Past Book Review (June 13, 2010): "IBM and the Holocaust"
New book review for IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation, by Edwin Black, Dialog Press, 2008:
As a consultant, I often hear complaints from others in the workforce about IBM's WebSphere product line, but the objects of these complaints pale in comparison to the history of IBM that Black presents in this work. While IBM is barely mentioned in McKenna's "The World's Newest Profession: Management Consulting in the Twentieth Century" (see my review), Black presents the history of IBM from its beginnings through the second world war, with an intensive focus on IBM's connection with the National Socialists. In addition, during this journey the author brings the reader step-by-step through the historical events surrounding the second world war, with a concentration on Germany, a journey that is written so well that this book outshines many other books that cover this period of history in this aspect alone.
Black explains that the visit with his parents in 1993 to the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. caused him to ask question after question, beginning with questions surrounding National Socialist obtainment of his parents' names (his parents are Jewish survivors of the Holocaust). The Holocaust Museum exhibit at the time had an IBM Hollerith D-11 card sorting machine (one of the predecessors of modern computing equipment), but the exhibit did not explain much more than provide indication that IBM had been responsible for organizing the census of 1933 that first identified Jews living in Germany. To discover the details behind this lack of explanation, Black assembled a host of researchers across the globe in search of documents that explain how IBM equipment was used by Germany during that time period, resulting in approximately 20,000 pages of such documentation, and based on this effort Black estimates in his introduction to this book that five times this amount in additional documentation is yet to be discovered.
Thomas Watson, who eventually headed IBM, came from National Cash Register (NCR), a firm where Watson excelled for seventeen years, but where he felt business development opportunities were lacking. To broaden his opportunities at an international level, Watson joined the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR), from where Hollerith machines originated, the name of which Watson changed to International Business Machines (IBM) after he became chief executive. Dehomag, a German firm, was a licensee of Hollerith equipment from IBM, but the monetary crisis in Germany during the early-1920s made it impossible for Dehomag to pay royalties and other monies it owed to IBM, which controlled all of Hollerith's patents, so Dehomag became a subsidiary of IBM.
Black explains that while many European countries were slow to adopt Hollerith technology, more than half of IBM's overseas income came from Dehomag alone, and there were about seventy IBM subsidiaries and foreign branches worldwide at the time. In 1933, the business world questioned whether it was worth economic risk or moral descent trading with Germany. IBM was in an interesting position, because it exported American technology rather than import German goods, and while Dehomag was renamed IBM Germany following the second world war, it did not carry the name of IBM or Watson at the time, permitting it to fly below the radar. Unfortunately, in the pure pursuit of business development, Watson chose to risk moral descent, seeing many opportunities in the plans of the National Socialists, beginning with a census of Poland to identify those of Jewish origin, and later working with German statisticians to trace Jewish bloodlines back to the early 1800s.
The space available here is simply lacking for a thorough review of this book. In my opinion, the content that Black provides is as much an account of IBM and its enablement of ethnic cleansing as it is a warning to the modern world not to follow in the footsteps of early-IBM or the National Socialists. As other reviewers here have indicated, morality should not take a back seat to the demands of stockholders seeking a profit. And Black's mentions of Germany's "The Law for Simplification of the Health System" and "The Law for the Prevention of Genetically Sick Offspring" of 1934 together with the article for the German statistical journal written by Friedrich Zahn that same year, "The Economic Value of Man as an Object of Statistics", should be remembered by modern society as avenues which we should not travel again. But are we not as a global society moving in this direction again? Well recommended text to everyone seeking insight into how IBM, in the words of Black, put the "blitz" in "blitzkreig".