Synopses & Reviews
Published to extraordinary praise, this provocative international bestseller details the story of IBM’s strategic alliance with Nazi Germany. IBM and the Holocaust provides a chilling investigation into corporate complicity, and the atrocities witnessed raise startling questions that throw IBM’s wartime ethics into serious doubt. Edwin Black’s monumental research exposes how IBM and its subsidiaries helped create enabling technologies for the Nazis, step-by-step, from the identification and cataloging programs of the 1930s to the selections of the 1940s. With a new afterword, the publishing event of last year is certain to generate even more controversy.
Review
"You are Thomas Watson, the founder of IBM, and you face a choice. Hitler has just come to power in Germany, and you are considering whether to direct your German subsidiary, Dehomag, to bid for the job of tabulating the results of a census the Nazi government wants to conduct. While you are making up your mind in your New York office, the local papers swell with stories of anti-Semitic outrages committed by that government. On March 18, 1933, The New York Times reports that the Nazis have ousted all Jewish professionals lawyers, doctors, teachers from their jobs. A front-page story under the headline "German Fugitives Tell of Atrocities at Hands of Nazis" describes Brown Shirts dragging Jews out of a Berlin restaurant and forcing them to run a gauntlet of kicks and blows such that..." Jack Beatty, Atlantic Online (read the )