The Sunday Times

News Review
11th. February 2000

This is the stuff of corporate nightmare. IBM, one of the world's richest companies, is about to be confronted with evidence of a truly shameful history. Edwin Black reveals Big Blue's vital role in the Holocaust 	

	
IBM's guilty past 
	
Custom made for the Reich

Veils of smoke hung above Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Many prisoners slumped lifelessly, waiting for death. 
Plainly visible at the rear of the camp, a round-topped furnace squatted in the mud. Black and elongated, it resembled a railway engine, but with two heavy kiln doors at the front. A metal stretcher used to slide emaciated corpses into the flames was always nearby. Here was the crematorium. 
Belsen had originally been a transit camp. But in late 1944, as Nazi death camps such as Auschwitz were liberated by the allies, Belsen became a nightmare receiving transports from other sites. 
In December a Dutch-Jewish prisoner, Rudolf Cheim, was assigned to the office of the Arbeitsdienstführer, the labour service leader, a few yards away from the crematorium, down a muddy path. 
Cheim was often beaten by the SS men in the labour service, but he knew that having a job meant staying alive. 
He noticed that they were engaged in some sort of work involving punch cards. He unobtrusively watched them and quickly learnt their system. 
At first glance they seemed to be handling simple rectangular cards, 5¼ x 3¼in, divided into numbered columns with holes punched in various rows. But Cheim began to understand the truth. The labour service office held the power of life or death over prisoners. 
Hundreds of thousands of human beings were being identified, sorted, assigned and transported by means of the card system. 
Every day, transports of slave labourers were received at the camp. Prisoners were identified by cards, each with columns and punched holes detailing nationality, date of birth, marital status, number of children, reason for incarceration, physical characteristics and work skills. 
Sixteen categories of prisoners were listed in columns 3 and 4, depending upon the hole. Hole 3 signified homosexual, hole 9 for antisocial, hole 12 for gypsy, hole 8 for Jew. 
Column 34 was labelled "reason for departure". Code 2 meant transferred to another camp. Natural death was coded 3. Execution was 4. Suicide was coded 5. Code 6 designated "special handling", the term commonly understood as extermination, either in a gas chamber, by hanging or by gunshot. 
On arrival, each prisoner's punch card was fed into a mechanical sorter. The dials were adjusted to isolate the skills, age groups or language abilities needed for particular work battalions. 
The process was monitored by Office D II of the SS economics office, which administered all the camps under General Oswald Pohl, the creator of the "Extermination by Labour" programme. The general argued that expeditiously gassing Jews deprived the Reich of an important resource; he preferred working them to death. 
As the trains and trucks full of prisoners rolled into Belsen from Belgium, France and Holland, thousands of punch cards were processed and the information fed back to the SS department of statistics. How many died was just a statistic to note. 
That December, some 20,000 prisoners were registered: 50 deaths per day, on average, were recorded on the punch cards. By spring 1945, more than 40,000 were imprisoned under indescribable conditions - starved, randomly tortured and worked to death. The monthly death toll rose to nearly 20,000 in March. 
Cheim never understood where the punch card system came from, but after the war - having survived Belsen - he saw a punch card in a shop and felt the need to write a record of what he had witnessed in the camp. This ended up in a Dutch archive in Amsterdam and was quietly forgotten. 
Many years later, in 1993, I went with my parents to the new Holocaust museum in Washington. There, in the very first exhibit, was a gleaming black, beige and silver machine. The label said it was an IBM Hollerith D-11 card-sorting machine. 
What was this thing - with its circuits, slots and wires - doing in the dimly lit museum? What did IBM, one of America's most powerful corporations, have to do with Hitler's attempt to exterminate European Jewry? 
