IBM and the holocaust

The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation

The title of Edwin Black's book is jarring not because we believe that the horrors of the Holocaust are beyond a large, prosperous corporation but because "IBM" and "Holocaust" seem to be words from different eras. IBM conjures images of the modern office, personal computers, and Internet connections --- the leader of what we have dubbed our own Information Age. IBM seems alienated even from its full name, International Business Machines, and certainly a world away from barbed wire, locked cattle cars, ghettos, and gas chambers. But as IBM AND THE HOLOCAUST by Edwin Black reveals, the world that IBM and the Third Reich occupied in the 1930s and 40s was a terrifyingly small place where corporate America not only tolerated Nazi policies, but may have profited from them.

Black has assembled government files, IBM letters and correspondence as well as newspaper headlines from the period to form his argument. He asserts that one of America's most powerful corporations willingly supplied the Nazis with technology that organized, tabulated, and analyzed population data --- making possible mass deportations and executions.