known to have Jewish citizens or merchants - Watson continued to make public pleas for a reduction in trade barriers to Germany. It wasn't until 1940, after the Germans had bombed Paris and committed untold atrocities across Europe, that Watson reluctantly returned the medal to Hitler and thus cast himself as an enemy of the Fuehrer.

The years of war were tumultuous for IBM and its European subsidiaries, but they were not ruinous. Much of Black's book details the difficulty of doing business with "the enemy," but Watson's IBM was determined to continue doing it, usually by funneling transactions through its companies in neutral countries.

There is no question in Black's mind, nor will there be one in the minds of readers, that IBM officials had the ability to understand the tasks their machines were performing. For one thing, Watson was evidently a micro-manager who kept tabs on all aspects of his company. For another, many foreigners were trained at IBM's training center in New York. And the company was proud of its ability to customize machines for its clients. As the science of "raceology" developed in Germany, punch cards were created to process racial information.

Black answers questions he set out to answer, primarily about the depth of IBM's involvement in the Shoah. He raises others that he does not answer. As much as we come to know Watson as a businessman, for instance, the book contains almost no information on him personally. Yet in a story like this, personal details seem important. Who was his family? What did they know and how did they feel about it?

Nor does "IBM and the Holocaust" address Black's feelings about whether present-day IBM ought to try to make good, in some way, to survivors and families.

The book succeeds as a piece of excruciatingly documented journalism, but sometimes grows sleepy as pure narrative. Many chapters succumb to the weight of details about squabbles over stock ownership and control of subsidiaries. Again, these facts are a necessary part of a tale Black wants told in as complete a way as possible. (He even warns readers, in his introduction, that "if you intend to skim, or rely on selected sections, please do not read the book at all.")

But whether you will want to read it as completely as possible probably will depend on the value you assign to the book's revelation: One of the world's largest corporations was apparently quite willing to dirty its hands in the ugliest episode of modern history.