Corporate Guilt Exaggerated
JAMES, HAROLD
Corporate Guilt Exaggerated IBM and the Holocaust By Edwin Black Crown. 519 pp. $27.50. Reviewed by Harold James Professor of History, Princeton University THE CRIME of the 20th century...
...Nor do the book's accusations carry much conviction...
...In other countries occupied by the Germans or allied to the Third Reich, censuses were used even more directly for providing lists of persons to be deported and killed...
...But there is no evidence to support this contention...
...Second, the machines played an important role in Germany's organizing its War economy, including the creation of timetables for trains used in Holocaust deportations...
...Individual parts of the bureaucracy had visions of technical efficiency, but they were only partially realized...
...There is a doubly uncomfortable side to IBM's wartime operations: Not only was a major U.S...
...In addition, the required punch cards were available exclusively from affiliated companies, further preserving IBM's dominance...
...Black ominously reports, too, that Fortune magazine "referred to Watson as the Leader with a capital L," a gesture he tenuously equates with references to Hitler as Der Fährer...
...An interesting discussion might be had about the room for maneuver and choice by individual managers within a large corporation, but that is too subtle a subject for Black to tackle in a work of condemnation...
...Customers such as Krupp, Siemens and the Deutsche Bank were able to reduce their operating costs and clerical staffs by as much as a half...
...In general, the book demonstrates how the company's political muscle and range of contacts in the United States allowed it to continue functioning abroad...
...Some uniforms were brown...
...Its employees certainly promoted their ability to classify populations both racially and in terms of workers' particular skills...
...Widely used initially in the 1890 U.S...
...Often he creates an impression of guilt by the mere juxtaposition of sentences...
...When it had trouble with its German subsidiary in 1941, it turned to the commercial attaché at the U.S...
...IBM companies in Germany and the countries it occupied were put under German administrators, who, because of the technical skills required, were frequently IBM employees...
...it also blurs the distinction between the moral indifference of technological corporatism and the intense immorality of the Nazis...
...And it is the core of the case made in IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black, who aims to demonstrate that "the dawn of the Information Age began at the sunset of human decency...
...After the United States entered the War on December 7, 1941, the issue of knowledge, control and responsibility takes a more political form...
...Now, throughout the globe IBM-owned subsidiaries (many having Watson in their name) produced the system, but they only leased it...
...Reviewed by Harold James Professor of History, Princeton University THE CRIME of the 20th century was the work of an advanced industrial country, accomplished with the machinery of the modern age...
...For example, a paragraph on Yugoslavia ends: "The area's most savage concentration camp was at Jasenovac, where unspeakable crimes were committed by Ustaschi guards...
...The inventor of the machine and process was an American named Herman Hollerith...
...Some were blue...
...Embassy in Bern, helped the manager of IBM Europe, then wanted in Switzerland, flee to the United States...
...One of the most striking features of the way IBM New York kept contact and control over its European operations was its access to U.S...
...diplomatic channels...
...Each different use entailed adjustments that had to be made by the company...
...After the War, those contacts made sure that IBM could reclaim its machines as "American owned," and that its managers were not tried for their contribution to the Nazi enterprise...
...Without new technology, the Nazi genocide couldnot have been implemented with such relentless brutality...
...Third, the Holleriths kept track of the concentration camp inmates turned into slave laborers...
...Despite the author's claims in the Introduction about drawing on large quantities of documents, his charges cannot be verified...
...The next paragraph starts, "Hitler also wanted Poland...
...These are the features that appealed to the technocratic desk-killers of the SS, who saw the machines as offering a perfect application of social management along eugenic lines...
...The following paragraph begins: "Despite any horrors, IBM continued its thriving enterprise in Yugoslavia....' At other points, rhetorical ploys are used to suggest that IBM was a sort of evil empire parallel to that of the Nazis...
...This is not simply sensationalist...
...Hitler's Germany began achieving undreamed of efficiencies," Black writes...
...The clearest example was Romania, where an April 1941 census was followed in June by the start of deportations...
...Prior to selling his own company to the firm that later became IBM, Hollerith licensed his machine for use in Germany...
...In 1937 he arranged to have the International Chamber of Commerce, an organization he virtually controlled, meet in Berlin...
...The critical question, of course, is how much did IBM know about the uses to which its machines were put...
...In fact, the German economy under the Nazis was not particularly efficient, and there is considerable literature on the competinghierarchiesfightingrurf wars...
...Although documents he cites are footnoted as being in "IBM Files" or in the National Archives Record Group 60 or 84, it is nearly impossible to check the references, since the record groups each contain tens of thousands of boxes of papers...
...All this notwithstanding, IBM and the Holocaust makes the punch card machinery more central to the Nazi War effort than the historical record warrants...
...Jasenovac was situated on the BelgradeZagreb railroad line...
...This connection between technology and crime is often used as a weapon by an environmentalist lobby seeking to portray the evil of industrial efficiency...
...corporation apparently trading enthusiastically with the enemy, but it was supported fully by the U. S. government...
...Embassy in Berlin...
...The message conveyed in such passages, that participating in a big company is the functional equivalent of being a Nazi criminal, is absurd...
...Census, these pre-computer devices could perform amazing feats of sorting and tabulation...
...Though U.S...
...In the mid-1930s, IBM persuaded the Polish Post Office to use its machines...
...During the hyperinflation following World War I, IBM bought the licensee and thereby acquired the Hollerith rights in Germany...
...law barred American firms from communicating with organizations in enemy territories, regulations that IBM New York observed punctiliously, IBM Europe's headquarters in neutral Switzerland regularly corresponded with and arranged for the shipment of components to firms in Germanoccupied regions...
...Watson would have Poland again," concludes one paragraph...
...First, the latest Hollerith machines were employed to collect census data in 1933 and 1939, with the '39 punch cards identifying subjects according to the Nuremberg Laws' racial definitions...
...IBM and the Nazi party had bonded...
...IBM helped Hitler and the Nazis in three important ways...
...By frequently taking the technologists' claims at face value, it presents the Hollerith as the prime source of a technical miracle that made the War economy possible...
...In the end, what has been promoted as a sober analysis of the division of responsibility for Nazi crimes between the private and the public sector emerges as a denunciation of capitalist corporatism...
...His polemic tends to be overstated and marked by exaggerated rhetorical effects...
...Black's tone is not helpful in reaching a verdict either...
...Indeed, Black himself tells us that the Reichssicherheitshauptamt Race and Settlement Office, the sinister institution at the center of the campaign to kill all European Jews, did not install the Hollerith machine it requested until 1943...
...During the 1930s, Watson was something of a hero in Germany (in an exaggeration that is characteristic of the book, Black calls him "Hitler's favorite capitalist...
...Long before World War II, under the charismatic direction of Thomas J. Watson, International Business Machines cornered the market for punch card machines...
...In 1945 the same man, working at the U.S...
...This seems innocent enough, but Black's language evokes a more insidious plot...
...Moreover, unlike the modern Excel spreadsheet, Holleriths could not be easily adapted for any particular purpose...
...Swastikas and corporate slogans had found their common ground...
...Black's book includes illustrations of handwritten index cards that had a space to be checked once a prisoner's record was punch-coded...
...The reward was a medal presented to him by Hitler, as well as the continuation and expansion of IBM's German business opportunities...
Vol. 84 • March 2001 • No. 2
