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# 2025-08-01 - IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black
(IMG) Tea Time With Thomas J. Watson and Adolf Hitler
Some time ago i saw this book referenced online. I checked it out
from the local library. Of course it was serious, heavy reading
chock full of data and references.
From this book i learned about the sheer quantity of hard, historical
data concerning the Holocaust. In my opinion, Holocaust deniers must
be practicing willful ignorance on an epic scale.
(TXT) Evidence And Documentation For The Holocaust
Reading this book raised questions. I wonder what it must feel like
to know about this amoral indifference and yet work in an IBM
subsidiary such as RedHat, or to found a company that does large
scale business with IBM, such as Intel.
> By the time I was twenty, I had lived through a Hungarian Fascist
> dictatorship, German military occupation, the Nazis'
> "Final Solution," the siege of Budapest by the Soviet Red Army, a
> period of chaotic democracy in the years immediately after the war,
> a variety of repressive Communist regimes, and a popular uprising
> that was put down at gunpoint... [where] many young people were
> killed; countless others were interned. Some two hundred thousand
> Hungarians escaped to the West. I was one of them.
>
> --Andy Grove, Intel
(TXT) Andrew Grove
On the other hand i see plenty of online rhetoric about punching
Nazis or kicking Nazi sympathizers out of bars. Some people seem to
have a sloppy definition of what counts as a Nazi. On top of that,
the whole attitude has a distinctly American posture of denying the
systematic nature of problems and reducing them to hopeless matters
of individual choice and responsibility. This "small picture" line
of thought is what permitted IBM to be so amoral in the first place,
while smaller scapegoat companies received public punishment.
Below are notes from the book.
# Introduction
Solipsistic and dazzled by its own swirling universe of technical
possibilities, IBM was self-gripped by a special amoral corporate
mantra: if it /can/ be done, it /should/ be done. To the blind
technocrat, the /means/ were more important than the /ends/. The
destruction of the Jewish people became even less important because
the invigorating nature of IBM's technical achievement was only
heightened by the fantastical profits to be made at a time when
bread lines stretched across the world.
IBM NY (USA) always understood--from the outset of 1933--that it
was courting and doing business with the upper echelon of the Nazi
Party.
Punch cards could only be designed, printed, and purchased from
one source: IBM. The machines were not sold, they were leased, and
regularly maintained and upgraded by only one source: IBM.
IBM was founded in 1896 by German inventor Herman Hollerith as a
census tabulating company. Census was its business. But when IBM
Germany formed its philosophical and technical alliance with Nazi
Germany, census and registration took on a new mission. IBM Germany
invented the racial census--listing not just religious affiliation,
but bloodline going back generations. This was the Nazi data lust.
Not just to count the Jews--but to /identify/ them.
People and asset registration was only one of the many uses Nazi
Germany found for its high-speed data sorters. Food allocation was
organized around databases, allowing Germany to starve the Jews.
Slave labor was identified, tracked, and managed largely through
punch cards. Punch cards even made the trains run on time and
cataloged their human cargo. German railway, the /Reichsbahn/,
Dehomag's (IBM Germany's) biggest customer, dealt directly with
senior management in Berlin. Dehomag maintained punch card
installations at train depots across Germany, and eventually across
all Europe.
How much did IBM know? Some of it IBM knew on a daily basis
throughout the twelve year Reich. The worst of it IBM preferred
not to know--"don't ask, don't tell" was the order of the day. Yet
IBM NY officials and frequently Watson's personal representatives,
Harrison Chauncey and Werner Lier, were almost constantly in Berlin
or Geneva, monitoring activities, ensuring that the parent company
in New York was not cut out of any of the profits or business
opportunities Nazism presented. When United States law made such
direct contact illegal, IBM's Swiss office became the nexus,
providing the New York office continuous information and credible
deniability.
... I understood that IBM does not merely wait for governmental
customers to call. IBM has attracted its fortune and reputation
precisely because it generally anticipates governmental and
corporate needs even before they develop, and then offers, designs,
and delivers customized solutions--even if it must execute those
technologic solutions with its own staff and equipment.
How many solutions did IBM provide to Nazi Germany? I knew about the
initial solution: the census. Just how far did the solutions go?
In my pursuit, I received extraordinary cooperation from every
private, public, and governmental source in every country. Sadly,
the only refusal came from IBM itself, which rebuffed my requests
for access to documents and interviews. I was not alone. Since
World War II, the company has steadfastly refused to cooperate with
outside authors.
