IBM and the Holocaust

by Edwin Black

  There is a point here. IBM and the Holocaust was not—and could not—be created in isolation. I invited an unprecedented level of pre-publication review and authentication by scores of independent sources—all at my unwavering insistence. It was expensive, cumbersome, tedious, and frequently a nerve-wracking, twenty-four-hours-per-day undertaking for my publishers; my agent, Lynne Rabinoff; my seasoned, original editor at Crown Publishing, Douglas Pepper; and myself. But in the end, we could all declare that we had exercised every ounce of prudence humanly possible—and then some.

  Books had been pre-positioned in stores worldwide in unlabeled boxes, with warnings that they could not be opened until February 12, 2001.

  Then came the leak—it was exactly the type of vague and misleading message we were hoping to avoid. And it was pervasive. Far from an errant book store, or a reporter jumping the gun—the source of the leak was where I always expected: IBM itself.

  Days before February 12, IBM broadcasted a global e-mail to its more than 300,000 employees, warning that the book would soon be released and that it would evoke “painful” topics about IBM’s involvement in the Holocaust. Copies of the e-mail were circulated to major news outlets around the world. That warning was followed by a carefully crafted statement: “IBM does not have much information about this period or the operations of Dehomag.” Then a steady campaign of misinformation began.

  IBM always knew I was working on this book. In 1999, after assembling very preliminary research, I contacted IBM’s corporate archivist Paul Lasewicz for permission to examine the company’s archives in Somers, New York. I offered to share with the company all my findings so that IBM—and the world—could obtain an accurate portrayal of the corporation’s involvement in the Holocaust. Lasewicz approved my access but needed permission from IBM public relations manager Ian Colley to schedule the exact day. After I had spent weeks of waiting, and numerous conversations with him, Colley still refused to schedule my visit, claiming Lasewicz’s archive was “understaffed,” in massive disarray after years of neglect, and involved in a time-consuming Internet project.

  Several prominent Holocaust figures also asked IBM to schedule my access. The importance of the project was stressed, as were the basic themes of identification, confiscation, ghettoization, and even concentration and extermination. The more we inquired, the quieter and more ambiguous IBM became about its intentions to permit a review. Unbeknownst to me, IBM used this time to scour its New York files. Nor did we know that, many months before, IBM had hired a group of litigation historians who search government archives worldwide for incriminating corporate links to Nazi Germany, to tackle the company’s own 8,400 cubic feet of files. We knew that IBM had a history, going back to the Hitler era, of moving files from obscure place to obscure place, losing critical documents, purging records, and even destroying files.

  After several months, I wrote a blunt letter to IBM chairman Louis Gerstner, openly sending copies to numerous senior executives: “I and others have repeatedly asked since May of 1999 that I be allowed into the IBM Archives in New York to conduct my research regarding IBM’s role in Nazi Germany and in the Holocaust. Your company has consistently refused to allow me access, indicating the topic of the Holocaust is ‘not a priority’ for IBM…. I again repeat my request that IBM stop stonewalling on this issue and open your archive. I also ask that until that moment comes, you order a halt to any and all purges and/or destruction of Holocaust-era documents. I am writing this letter so there will be no question as to the stonewalling conduct now being displayed by IBM.” I wrote several more letters like that to Gerstner, as did esteemed Holocaust historians and archivists Sybil Milton and Robert Wolfe, as well as Jewish media editors who were aware of my work.

  After stalling for months in the face of continued pressure, IBM suddenly took action by transferring about a thousand pages of their Somers, New York, documents to an academic institution. The documents were “loaned.” But IBM did not “lend” this material to any recognized Holocaust or Jewish archive, such as the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., or even the Center for Jewish History in Manhattan. Instead, an IBM public relations manager called the public relations director at New York University, seeking to transfer the documents to NYU’s Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, famous for Biblical-era scholarship. Six boxes were abruptly shipped to the departmental chairman Lawrence Schiffman, an esteemed Dead Sea Scrolls scholar. Schiff man, with no idea what was in the boxes, innocently stored them in his office closet. For IBM’s part, the company could tell the media it had donated the files to a scholar—even though the scholar’s expertise was in the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

