Review: IBM and the Holocaust

«IBM and the Holocaust» by Edwin Black.

The book is fairly well known and had been recommended by several people.

The 80-column punched card is the main character in the book. To a modern reader this technology seems impossibly ancient, but in the 1930s it was the cutting edge of data processing.

The book documents the rise of the punched card and its ability to record, sort, and tabulate data. Data about trains, data about inventory, data about people. IBM's corresponding rise and its increasing monopolisation of this technology forms some of the earlier material in the book.

Black's central thesis is that IBM were aiding the Nazi's in their genocide of the Jewish people (Black focusses on the extermination of Jews, but not exclusively). Black brings a lot of carefully researched and documented evidence to the discussion. It makes the book rather long, tedious, and dry in sections. Still, I feel that for such an important cause, the reader's hardship does not matter much.

Black acknowledges that, despite volumes of evidence, there isn't quite enough evidence to show that IBM were specifically and deliberately aiding the Nazi's. He does make a convincing case that IBM acted so that their "this is just wartime business" stance is as plausible a defence as it could be. Ever the masters of paperwork, IBM make sure there is enough paperwork to show that the IBM in America couldn't know their European subsidiaries were doing when those subsidiaries were in fact helping the Nazis in their business of extermination. Of course at the end of the war there is just enough paperwork to show that the subsidiaries should be returned to ordinary American ownership and the profits (which, like a modern day Starbucks, IBM insists are licenses and royalties in order to avoid paying taxes) kept in frozen accounts should now be allowed to pass to IBM in America.

Black shows how the machines that IBM makes, Holleriths, are used to process and exterminate every category of people that the Nazis identify as undesirable. The detail is impressive, even down the to column numbers of the punched cards. He is also able to show how vital these machines are. It's not just that the IBM machines are used to exterminate people, it's that there is no other way to do it as efficiently as it was done. Where the machines are unavailable or, as is the case with unoccupied France, where their use is frustrated by a member of the French resistance placed very highly in the French administration, the exterminations are much less reliable and much lower.

IBM in possession of their machine technology were shown to be invaluable. Nazi Germany, aware of how useful IBM technology was, would encourage soon-to-be-invaded states to invest in IBM technology and have censuses set up. When the Nazis invaded the machines were taken into Nazi control and the data already collected was used to suppress, identify, and transport groups of people.

The American government set up a task force to investigate if IBM's activities were un-American and unpatriotic. But the more this taskforce learnt about IBM and its technology, the more it realised that the liberating Allied forces could make use of it. Lists of key installations of IBM machines were made. But instead of crippling the Nazi war machine by bombing these installations, the lists were handed to specially trained troops placed forward in the liberating army. Troops that would capture the IBM machines intact and take over control of the IBM machines, putting them to work for the Allied forces.

What are we to make of all this? The grim message repeated time and time again in the book is how routine the business of doing business with the Nazis is. From the perspective of business leaders, IBM's subsidiaries are just doing good business when they sign contracts with the goverment. Yes, the government is a wartime occupation Nazi government, but it is still good business and that is all that matters. It's also fairly clear that IBM America could to a large extent depend on its subsidiaries to have this "business is business" attitude and therefore continue to make healthy profits throughout the war. Those profits could be duly collected at the end of the war despite the fact that they were frozen during the war.

Personally the message for me is that merely by continuing to do "business as usual" one might end up aiding and abetting in the most horrific of genocides. Where possible each of us should strive to avoid that.

Good questions to ask are: "Am I building something that could be used to make a Nazi death machine?", and, "Am I collecting data that will be used by Nazis to kill or suppress people when the Nazis invade and overthrow my legitimate government?".

The book certainly makes the case that technocracy is problematic. Technocrats who were striving to bring order with their new machines are shown time and time again to become useful tools in the Nazi war machine. They loved the technology. They loved what the machines could do. But they never should have.