# Chapter 2: The IBM-Hitler Intersection
"The physician examines the body and determines whether all organs
are working to the benefit of the entire organism." asserted
Heidinger to a crowd of Nazi officials. "We [Dehomag AKA IBM
Germany] are very much like the physician, in that we dissect,
cell by cell, the German cultural body. We report every individual
characteristic... on a little card. These are not dead cards, quite
the contrary, they prove later on that they come to life when the
cards are sorted at a rate of 25,000 per hour according to certain
characteristics. These characteristics are grouped like the organs
of our cultural body, and they will be calculated and determined
with the help of our tabulating machine.
"We are proud that we may assist in such task, a task that provides
our nation's Physician [Adolf Hitler] with the material he needs
for his examinations. Our Physician can then determine whether the
calculated values are in harmony with the health of our people. It
also means that if such is not the case, our Physician can take
corrective procedures to correct the sick circumstances... Our
characteristics are deeply rooted in our race. Therefore, we cherish
them like a holy shrine which we will--and must--keep pure..."
Heidinger's speech, along with a list of the invited Nazi Party
officials was rushed to Manhattan and immediately translated
for Watson. The IBM Leader cabled Heidinger a prompt note of
congratulations for a job well done and sentiments well expressed.
# Chapter 3: Identifying The Jews
IBM did not invent Germany's anti-Semitism but when it volunteered
solutions, the company virtually braided with Nazism. Like any
technologic evolution, each new solution powered a new level of
sinister expectations and cruel capability.
When Germany wanted to identify Jews by name, IBM showed them how.
When Germany wanted to use that information to launch programs of
social exclusion and expropriation, IBM provided the technologic
wherewithal. When the trains needed to run on time, from city to
city or between concentration camps, IBM offered that solution as
well. Ultimately, there was no solution IBM would not devise for
a Reich willing to pay for services rendered. One solution led to
another. No solution was out of the question.
# Chapter 5: Medal For Watson
Thomas Watson was more than just a businessman selling boxes to the
Third Reich. For his Promethean gift of punch card technology that
enabled the Reich to achieve undreamed of efficiencies both in its
rearmament program and its war against the Jews, for his refusal to
join the chorus of strident anti-Nazi boycotters and isolators and
instead open a commercial corridor the Reich could still navigate,
for his willingness to bring the world's commercial summit to
Berlin, for his value as a Roosevelt crony, for his glitter and
legend, Hitler would bestow upon Thomas Watson a medal--the highest
it would confer on any non-German.
The Merit Cross of the German Eagle with Star was created for Thomas
Watson to "honor foreign nationals who made themselves deserving of
the German Reich." It ranked second in prestige only to Hitler's
German Grand Cross.
Watson was honored. At the next ICC Congress, he would not only be
installed as president of the ICC, he would be decorated by
/der Führer/.
On June 28, 1937, over a peaceful cup of tea served in dainty
china cups atop elegant saucers, in a quiet corner of the Reich
Chancellery, huddling over a small serving table and seated on
cushy, floral armchairs, Watson and Hitler would finally talk.
Sitting with them was a Hitler cohort and two other prominent Hitler
supporters from the ICC convention. No one knows exactly what Hitler
told Watson during the exchange.
* * *
... And then Adolf Hitler suddenly walked in. Dressed in his
familiar brown party uniform, he made his way directly to the royal
box festooned with a swastika flag. As he did, the familiar command
crackled through the air: "Sieg!"
The assemblage of distinctive businessmen, including dozens from the
United States of America, in the year 1937, gripped by the moment,
awed by the occasion, imbued with the spirit, under the leadership
of Thomas J. Watson, jumped to their feet amid roars, cheers, and
wild applause, reached for the sky in a loyal salute, and chanted
back "Heil!" Watson lifted his right arm halfway up before he caught
himself. Later a colleague denied to a reporter for the New York
Herald that Watson's gesture was a genuine salute. [Maybe it was
merely a Roman salute. Sarcasm.]
Hitler's medal was bestowed by Schacht as the newsreel cameras
whirred and government functionaries snapped to stiff attention.
The eight-pointed gold-framed cross of white enamel embedded with
German eagles and Nazi emblems dangled about the neck from a broad
red, black, and white ribbon in tandem with a second six-pointed
star worn over the left breast. To Watson, it was magnificent. When
wearing it, he was draped by two swastikas, one on the right and one
to the left.
# Chapter 8: With Blitzkrieg Efficiency
In spring 1940, J.W. Schotte, IBM's general manager for Europe,
dispatched a confidential report from his German office to senior
IBM executives in America.
Schotte's enthusiastic memo was titled
"Our Dealings With War Ministries in Europe"...
IBM had finally succeeded in gaining the necessary insider access
to sensitive military projects, Schotte reported, so that company
engineers could properly design punch card applications for war use.
