An ad promoting IBM technology to Nazi Germany said "See it all with a Hollerith punch card by Herman". This article examines the strategy of US-owned IBM, then a punch card manufacturer, in Nazi Germany before 1937. IBM CEO Thomas J. Watson met Adolf Hitler while serving as president of the International Chamber of Commerce. Edwin Black further claims that Thomas J. Watson, chairman of IBM from 1915-1956, and other high-ranking IBM executives in New York deliberately allowed the Third Reich to use IBM technology in order to protect IBM's profits.
The Holocaust, Edwin Black argues, would have occurred regardless of whether Hollerith's punch cards and adding machines had been loaned by its German subsidiaries to the Nazi government. Yet with the help of more than a hundred researchers working in archives in the US, Great Britain, Germany, France and Israel, Edwin Black has documented the dirty dealings between the nation's most powerful corporation and the Third Reich, which has spread throughout the world war years. Recently discovered Nazi documents and Polish eyewitness testimony make it clear that IBM's alliance with Nazi Germany extended far beyond its German subsidiaries.
Soon after Hitler took power, Nazi Germany became America's most important corporate customer outside the United States. IBM's German subsidiary was Deutsche Hollerith Machine Ge sell sch aft, known by its initials Dahomey. The involvement of America's most powerful corporations with Nazi-occupied Poland continued, but now through a specialized New York-controlled subsidiary known as Watson Business Machines, recently located at 23 Kr UE TZ Building in Warsaw. A special new branch was established by IBM New York after the invasion of Poland to provide for-profit services to Nazi Germany's looting and ethnic cleansing programs.
As part of this strategic alliance, the nation's most powerful corporations and the Nazis jointly designed technical solutions that allowed Hitler to speed up and in many ways automate major aspects of Hitler's persecution of the Jews, exclusively manufactured by IBM from primal identity and social expulsion, through confiscation and ghettoization, through deportation and finally extermination. The dynamics and background of America's unique corporate alliance with the Reich certainly changed over the course of the Holocaust... Make no mistake. The only American company refused to respond to allegations stemming from the initial simultaneous revelation in 40 countries on February 11, 2001, that IBM had deliberately codified Adolf Hitler's persecution and extermination of European Jewry, both directly from New York and through its subsidiaries around the world. Europe controlled by Germany, coordinated by its Swiss operations.
The computer corporation IBM did not deny the role of its subsidiaries in helping the Nazis deal with the Holocaust, choosing instead to assume that they could bear no responsibility for the actions of companies the Nazis took control of. The suit also alleges that IBM failed to provide historians with access to archived IBM records, which Hausfeld said would have shown that the company played an active role in aiding the Third Reich. The suit repeats this argument, alleging that IBM helped design the Germans' custom-made method of tracking ethnicity using cards and also maintained the machines for the Nazis during the war years.
In an earlier version of Blake's book, the connection between the New York corporate headquarters and the European operations of computer firm IBM was more sketchy, as it tracked the delivery of machines to a German branch seized by the Nazis. Black also refers to documents relating to a secret agreement between H EI din Ger and Watson on their visit to Germany, which allowed Dahomey's commercial authority to extend beyond Germany, allowing the now Nazi firm to bypass and squeeze out several domestic subsidiaries and licensees, and to demand and sending Punch Card Solution Technology directly to IBM customers in these areas. Black told Reuters that since the book was published, evidence had emerged of the role of an ad-hoc wartime IBM subsidiary known as IBM Watson Business Machines, which reports directly to IBM headquarters in Geneva.
A new book takes the case against Watson and IBM much further, claiming that IBM's purpose-built technology helped fuel the Holocaust, enabled Hitler's automated persecution of Jews and created lists of groups slated for deportation to Nazi death camps. A new book recounts how, after IBM lost control of its German operations in 1941 and Watson returned to Watson, IBM technology was used at Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps to register prisoners and track slave labor. Despite the fiery spirit of a person named Edwin Black, his painstaking research revealed tens of thousands of documents collected from across Europe that carefully reveal how IBM did not supply technology to Hitler's Germany - IBM helped deploy and support it, for whatever purposes Hitler's Germany required.
Historians have since documented how IBM's punched card technology, a precursor to computers, did everything from helping German trains run on time, to aiding Hitler's rearmament plans to compiling census data, a key element of the Nazi leaders' murderous racial policies. In fact, the IBM Hollerith Machine, a tabulating machine running on punched cards, was a vital tool in carrying out the logistical challenges of the extermination of the Jews in Hitler's Germany in the pre-computer era. IBM technology actually helped the Nazis led the Holocaust in the mid-20th century.
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