  At the same time, an IBM employee group in Germany had separately agreed to allow me access to their files outside Stuttgart. Several years before, IBM Germany had arranged for its Nazi-era files to be shunted to an obscure, abandoned IBM warehouse located a forty-five-minute train ride away from Stuttgart. A group of former German employees in the “IBM Klub” stored the files in a private Hollerith museum called the House of Data. I flew to Stuttgart in September 1999 for my scheduled visit. But Colley learned of the visit and at the last minute instructed the Klub’s amateur historian to deny me access. On a gray, rainy afternoon, I stood in front of the museum door at the appointed hour, hoping to be let in. But the museum was instructed to shut down that day. Talking only into a door intercom, I repeatedly asked, “What are you hiding?” A voice responded, “You must call Ian Colley.”

  Later, Colley warned me, “You won’t get access to any IBM facility in the world, no IBM archive, no IBM library.” He also told me the company was getting ready to move the Stuttgart documents to another location.

  IBM continued to receive letters of protest. In mid-September and early October 1999, Gerstner and numerous senior managers at IBM received several of these. Sybil Milton wrote Gerstner, “As former senior historian of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, I am aware of the importance of researching the subject of IBM’s involvement with Nazi Germany, including but not limited to its Hollerith machines…. I understand that documents were withdrawn before Mr. Black arrived in Stuttgart and [others were] transferred to the NYU Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies. This appears to be an act of obstruction intended to impede access and research. [The] NYU [department] specializes in Biblical archaeology and pre-twentieth century learning and is inappropriate as an archival repository for IBM materials; indeed the physical transfer and potential disarray of these records seems likely to obstruct further access and research. I have known Mr. Black since the early 1980s. His previous studies have focused on Holocaust-era finances and Jewish affairs and speak for themselves. He is a responsible researcher familiar with the subject. He is thorough and fair in his analysis and writing.” She demanded IBM open its archives to me.

  Robert Wolfe wrote, “Until 1995, I served with the National Archives for more than a third of a century of service as its specialist for captured Third Reich, war crimes trial and World War II records…. Black’s latest project seeks information about IBM’s involvement in statistical work performed for the Third Reich…. As an archivist of decades of experience, I am taken aback at such a cavalier denial of access to a project of such potential historic, humanitarian and moral significance. As an archivist and historian, I can assure you there is no justification—commercial, historical or archival—for hiding this material or obstructing efforts to access it…. The sudden transfer of selected files to the NYU Department of Judaic Studies, a university department known primarily for Biblical and Medieval studies with little archival capability and devoid of any transmittal papers allowing NYU to show the documents, rather than working with a recognized Holocaust-oriented institution, suggests obstructive timing to thwart Black’s research. This is a familiar tactic for keeping documents on the move and hamstringing them in archival processing.”

  Several major Jewish leaders then contacted Professor Schiffman, indicating that the documents in h
is closet were of great significance to the Jewish community, and urging him to share them with me. Quickly, Schiffman became the hero of the documents. He immediately secured legal permission through university attorneys to show them to me. I was given complete access. The selection of the seemingly boring, completely unprocessed corporate documents IBM had loaned NYU was quite sparse. Virtually all wartime documents were conspicuously missing. But by adding information from other archives, I was able to assemble the story. Indeed, Schiffman received an advance copy of my manuscript and joined other scholars in endorsing the book. Schiff man declared, “Edwin Black’s IBM and the Holocaust is a thoroughly researched, meticulously documented history of the relationship of a corporate giant and the advanced technology it sold to the Third Reich, its war effort, and its plan to exterminate the Jews.”

  Over the months, I had phoned IBM officials dozens of times, seeking access to documents and explanations of their Hitler-era actions. I outlined the information discovered in my research with specificity so that the company understood the gravity of the implications. Each time, Colley stayed on message, declaring IBM would not discuss the period or my findings. Nor could I have access. At one frustrated and emotional point, I asked if Colley would search the archives for a copy of my mother’s punch card. He coolly replied, “I’m not going to get drawn into that question.” After about one hundred such calls, I simply gave up. IBM would never cooperate.

