Reply #4: Interview with Edwin Black, author of 'IBM and the Holocaust'

[scottxyz]

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What was this relationship about then? Money? Was IBM aware of what the Nazis were going to be using the technology for?

IBM was of course aware of what the technology was being used for because they had to ask not only what information was to go into a punch card application, but what information the Nazis wanted to bring out of it. And so IBM had to basically find out what its clients wanted to have at the end of this process. And if the answer was to identify the number of Polish Jews in Berlin who were in the fur trade by coding a Jew in one column, and a person of Polish descent in another column, and a resident of Berlin in a third column and being in the fur trade in a fourth column, by cross-tabulating 24,000 cards per hour the Reich could quickly identify exactly how many Jews in Berlin of Polish extraction were engaged in the fur trade. That’s the velocity that IBM brought to Adolf Hitler. They began in 1933 and they covered all six phases of the Holocaust: the identification of the Jews, the social expulsion, the confiscation of their assets, the ghetto-ization of their communities, their deportation and finally, their extermination.

How known or unknown was the relationship between the Third Reich and IBM to the international public at the time?

It was very known because Thomas J. Watson, the President of IBM, was the world’s leading advocate, if you will, of conducting business with the Third Reich. He was the president of the International Chamber of Commerce. In 1937 Watson received a medal from Hitler- second highest medal awardable by Hitler- for his contribution to the Reich and basically he was interested in bringing more business to the Nazi regime because the more business that was brought to Nazi Germany, the more punch cards and machines could be produced by IBM for its Nazi clients and those who were catering to the Nazi regime. In addition, you should understand that all of the Nazi atrocities which were before the war, in terms of persecution, were vastly headlined in the newspapers of the day and my book explicitly quotes the front page of the New York Times continuously because this is the newspaper that Thomas Watson and IBM was reading.

And so, Thomas Watson, like everyone else in the United States, was aware that Adolf Hitler was persecuting the Jews, stealing their assets and getting them ready for the worst forms of physical destruction, even extermination....

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