> In military literature and in newspapers, the importance and
> necessity of having in all phases of life, behind the front, an
> organization, which would remain intact and would function with
> "Blitzkrieg" efficiency... was brought out. What we have been
> preaching in vain for years all at once began to be realized.
Revenue from IBM's dominant customer, the Third Reich, was growing
so rapidly, Schotte said he didn't yet possess the sales numbers.
IBM had almost single-handedly brought modern warfare into the
information age. Simply put, IBM organized the organizers of Hitler's
war.
Although deniability was constructed with enough care to last for
decades, the undeniable fact was that either IBM NY or its European
headquarters in Geneva or its individual subsidiaries, depending on
the year and locale, maintained intimate knowledge of each and every
application wielded by Nazis. This knowledge was inherently revealed
by an omnipresent paper trail; the cards themselves. IBM--and only
IBM--printed all the cards. Billions of them.
IBM printed billions of its electronically sensitive cards each year
for its European customers. But every order was different. Each set
was meticulously designed not only for the singular client, but for
the client's specific assignments. The design work was not a rote
process, but an intense collaboration.
# Chapter 12: IBM And The War
Carter saw IBM not as a great American company, but as a global
monster. In Carter's view, Watson was no capitalist luminary but
an opportunist to be classed with the Nazis themselves.
Throughout 1942, a number of American companies were grandly exposed
for extensive dealings with Nazi Germany.
Ironically, none of IBM's subsidiaries were on the Proclaimed
List because they fell into a double-edged corporate identity as
"American-owned property." The same applied to all American-owned
subsidiaries in Axis-controlled lands. So even though corporate
parents, such as IBM, were not permitted to communicate with
their own subsidiaries because they were in Axis territory, these
companies were deemed American property to be protected. In fact,
since IBM only leased the machines, every Dehomag machine, whether
deployed at the Waffen-SS office in Dachau or an insurance office
in Rome, was considered American property to be protected.
Hence, Dehomag could simultaneously exist as a United States interest
and a tool of the Nazis doing business with the same Farben and
Siemens entities that brought other American companies utter
denunciation and often prosecution.
* * *
One special defense project involved an experimental system required
by the Army Air Corps. It needed a device that could read holes in
the telegraphic paper and translate the results to punch cards.
[I had already thought of this idea before i read this book.]
* * *
IBM and its technology were in fact involved in the Allies most top
secret operations. The Enigma code crackers at Bletchley Park in
England used Hollerith machines supplied by IBM's British licensee,
the British Tabulating Machine Company.
It was an irony of the war that IBM equipment was used to encode and
decode for both sides of the conflict.
The maps displaying Japanese population density were marked with
dots, one for each ten persons. American and Dutch census bureaus
simultaneously used Hollerith systems in 1943 to create racial "dot
maps" as a means of organizing transfers to concentration camps.
IBM was in some ways bigger than the war. Both sides could not
afford to proceed without the company's all-important technology.
Hitler needed IBM. So did the Allies.
For the Allies, IBM assistance came at a crucial point. But for the
Jews of Europe it was too late.
# Chapter 14: The Spoils of Genocide
IBM's business was never about Nazism. It was never about
anti-Semitism. It was always about the money. Before even one Jew
was encased in a hard-coded Hollerith identity, it was only the
money that mattered. And the money did accrue.
# Chapter 15: The Spoils of Genocide, Part 2
In the years that followed, IBM's worldwide stature became even
more of a beacon to the cause of progress. It adopted a corporate
motto: "The Solutions Company." Whatever the impossible task, IBM
technology could find a solution. ... Their exploits during the Nazi
era were lionized with amazing specificity in a promotional book
entitled /The History of Computing in Europe/ published in 1967 by
IBM itself. However, an internal ISM review decided to immediately
withdraw the book from the market. It is no longer available in any
publicly accessible library anywhere in the world.
How did the Nazis get the names? They always had the names.
What seemingly magical scheduling process could have allowed
millions of Nazi victims to step onto train platforms in Germany or
nineteen other Nazi-occupied countries, travel for two or three days
by rail, and then step onto a ramp at Auschwitz or Treblinka--and
within an hour be marched into gas chambers. Hour after hour. Day
after day. Timetable after timetable. Like clockwork, and always
with /blitzkrieg/ efficiency.
The question was barely raised.
author: Black, Edwin
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tags: book,history,holocaust,non-fiction
title: IBM and the Holocaust
See also:
(HTM) How Not To Build The Torment Nexus
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(DIR) book
(DIR) history
(DIR) holocaust
(DIR) non-fiction