A notice explained that IBM organised a census in 1933 that first identified Germany's Jews. I stared at the machine and promised my mother and father that I would discover more. 
My parents are Holocaust survivors, uprooted from their homes in Poland. My mother escaped from a cattle truck en route to Treblinka concentration camp, was shot and buried alive in a shallow mass grave. My father, who had run away from a guarded line of Jews, discovered her leg protruding from the snow and dug her out. They lived in the forests for two years. 
Standing in confusion in the Holocaust museum, they still had glass, shrapnel and bullet fragments embedded in their bodies. 
For years after that visit to the museum, I was overshadowed by the thought that IBM was somehow involved in the Holocaust in ways that had not yet been pieced together. What connected the machine in the exhibit, with its glistening IBM name plate, to the millions of Jews and other Europeans who were murdered in the Nazis' 12-year campaign of highly organised humiliation, dehumanisation and extermination? 
IBM has amassed its fortune and reputation because it generally anticipates governmental and corporate needs before they develop and then offers, designs and delivers customised solutions. It has always billed itself as a "solutions" company. How many solutions did IBM provide to Nazi Germany? 
I knew about the initial solution: the 1933 census. But how far did the solutions go? 
I also wanted the answer to another question. When a squadron of SS burst into a city square in occupied Europe, they would post up a list of people who had to assemble for deportation. How did the Nazis get the names? How did they get my parents' names? 
In 1998 I began seriously looking for answers, recruiting researchers, translators and assistants in America, Germany, Israel, Britain, the Netherlands, Poland and France. I also assembled nit-picking, adversarial researchers to challenge my findings. Everybody was sworn to secrecy. 
More than 100 people participated. They looked for key words: census, statistics, lists, registrations, railroads, punch cards. When they found them, the material was copied and sent to me. The search would have been impossible without modern computer technology, the internet and e-mail. 
Documents flowed in at the rate of 100 per day. Rudolf Cheim's eyewitness account from Belsen was one of the first to be found. 
I assembled more than 20,000 pages of documentation from 50 archives, library manuscript collections, museum files and other repositories. I had access to thousands of formerly classified documents from the State Department and the OSS (the precursor of the CIA), and to previously restricted government papers. 
We also scanned and translated more than 50 books and memoirs, as well as technical and scientific journals covering punch cards and statistics, Nazi publications and newspapers of the era. 
IBM rebuffed my requests for access to documents and interviews, but hundreds of IBM documents were placed at my disposal through an academic archive. 
Many of the IBM papers and notes were unsigned or undated carbons employing code words, catch phrases or corporate shorthand. I had to learn the company language to decipher them. 
All the documentation was cross-indexed by date and by topic - Warsaw ghetto, German census, Bulgarian railways, Auschwitz and so on. As many as six people at a time shuttled copies of documents from one stack to another from morning until midnight around my basement floor. 
Examined singly, none of the documents revealed the story. Putting all the thousands of jigsaw pieces together, however, I uncovered a profoundly uncomfortable story: IBM's conscious involvement - directly and through its subsidiaries - in the Holocaust, as well as its involvement in the Nazi war machine that murdered millions of others throughout Europe. 
From the very first moments, and throughout the 12 years of the Third Reich, IBM placed its technology at the disposal of Hitler's programme of destruction. 
His hatred of the Jews was the driving force behind the development of massively organised information as a means of social control, a weapon of war and a road map for group destruction. But his quest was greatly enhanced and energised by the ingenuity of IBM and Thomas J Watson, its autocratic chairman. For the first time in history, an anti-semite had automation on his side. 
