Every day I continue to receive emotional emails and letters from Christians, Jews, and others from all over the world, giving thanks for the information in the book and deploring IBM’s past involvement and its continued silence. One gentleman wrote, “For days now, I have not slept well since reading your book. This is my fourth reading. I am haunted by the image of IBM working with the Nazis to schedule trains to gas chambers.”
Not a few are from thankful current or former IBM employees who admit that rumors circulated around the company for years. The descendant of one key IBM official mentioned in the book remembered innocently playing with Nazi punch cards as a child, and wrote, “Your book will never leave me. So many hands stained, I am sorry that my family name played a major role in what is history’s greatest wrong—perished innocent people…. Thank you for taking the painstaking efforts to uncover both of our families’ history.”
During my speaking events, the audiences are angry and emotional. These people demand answers from IBM. But answers have yet to come.
Worse, in place of answers, IBM’s Makovich offers tortured tautologies. For example, she told the C-Net Internet news service: “As far as we know, the nature of the contacts between IBM executives and German government officials during the 1930s were similar to those with other government officials in other countries and consistent with IBM practices in the various countries in which the company did business during that era.”
More than that, Makovich has quietly plied the media with a twelve-page background fax or email of distraction, misinformation, unverified information, and negative reviews. As reviewers and reporters on tight deadlines digest the conflicting information, and weave it into their work, IBM’s method has cultivated some confusion. It seems that the most important thing for IBM is not clarity, but confusion about its activities. The more confusion IBM engenders, the more ambiguous its role might become. Fortunately, that has generally not been the case. Some 400 public reviews and commentaries by respected historians and reviewers have lauded the book, despite the misinformation in IBM’s campaign. Scores of these public reviews have been posted to my website, www.edwinblack.com.
But it is true that a small number of historians—about a dozen—have been unduly defensive. We fully anticipated that some historians would react this way. After all, 15 million people had seen the machine at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., and no one had yet connected the dots. Few even tried. In my introduction, I clearly wrote, “Historians should not be defensive about the absence of even a mention [about IBM’s role in the Holocaust].” I always understood that the task required a special combination of Holocaust knowledge with an emphasis on Hitler-era finance, added to information-technology expertise, sifted through the dogged techniques of an investigative reporter. Instead of using the book’s revelations as a springboard for additional research, several esteemed but embarrassed historians sought to defensively find excuses to deny its findings.
Like Holocaust denial, Hollerith denial requires meticulous documentation to refute. But in both cases, the sad facts of Hitler’s solutions are inescapable. For example, one elderly, eminent, but highly defensive Holocaust historian who had not read the full book opined in a Frankfurter Rundschau interview that Hollerith machines were mainly used for census during the Hitler years, and the ghettos and Jewish organizations had no such machines. In his many respected books, this historian had never mentioned the topic, and indeed the gentleman had no grasp on the technology. The newspaper subsequently published my corrections that the main use was not census—which occurred only once every five or ten years in any country, but the customized financial, statistical, railroad, and inventory management that clicked ceaselessly hour to hour throughout Europe during the Hitler era. Moreover, published Frankfurter Rundschau, the technology did not require on-site machines. For example, some 41 million census forms from across Ger many were trucked into one central office at Alexanderplatz in Berlin. Many concentration camps operated Hollerith Departments with no machines; they simply messenged their punch cards or coded paper forms to Berlin or Oranienburg for processing.
One prominent American business magazine published an ad hominem and vitriolic review by a Reich-era business historian who tried his best to defend IBM. The review asserted, “When data processors finally appeared at some forced labor camps… they had little effect on the fates of the inmates.” It is hard to envision a program named Extermination by Labor that has “little effect on the fates of the inmates.” The misinformed reviewer then clamored that the SS Race and Settlement Office did not even receive its machines until 1943, as though this marginal agency was somehow vital to the extermination effort. Few know that the obscure SS Race and Settlement Office was a screening service for adoptions and marriages by SS officers, which is why it did not receive a machine until 1943, a point my book makes in two separate chapters. The Race and Settlement Office is so marginal, its work is unmentioned in virtually every standard Holocaust reference. The reviewer even tried to excuse Watson’s collaboration, writing, “Unless Watson was prepared to write off his assets in Germany… he had little choice but to put the best face on happenings there, or to bite his tongue, and cultivate good relations with German leaders.”
The review in that business magazine was immediately condemned by the Anti-Defamation League as “morally bankrupt,” and they added that it “not only distorts the historical facts of the period, but virtually argues in favor of commercial collaboration with the Nazis…. Millions of dispossessed and exterminated Jews, had they known, would have hoped a major American corporation would have foregone the pursuit of these profits.” The business magazine promptly published my rebuttal, linked it and my own website to the archival article on its website, and then ran a second laudatory review, declaring, “With exhaustive research, Black makes the case that IBM and Watson conspired with Nazi Germany to help automate the genocide of Europe’s Jews.” The turnabout was obvious, but that did not stop IBM from continually distributing the first condemned review—and not the second—to other reviewers and inquiring historians.
Defensive and misinformed conclusions and analysis are one thing, but I was astonished when a few eminent historians published—or tried to publish—highly detailed information out of thin air without a single document to justify it. For example, one esteemed reviewer in a major New York daily wrote with great authority that machines at Dachau were only used for payroll, or that they were installed at Buchenwald in August 1944 but then destroyed weeks later. I launched an international effort to locate even one document to support these groundless statements. The result was new discoveries (see the Afterword), which only deepened the original book’s findings. Wary of publishing false Holocaust information devoid of any basis in fact, the managing editor of the New York daily asked the book review editor and the reviewer to provide documents to support the statements. When no primary, secondary, or even tertiary documentation was forthcoming, the newspaper published my letter stating that the review “relies on many startling misstatements of known historical documentation. Several researchers have checked records in Germany and America, attempting to verify… [the reviewer’s] claims about Hollerith machines. We have been unable to locate a single historian, survivor, archivist, or editor anywhere who can produce even one Nazi-era document, oral testimony, or memoir to support” the assertions.