  Things were quiet at IBM throughout the beginning of 2000. But in May 2000, IBM was again reminded that my research was progressing rapidly. An eminent professor who had been helpful and was aware of my work let slip a comment to reporters in Jerusalem that a book would soon be released proving that “IBM helped Hitler exterminate the Jews.” Israeli, German, and Austrian reporters aggressively called Ian Colley, who had by now transferred to Paris, asking what IBM’s role was during the Holocaust. Colley answered by saying the company “knew little about the German subsidiary.” After a few days, the isolated radio and newspaper reports ceased. Sometime after that leak, IBM arranged to transfer several linear meters of its Stuttgart documents to business archives at Hohenheim University in Germany, where they are being “inventoried” and, as of this writing, are still inaccessible. The documents arrived at Hohenheim just weeks before my book was released.

  Also in the weeks before publication, reporters began contacting IBM public relations manager Carol Makovich and other IBMers, seeking official responses to the specific findings in the book. IBM stuck to its story that the “Information Company” had no information about the documents in its own archives, and had transferred some documents to esteemed institutions for study.

  IBM had known for two years that my book was coming. During those two years, I and others had been asking for access and answers, and during the seven years their logo-emblazoned machine had been prominently displayed at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., prompting enormous speculation, IBM claimed it had never tried to look into its own records and document its own past.

  When press inquiries made it clear that the book was just days away, IBM pre-empted with its own global press release—essentially, the only official statement it has issued. IBM’s statement reiterated that the company had no information about the period or its own documents. The company added the first of a series of well-parsed phrases, and what can only be seen as conscious misinformation. For example, IBM’s statement declares, “As with hundreds of foreign-owned companies that did business in Germany at that time, Dehomag came under the control of Nazi authorities prior to and during World War II.”

  But clearly, the public facts are otherwise. Watson received his medal from Hitler in 1937. The war began on September 1, 1939. IBM exercised highly visible minute-to-minute on-site micro-management of its German subsidiary—and indeed all its European subsidiaries—until the summer of 1940 when Watson was pressured into returning the medal. Until the late fall of 1941, IBM NY ruled the German unit through stalwart European managers who were backed up by German and American attorneys. IBM’s statement was released even as the Sunday Times (London) posted to its website incriminating October 1941 IBM internal correspondence with Watson confirming the fashion in which IBM NY controlled its German, Polish, and Romanian operations two years after the war began.

  Even after the U.S. entered the war in December 1941, IBM never lost control of its companies in Nazi-controlled lands. When German custodians, or receivers, took over, virtually all IBM staff and management remained in place. Only the profits were temporarily blocked as in any receivership. After the war, IBM fought to recover all those Nazi-blocked bank accounts, claiming they were legitimate company profits.

  IBM, through spokeswoman Makovich, remains consciously silent about the numerous other European subsidiaries controlled during the twelve-year Holocaust directly from New York or through its Geneva office. These include subsidiaries in Switzerland, France, Spain, Poland, Romania, and dozens of other territories. Nor will Makovich make any mention of the Hitler-era documents still held by IBM subsidiaries in Poland, Argentina, France, Italy, Holland, and many other countries. The corporation has been asked repeatedly, but simply declines to respond and refers callers to its one and only on-the-record statement. Indeed, as recently as September 2001, IBM told an American Jewish Congress regional board member in Dallas that the company had no information on the topic.

  The details of IBM’s obstruction were not included in the original book’s introduction. In my view, that would have been a distraction that IBM would have welcomed. The paramount issue is not IBM’s obstruction in the twenty-first century, but its involvement with the Hitler regime from 1933 to 1945. My personal struggle to obtain this information is, in my view, but a tertiary footnote.

  The public, it seems, has not accepted IBM’s vague and parsed words. The book became an immediate New York Times bestseller in America, with similar results across Europe and Latin America. In many countries, such as Canada, Ireland, and Brazil, the book achieved the number-one slot. This is meaningful not as a measure of commercial success, but only as a gauge of the world’s acceptance of the information. Average people, most of whom had no detailed understanding of the Holocaust or its twelve-year chronology, are now avidly reading the unhappy details. Word of mouth is stronger than any minute on TV or inch of type.

  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 inf
ormation, 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.