IBM did not invent Germany's anti-semitism, but when Germany wanted to identify the Jews by name, IBM showed it how. When the Reich wanted to use that information to launch programmes of social expulsion and expropriation, IBM provided the means. When the trains had to run on time between concentration camps, IBM offered the solution. Ultimately, there was no solution that IBM would not devise for a Reich willing to pay for services rendered. 
Without IBM the Holocaust would have proceeded - as it often did proceed - with simple bullets, death marches and massacres based on pen-and-paper persecution. But automation and technology had a crucial role in the fantastic numbers Hitler murdered. 
How much did IBM know? Some of it the firm knew on a daily basis throughout the 12 years of the Reich. The worst of it IBM preferred not to know. "Don't ask, don't tell" was the order of the day. 
Yet IBM New York officials, and frequently the chairman's personal representatives, were almost constantly in Berlin or Geneva - the company's European headquarters - monitoring activities and ensuring that it was not cut out of any of the profits or business opportunities that Nazism presented. When US law made such direct contact illegal, IBM's Swiss office provided New York with continuous information and credible deniability. 
Watson micromanaged IBM's German subsidiary, which was known as Dehomag, and made it by far the most lucrative of the company's overseas assets, turning it into a prototype IBM Europe. 
Watson also defended the Reich against its critics and often visited Berlin, where the Nazis regarded him as a powerful friend (see next page). 
IBM maintains that Watson handed over control of the German subsidiary to German management in 1940 - as war raged in Europe - and thereafter had no control over it. 
This is incorrect. Dehomag was still part of the global IBM empire and Watson deployed lawyers, special emissaries and government intermediaries to protect his privileged and profitable position in Hitler's new world order. 
Despite the illusion of non-involvement, IBM New York continued to play a central role in the day-to-day operations of its subsidiaries. Company subsidiaries regularly traded with Axis-linked blacklisted firms in neutral countries and even directly with Germany and Italy. It was business as usual throughout the war. 
Once war was declared between America and Germany in December 1941 - and it became illegal for an American company to trade with Germany - the Reich authorities put a "custodian" in charge of Dehomag. Watson welcomed this, knowing that under the law of German enemy trusteeship the profits would be waiting when it was all over. 
He was confident that the Nazi receiver who took over Dehomag would do all in his power to run it profitably while serving the interests of the Reich. The receiver would make the hard decisions, probably in tandem with IBM subsidiaries in Sweden, Switzerland and other real or nominal neutral countries that were indispensable to Dehomag's supply lines. 
Other IBM subsidiaries in Latin America, Africa and the colonial lands of conquered European nations would also co-operate with Dehomag, but only through the most indirect and purely legal routes. Plausible deniability would be real. 
The revealing records would not be kept in New York but in Europe, where they could never be uncovered and examined. Nobody would ever be able to identify exactly what IBM New York did and did not know about Hitler's use of IBM technology. 
While IBM Europe thrived in enemy custody, executives in New York could still monitor events and exercise authority on the Continent through neutral country subsidiaries under their control. Special bureaucratic exemptions were regularly sought by IBM New York, or its subsidiaries, to continue or expand business dealings throughout occupied Europe. Official American demands that business be curtailed were often ignored. 
The official record was well-padded to protect IBM's legal position. From 1942 to 1945, IBM New York telegraphed uncharacteristically verbose and belaboured instructions to its managers in neutral Europe to repossess machines, stop trading with subsidiaries in enemy countries and terminate contracts with blacklisted firms. 
