But I digress. Yet again. Here's a quote:
"Interior Ministry officials reviewed one fanciful proposal for a twenty-five-floor circular tower of data to centralize all personal information. The proposal was rejected because it would take years to build and stock. But the futuristic concept opened the eyes of Reich planners. Each of the twenty five floors in the imagined tower would be composed of 12 circular rooms representing one birth year. Every circular room would contain 31 cabinets, one for each day of the month. Each cabinet in turn would contain 7,000 names. Registrations and updates would feed in from census bureaus. All 60 million Germans would then be organized and cross-indexed in a single location regardless of changes in residence. Data could be removed by some 1,500 couriers running from room to room like so many magnetic impulses fetching files."
Edwin Black is an investigative journalist and author of several books. He's the child of Polish Holocaust survivors, and has written often on Nazism, anti-Semitism and human rights.
IBM and the Holocaust is a very detailed, very carefully argued book, and I'll do my best to synopsize its contents. In the late 1800s an American invented a new form of punch card technology which improved the quality and speed with which the U.S. Census was produced. The centerpiece of this technology was the Hollerith machine, named after its inventor, Herman Hollerith.
By various twists and turns a business predicated upon this punch card technology became International Business Machines, or IBM, which under new leadership sought to expand outward into international markets. By that time the company was under the direction of Thomas J. Watson, a cutthroat individual who transformed the company into both an industrial powerhouse and a cult of personality centered around himself.
Somewhere in the middle of all that World War I happened, and IBM, casting a hopeful eye toward postwar Germany, expanded into that country without considering the cost of doing business with the German government. As part of this process IBM came to set up a subsidiary in Germany by the name of Dehomag, which was completely subservient to IBM's main office in New York.
Hitler happened, and what was his stated goal from the outset? The extermination of the Jews of course. And what was the first step in achieving that goal? Compiling a census, a task with which IBM Germany (i.e. Dehomag) was intimately familiar.
This compiling of a German census involved a lot of collaboration with IBM executives, and as the book makes clear the IBM New York office was kept informed every step of the way. IBM was there when the Nazis were searching for better ways to profile "social undesirables," and IBM was there when the Nazis were looking for better ways to catalogue people, places and modes of transportation.
And what was the result of all this cataloguing and census-taking? The Holocaust. Without IBM's Hollerith machines the trains in Germany wouldn't have run on time, the Jews wouldn't have been so effectively herded into concentration camps, and the tallies of deaths and the specifics of slave labor wouldn't have been so efficiently compiled. The Holocaust was undoubtedly accomplished with IBM collaboration, and if they managed not to see certain details of it it was only because they were too busy squeezing the Third Reich for its last pfennig.
What were the consequences of IBM's collaboration? For the Jews, in countless cases, it was death. For those serving the company in Germany the consequences were also death, sometimes imprisonment, and still other times relocation into IBM's new corporate hierarchy after the war. The company as a whole prospered, and many of those directly responsible for IBM's actions in Germany escaped relatively unscathed.
It's a story that has been repeated many times. We might even be seeing it now, with different actors, in the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Company A, resident in Country A, wants to do business in Country B. Yet at some point Country A and Country B go to war, and Company A has to decide how involved it wants to be in Country B's economy, and how much profit offsets how much risk. Often Company A overextends itself, compromising its position to where tracks must be covered, and associations must be minimized.
You also see this story repeated in China, wherein the designs of the Chinese Communist Party conflict with the expressed ideals of non-Chinese companies doing business there.
And the book? Is it good? Well, if you're asking me if it's entertaining I'd have to say no. The corporate maneuvers detailed in this book make for excruciating reading, even if the author lays out a compelling case for IBM's dishonesty during World War II. Did IBM create the Holocaust? Certainly not, but they knew what was going on in Germany, and it couldn't have been accomplished on the same scale without their assistance.
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