Virgile was released briefly, but then re-arrested on September 19 along with CEC Assistant Sales Manager Pierre Bastard. Other CEC officials feared they would be arrested as well. The American Embassy was notified and an urgent cable was sent to Watson. During the next few weeks, efforts to obtain the release of CEC staffers were unsuccessful. Watson was kept informed.71
By October 17, 1944, William Borel, who had been appointed interim manager, wired Watson through the Embassy that IBM staffers were still in jail. “With your intervention, we sincerely hope that the company will soon be operating normally. Two days later, Borel cabled Watson again that key people were “investigating situation which appears to have several angles. Everything is being done to clarify the whole matter.”
Shortly thereafter, IBMers were suddenly released. Lavoegie resigned and Virgile took leave from the company. No charges were ever preferred. CEC resumed normal business by November 2, 1944. Even though General Ruling 11 was still in effect, the subsidiary began sending IBM NY copies of new orders through “various channels.”72
About a year later, Captain Gamzon, a Jewish officer from the French resistance was speaking to the United Jewish Appeal charity in New York. The UJA was raising funds to assist decimated Jewish populations in Europe. The New York Times reported his remarks under the headline “Jews in France Saved by Others.” The article reported, “Almost all surviving Jews in France owe their lives to non-Jews who risked everything to save them from the Nazis when they overran and occupied that country…. Captain Gamzon, a former leader of the Maquis of France… told the delegates that it can be said without exaggeration that any Jew now living in France has been saved at one time or another by a non-Jew—by the police, who made believe they did not see those wanted by the Nazis, and by others; many of them French officials who furnished false ration and identification cards to Jews who were successfully hidden in the various districts. The children specially have been saved, he said, by a people touched and saddened by the deportation of entire families.”73
Captain Gamzon stressed that 25,000 families were lost. But so many more were saved due to the heroism and sacrifice of the resistance. He saluted the men and women of the underground, people who had been tortured and deported to concentration camps, but never cracked. Rene Carmille was not there to hear those words. Carmille was one of the valiant who died in Dachau rather than make the punch cards work.74
It took more than a year of petitions through the State Department, but IBM was able to recover all of its French machines from across Europe. Eventually, it secured all the money in its bank accounts at Credit Lyonnais. With the Holleriths back and the money recouped, the war was over for IBM France.75
SWITZERLAND WAS the commercial nexus of World War II. Its famous financial secrecy laws, neutrality, and willingness to trade with enemies made Switzerland the Reich’s preferred repository for pilfered assets and a switch-board for Nazi-era commercial intrigue. In 1935, when talk of war in Europe became pervasive, Watson moved the company’s European headquarters from Paris to Geneva. Doing business with Nazi Europe via Geneva involved a constant ebb and flow of incoherent blacklist enforcement and acquiescence by American commercial attaches. Deals and denials characterized virtually the length and breadth of IBM’s presence in Geneva.76
Murky transactions were fundamentally untraceable since they could filter through a maze of banks or their branches, many of them newly created by Germany, scattered across occupied and neutral countries. New York branches of Swiss banks only complicated the trail, prompting Treasury officials in Washington to dispatch squads of investigators to Manhattan seeking evidence of trade with the enemy.77
Information even reached the Treasury that IBM might help establish its own international bank to link Nazi and American economic interests, thus only further obscuring Reich transactions and financing projects. In early 1942, the Treasury Department’s Monetary Research Division moved quickly to block any such initiative. On July 13, 1942, Acting Treasury Secretary D. W. Bell took the unusual precaution of contacting Watson directly to stymie the possibility. Watson quickly declared neither he nor his company were involved in the enterprise, directly or through surrogates. For emphasis Acting Secretary Bell sent Watson an extraordinary, almost accusatory acknowledgment of his declaration: “Treasury takes note of your statement that the International Business Machines Corporation has no knowledge of any plan for the formation of an inter-continental credit bank financed jointly by American, French, and German capital. The Treasury also acknowledges your statement that the International Business Machines Corporation has not authorized and will not authorize anyone to act for it in the formation of such a bank.”78
Bell added this clear warning to Watson: “You are, of course, aware that any action in connection with such a bank would be illegal unless done in conformity with the provisions of the Trading with the Enemy Act and Foreign Funds Control.”79
Watson snapped back to Bell with a rare one-sentence letter: “Referring to the last paragraph of your letter of July 13, I was aware that the plans were illegal and that is why I wanted the Treasury Department to know that no one with our company had discussed or had anything to do with the proposition.”80
Any illusion that IBM NY would not receive regular reports from its European agents about the most detailed operational vicissitudes was contradicted by the numerous Monthly Narratives, quarterly financial reports, and special punch card requests funneled through Sweden, Switzerland, Spain, and America’s own diplomatic pouches.81
Certainly, the record was well-papered to protect IBM’s legal position. From 1942 to 1945, IBM NY would wire uncharacteristically verbose and belabored instructions to its managers in neutral Europe to repossess machines, stop trading with subsidiaries in enemy countries, and terminate contracts with blacklisted firms.82 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 termed it. Or managers would ignore New York’s lengthy tractates to stop direct trading with Axis nations—sometimes delaying more than a year. In the case of IBM in Sweden, a Department of Justice investigator recorded that it was not until April 1943, more than one year after Swedish manager Tag Lundberg first received instructions to “cease trading with the enemy,” that the wholly-owned subsidiary complied with an explicit order from New York.83 In many instances, elaborate document trails in Europe were fabricated to demonstrate compliance when the opposite was true.84 Nonetheless, the true record would be permanently obscured.
During the war years, IBM’s own internal reviews conceded that correspondence about its European business primarily through its Geneva office was often faked.85 Dates were falsified.86 Revised contract provisions were proffered to hide the true facts.87 Misleading logs and chronologies were kept.88