Each such instruction stood out as a veritable disquisition of deniability, laced with highly patriotic rationales for obeying the law against trading with the enemy. But when blacklists arrived, Watson's most trusted managers in Sweden and Switzerland would "get strangely busy", as one IBM internal probe later termed it. 
IBM's own internal reviews conceded that correspondence about its European businesses - primarily through its Geneva office - was often faked. Dates were falsified. Revised contract provisions were proffered to hide the facts. Misleading logs and chronologies were kept. In many instances, elaborate document trails in Europe were fabricated to demonstrate compliance when the opposite was true. The true record would be permanently obscured. 
Watson himself set the stage for IBM Europe's wartime conduct. In October 1941 he circulated instructions to all subsidiaries: "In view of world conditions, we cannot participate in the affairs of our companies in various countries as we did in normal times. Therefore you are advised that you will have to make your own decisions and not call on us for any advice or assistance until further notice." 
That instruction did not ask IBM executives to stop trading with the Hitler regime or to halt sales to the death camps, the war machine or any German occupying authority. Watson only asked his companies to stop informing the New York office about their activities. 
Although IBM worked so hard for deniability, there can be no denying the smoking gun revealed in IBM New York's correspondence with its Geneva office over one of the most brutal aspects of Germany's conquest of Europe - the Romanian census. It is worth looking closely at this episode. 
Romania had a murderously anti-semitic, pro-German regime under General Ion Antonescu. In January 1941, squads of Iron Guard militants rampaged through Bucharest massacring Jews. Many more died in the provinces. 
Senior Nazis, including Adolf Eichmann, believed the random acts of violence were "planless and premature", however. They favoured a more scientific approach that would systematically annihilate all of Romanian Jewry. 
Population estimates in Romania were wildly exaggerated. A census in 1930 had counted 756,930 individuals who routinely identified themselves as Jewish. German experts estimated that as many as half of Romania's Jewish citizens had since been murdered or deported, or had fled. Nonetheless, hysterical speculation in the Romanian press suggested as many as 2m Jews remained. Only a proper up-to-date census could answer what Nazi raceologists called "the Jewish question" there. 
This would be a comprehensive inventory of every individual, enterprise, farmland, building, profession, animal and asset in Romania. German statisticians and IBM would assist in every way. 
This Romanian business was not in Dehomag's portfolio. It was an enterprise of IBM New York. Watson had been preparing for it for years with frequent delays. 
Because the census involved virtually every aspect of Romanian life, extra IBM machines were needed. There were as many as 17 in Poland, where they had been used devastatingly against the Polish Jews. But Dehomag in Berlin would not move them without an order from the company. 
In the autumn of 1941 - when the Nazis had most of Europe at their feet - Werner Lier, IBM's Geneva-based European manager, went to Berlin at New York's request. Afterwards he wrote to Watson that he had "settled" the Romanian census problem. He also wrote to Harrison Chauncey, one of Watson's top aides, giving details of how he had solved it. 
IBM's best contact in Berlin, Sam Woods, the American commercial attaché, had put him in touch with the Romanian embassy in the hope that its diplomats could use their connection with Reich offices in occupied Poland to forward the machines through the war zone. 
"Thanks to Mr Woods," Lier reported to Chauncey, "I obtained an interview with the Romanian commercial attaché who immediately endeavoured to obtain the freeing of approximately 17 machines at present blocked in Poland from the Devisenstelle [foreign currency office] and the German authorities." 
Lier added that due to uncertainty about the specifications for the machines needed in Bucharest, he agreed that a senior Dehomag census expert should go there with an official of the German statistical office to analyse the matter. 
In other words, IBM, Dehomag and the Nazis were still working closely together on a project to identify and persecute Jews. 
