IBM link to Final Solution revealed
Tom Rhodes, New York
IBM, the American computer giant, faces detailed charges today that it
collaborated in Hitler's persecution of the Jews. More than half a century
after the second world war, an American investigative writer, Edwin Black,
says he has found extensive evidence that the Holocaust depended not on
German efficiency but on American technology. Black writes that IBM punch
card-sorters, a precursor of computers, were used to facilitate all aspects
of Nazi persecution - from the identification of Jews in censuses in Germany
and occupied Europe to the running of concentration camp slave labour. His
book, IBM and the Holocaust, is serialised today in The Sunday Times and
published tomorrow in America and Britain. "For the first time in history, an
anti-semite had automation on his side. Hitler didn't do it alone. He had
help." Black says Hitler's quest to destroy the Jews was "greatly enhanced
and energised" by IBM and its creator and chairman, Thomas J Watson. Watson
expressed admiration for Hitler and was awarded the Merit Cross of the German
Eagle with Star by the Führer. The Nazis regarded him as a powerful friend,
but his interest was profit, not ideology. He micromanaged Dehomag, the
company's German subsidiary, writes Black. "IBM NY understood - from 1933 -
it was doing business with the upper echelon of the Nazi party."
IBM has long acknowledged that its German subsidiary used punch card
technology in a 1933 census, soon after Hitler took power; but its role in
subsequent events has not been suspected, let alone investigated. The firm
has had good relations with organisations representing Holocaust survivors.
Two months ago, it donated hardware to help the Jewish Claims Conference
disburse German compensation payments. Watson's son, Thomas J Watson Jr, who
moved IBM into computers after the war, disagreed with his father's attitude
to the Nazis. "Dad's optimism blinded him to what was going on in Germany,"
he once wrote. According to IBM, its links with its Nazi-era German
subsidiary were severed in 1940. Black, however, has produced letters that
indicate the IBM chairman sent an emissary to Berlin to resolve problems in
late 1941, when America was about to enter the conflict. The charges made by
Black, whose parents, Polish Jews, both escaped death during the Holocaust,
arise from research into archives in America, Germany, Britain, Israel,
Holland, Poland and France. With the help of more than 100 people, he
assembled over 20,000 pages of documentation. "Examined singly, none revealed
the story," says Black. But put together, they showed "IBM's conscious
involvement - directly and through its subsidiaries - in the Holocaust".
Black produces evidence that, although IBM protected its legal position by
instructing its subsidiaries not to trade with enemy countries, "elaborate
document trails were fabricated to demonstrate compliance when the opposite
was true". IBM first became involved with Nazism because of Hitler's desire
to identify Germany's Jewish population before destroying it, Black says. "To
search generations of records all across Germany - and later Europe - was a
crossindexing task so monumental it called for a computer."
Equally, the mass movement of European Jews into ghettos and then into
concentration camps also required the powers of a computer. None existed; but
the IBM punch card and card-sorting system was available from its German
subsidiary. Nazi demand for IBM technology became so great that the firm
built a factory near Berlin, vastly increasing its investment in the German
subsidiary. The book seems certain to cause a furore in America. It has been
endorsed in advance of publication by several prominent Jewish figures.
"Edwin Black has put together an impressive array of facts which result in a
shocking conclusion never realised before," said Simon Wiesenthal, the
director of the Jewish Documentation Centre in Vienna. Michael Whine, the
director of defence and group relations division of the Board of Deputies of
British Jews, called it a "vital book".