Questions designed to pinpoint so-called "race Jews" were included in the Romanian census. Even the commercial ownership survey solicited responses from businessmen about any Jewish partners or employees. The mass of overlapping data would enable IBM tabulators to triangulate on the intended target: anyone of Jewish ancestry, even if the person were unaware of it. 
Although aspects of the census were orderly - the women hired to punch the cards were mainly high-school graduates, which was thought to increase accuracy - it was associated with scenes of terrible violence. 
In the city of Iasi, thousands of Jews were dragged from their homes, many still in their sleepwear. For several days German and Romanian policemen and soldiers, as well as mobs, perpetrated unspeakable violence. Corpses began piling onto the streets as Jews were clubbed to death with metal bars, rifles and rocks. Infants were not spared. Thousands more were loaded onto death trains, where they would be murdered. As many as 13,000 lost their lives. 
The statistics on Jews yielded a total of 375,422 Jews still surviving in Romania in 1941. By the end of the war, after a bloody series of Romanian-German executions and deprivations, more than 270,000 Jews had been killed or starved. 
LIER was not just active in Romania. His correspondence with IBM New York revealed that he had been to see Dehomag officials in Berlin in September 1941 to discuss "giving a more German appearance to the firm, this more apparent than real", and to set up a telephone call between a Dehomag director and Watson. 
As IBM's top officer in Europe, Lier was involved with almost every transaction in every occupied country throughout the war. It is clear from IBM's own documents that he was distrusted in some quarters at head office. But despite IBM's internal reviews summarising a pattern of improprieties, Watson allowed him to continue at his pivotal post. 
All the facts surrounding IBM's cloudy dealings in Geneva will probably never come to light, but this much became clear at the time: once the war ended, Lier would need to disappear from Geneva in a hurry. He had been the focus of many rumours. One story hinted that he was wanted for bending the financial statutes. 
Commercial officers at the American legation in Berne were reluctant to grant him a temporary visa to enter the United States on the grounds that this might be "detrimental to the public safety". Butthey were overruled by Sam Wood, the new consul-general, who in 1941 had helped to solve IBM's Romanian problem. 
When the second world war ended in Europe on May 8, 1945, IBM rushed in to recover its machines and bank accounts from enemy territory. 
Millions in blocked bank accounts scattered across Europe were waiting for the firm, as well as real estate, numerous Hitler-era factories and presses, and thousands of Hollerith machines. Much of this had been funded by the Third Reich from slave labour, plunder and genocide. 
Dehomag emerged from the Hitler years with relatively little damage and almost ready to resume business as usual. Its machines had been salvaged, its profits preserved and its corporate value protected. 
Just as Watson had envisioned, Hermann Fellinger, its German custodian, had functioned with as much commercial zeal and dedication as any senior executive he could have personally selected. 
Fellinger had proved to be the perfect solution to the predicament of a business alliance with the Third Reich while America was fighting a war with Germany. 
But that was not all. There was more money to be made. The Americans and the British were keen to maintain Germany's IBM equipment intact so as to facilitate the occupation. 
Company employees serving in the American army's machine record units kept Watson personally informed of the IBM machines they had seized from the German forces and reported to him on contacts with Dehomag personnel. 
IBM New York was able to recover its machines, charge for their use by the victors and quietly assimilate the wartime profits - which have remained a company secret to this day. 
© Edwin Black 2001 
Extracted from IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black, published by Little, Brown for £20. Copies can be obtained for £18 from The Sunday Times Books Direct on 0870 165 8585; www.sundaytimesdirect.co.uk 	
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To This Point

The Sunday Times

News Review
11th. February 2000

IBM's origins lay in Germany and it offered the perfect solution for a regime trying to keep records on millions 	
	
Custom made for the Reich 

IBM's guilty past

IBM was born German. Its technology was invented in the 1880s by Herman Hollerith, a German-American living in Washington. 
Hollerith became very rich, but a dispute with the US Census Bureau, which used his technology, led him to sell up in 1911. 
Enter Thomas Watson, a former sewing machine salesman, who transformed Hollerith's business into the International Business Machines Corporation, "a great worldwide institution that is going on for ever", as he put it. 
A paternalist who had a company anthem written extolling his sterling virtues, Watson also had a reputation for ruthlessness. In 1922, Dehomag (Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen Gesellschaft), a German company that used Hollerith's technology under licence, was unable to pay its fees because of the collapse of the German currency. Watson seized control of it. 
This was crucial to what would follow. Watson's connection to Germany set the stage for IBM's technological and economic alliance with the Third Reich. 
Under Watson's close supervision, the German subsidiary far outshone IBM's other overseas subsidiaries. By 1933, the year Hitler came to power, it was turning in a spectacular financial performance, more than three times its quota. 
There seemed to be fantastic profits to be made in Germany. IBM was already on its way to doubling in size by providing technology for President Franklin Roosevelt's interventionist new administration. Nazi Germany offered Watson the opportunity to cater to government control, supervision, surveillance and regimentation on a plane never known. 
Before the Nazis could fulfil their aim of destroying Germany's 600,000-member Jewish community, the Jews had to be identified - and to the Nazis, Jews were anyone of Jewish blood, regardless of assimilation, intermarriage or even conversion to Christianity. 
Since the first world war, European population shifts and dislocations had brought many more Jews to Germany, especially from Poland. Nobody knew how many there were, where they lived or what jobs they held. Most of all, nobody knew their names. 
To search generations of communal, church and governmental records all across Germany - and later throughout Europe - for Jewish bloodlines would involve a monumental amount of cross-indexing. 
The mass movement of Jews out of their homes and into ghettos was also a prodigious challenge. Transporting them out of the ghettos along railway lines and into death camps - with timing so precise that the victims were able to walk right out of the cattle truck and into a waiting gas chamber - demanded complex co-ordination. All these tasks called for a computer. No computer existed, but IBM had its Hollerith punch card and card-sorting system. For the first time in history, an anti-semite had automation on his side. 
IBM Germany invented the racial census - listing not just religious affiliations but bloodlines going back generations. Using its own staff and equipment, it designed, executed and supplied the technological assistance that Hitler's Third Reich needed to accomplish what had never been done before: the automation of human destruction. 
Primarily through its German subsidiary IBM made Hitler's programme of destruction of the Jews a technological mission, which it pursued with chilling success. 
Its first contract with the Nazi regime was to analyse the 1933 census in Prussia, Germany's largest state. A Dehomag consultant wrote to Watson: "We now have the chance to demonstrate what we are capable to do [sic]." 
Previous German censuses had taken years to analyse. Dehomag had a four-month deadline. Its 450 data punchers - housed in a huge hall at the Prussian state statistical office in the Alexanderplatz, Berlin - transferred information from census questionnaires to punch cards at a rate of 450,000 a day. 
When Jews were discovered special "Jewish counting cards" were processed separately. 
Then came the awesome sorting and re-sorting process for 25 categories of information cross-indexed and filtered through as many as 35 separate operations - by profession, residence, national origin and other traits. This was all correlated with information from land registers, community lists and church authorities to create a fantastic new database. What emerged was a profession-by-profession, city-by-city, block-by-block map of the Jewish presence. Anti-Jewish legislation and decrees restricting Jews from academic, professional, governmental and commercial life would be buttressed by this ability to target Jews by name. 
By cross-sorting the Jews revealed in column 22, row three with Polish speakers identified in columns 26 and 27, row 10, the Reich was able to identify the so-called eastern Jews, primarily from Poland, who would be its first targets for persecution. 
While other foreign companies fled the Reich's violence and anti-semitism, Watson moved swiftly to enlarge IBM's presence. 
He increased investment in Dehomag and decided to build IBM's first German factory. He also ensured that Dehomag would pay no Reich profits taxes. 
As the Reich's demand for IBM technology grew, more than 2,000 multi-machine punch card systems were dispatched throughout Germany - and, ultimately, thousands more throughout German-dominated Europe. 
Dehomag did not simply sell the machines to the Reich and then walk away. The machines were leased and regularly maintained and upgraded by IBM staff. 
Dehomag custom-designed the complex devices and specialised applications. Like software designers today, its technicians sent mock-ups of punch cards to Reich offices until the data columns were acceptable. 
The machines were serviced on site about once a month, even when that site was in or near a concentration camp. IBM's German headquarters in Berlin maintained duplicates of many code books, much as any IBM service bureau today would maintain data backups for computers. IBM subsidiaries trained Nazi officers and their surrogates, set up branch offices and local dealerships throughout Nazi Europe, staffed by a revolving door of IBM employees, and scoured paper mills to produce as many as 1.5 billion punch cards a year in Germany alone. 
IBM saw no moral dilemma in this. It simply saw Hitler as a valuable trading ally. It was dazzled by the technical possibilities and gripped by an amoral corporate mantra: if it can be done, it should be done. 
Watson was no fascist. But the accretion of wealth by, and for, the state under a strong autocratic leader fortified by nationalism and hero worship was appealing to him. His own workers wore IBM uniforms, sang IBM songs and were expected to display unquestioning loyalty. 
Watson travelled to Germany regularly during the 1930s for first-hand information about the Reich. He wrote to the German finance minister extolling the "heroic sacrifices of the German people and the greatest achievements of their present leadership". 
The Nazis greatly valued their unexpected and influential ally, who, having donated large sums to Roosevelt's presidential campaign, had entrée to the White House. Roosevelt offered to make him ambassador to Britain, but he declined to leave IBM. 
PICTURE Removed for ease of download
Unholy alliance: Watson, boss of IBM, with Hitler. The punch card and card-sorting machines allowed German politicians and soldiers to identify Jews 

In 1937 he met Hitler over tea in the Reich chancellery, was feted at a banquet by Hermann Göring and other top Nazis, and was decorated with the Merit Cross of the German Eagle with Star - the highest medal Hitler could bestow on a non-German. 
His first interest was commercial, however. He micromanaged Dehomag, and his personal representatives monitored the company on-site for months at a time. There was also continuous supervision by executives in the Swiss branch of IBM in Geneva, which became the all-important nexus for instructions, profit funnelling and Continent-wide co-ordination in support of Dehomag's activities throughout Europe. 
As a result, IBM had an hour-by-hour grasp of the most vital issues facing the subsidiary's relations with the Nazi regime. 
After Kristallnacht, the orgy of destruction against the Jews in November 1938, Watson began inserting corporate distance between himself and the affairs of his subsidiaries in Nazi Europe. He continued to oversee day-to-day operations, however, through lawyers and employees acting as nominee owners. 
The outbreak of war in September 1939 brought a boom in profits thanks to the German war machine's use of IBM technology. IBM executives in New York marvelled as the numbers rose, notably in December 1939 as SS squads armed with Hollerith lists rounded up Jews in Poland. 
The American government, however, was by now openly anti-Nazi - and IBM was under scrutiny for its Nazi connections. The company had become a virtual way station for German nationals moving in and out of New York for training, meetings and conferences. A number of German nationals were stationed at IBM offices in the United States. 
For years Watson had avoided criticising the Hitler regime, but he could not allow his position as a patriot to be compromised. 
In early June 1940, while the FBI investigation was under way, German bombers ravaged Paris, and the American ambassador narrowly missed death when a bomb landed near him but failed to explode. Some 2,000 German tanks were rolling towards the city and bombers were hitting the British coastline. 
Rumours circulated in American papers that the names and addresses of all Jews living in Holland were in the hands of Nazi agents, who were rounding them up and shooting them. 
Watson wrote a reluctant letter to Adolf Hitler, publicly returning his Merit Cross. 
The Nazis were furious but realised that, unless they continued to do business with IBM, the whole data system on which the Nazi economy and war effort relied would quickly grind to a halt. 
	
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SilentMajority nor any associate thereof does NOT vouch for the veracity of the documents hosted on its site or CD nor any foreign language documents thereon & advises you consult your own solicitor on legal details as we do not accept liability for nor presume to give legal advice ourselves.
For a copy of the CD please mail payment of £20.00 for UK deliver or £25.00 for ALL other Countries payable to:
Greg Lance – Watkins,
Glance Back Books,
17 Upper Church Street,
CHEPSTOW,
NP16 5EX
Monmouthshire,
GREAT BRITAIN
For delivery of 2 x CDs
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To This Point

The Sunday Times

News Review
11th. February 2000
February 11 2001
UNITED STATES

PICTURE Removed for ease of download
Technical assistance: even after the war began the IBM chairman Thomas J Watson, above, allegedly oversaw the company's German subsidiary, whose card-index system was used by the Nazis 
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." 
PICTURE Removed for ease of download
IBM's card-index system helped the Nazis to list Jews 
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." 
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Technical assistance: the Nazis used the IBM punch card and card-sorting system 
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". 
	
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