“Okay, I’ll bite,” I said. “Whaddya suspect?”
He took a deep breath. We both looked across the Hudson, where a red-orange July sunset lit thousands of tiny flames in the windows of the Riverdale buildings and homes on the other side of the mighty river. My father spoke as though addressing someone else on the far side of this great divide. His words were measured, slow.
“I suspect IBM needed a Blackie.”
“But they already had one. T. J. Laster was hired six or eight months before you.”
He bristled. His body stiffened. “He was in sales. I was in systems engineering.”
“Okay, but why you? Why’d Watson hire you?”
My father paused, and a long silence enveloped us. He turned away from the vista over the Hudson to put a hand on my shoulder.
“I’m tired,” he said. “Let’s sit.”
We walked to a nearby picnic table, where I swung into a seat. My father turned back toward the Hudson, then, leaning on his cane, slowly lowered himself onto the bench. He tucked his legs under the table, finally turning to face me. A sly smile creased his lips.
“I ever tell you about the time they sent me to a business meeting which turned out to be a meeting with a prostitute?”
His self-knowing chuckle reassured me that he’d reveal nothing more about Watson. My father’s fondness for secrecy resembled that of IBM’s.
IBM’s secret history began in the 1920s, not long after my father’s birth but certainly well before he had any inkling of his coming entanglement with the company. It began at a time when eugenics was all the rage.
Eugenics flourished in America at the beginning of the twentieth century. This so-called science of race brought together America’s rich and famous—Carnegies, Rockefellers, Kelloggs, Harrimans, Roosevelts—in a movement to breed pure blond-haired, blue-eyed “Nordic stock,” the eugenicists’ sought-after ideal. Eugenicists desired to eliminate the bloodlines of undesirables such as Blacks, Native Americans, Hispanics, Jews, Irish, and the mentally or physically ill.
Eugenics promoted thinly veiled racism under the guise of pseudoscience. Alexander Graham Bell, for instance, served on the board of the Eugenics Record Organization (ERO), which was established by the Carnegie Institute in Cold Spring Harbor, New York.2 ERO sought to collect data and conduct studies on the means to enhance Nordic race supremacy in the United States and to reduce “human flotsam,” as Madison Grant, bestselling author of The Passing of the Great Race, called those deemed undesirable by eugenicists.3 Even the famed women’s rights activist Margaret Sanger embraced eugenics. She viewed her work in promoting birth control and women’s health as part of a broader eugenics movement to exterminate “human weeds.”4
Eugenicists proposed several tools to cull America of undesirable human beings: sterilization, birth control, incarceration, miscegenation laws, immigration restrictions, and even death. In the early 1900s, as many as thirty states had passed eugenics laws that allowed forced sterilization or that restricted marriage between individuals of different races. The 1927 Supreme Court decision in Buck v. Bell upheld forced sterilization for individuals deemed “unfit” by the state. Writing for the court’s eight-to-one decision against Carrie Buck, a teenager from a poor White family in Virginia, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes issued this harsh decree:
It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate off-spring for a crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. . . . Three generations of imbeciles are enough.5
Eugenicists worldwide delighted. Never expressly overturned by the Supreme Court, Buck v. Bell was cited by Justice Harry Blackmun in Roe v. Wade as established law limiting the rights of women to control the fate of their bodies.6
American eugenicists, led by Dr. Charles Davenport, elevated their movement internationally with the help of prominent eugenicists in Germany. Davenport felt that the accomplishments in the United States could be duplicated throughout the world. But this required the identification of undesirable humans, particularly those polluted through mixed-race ancestry. In 1926, Davenport, head of the Eugenics Research Association, an outgrowth of the Eugenics Record Organization, which he also headed, received funding for a two-year study of “pure-blooded negroes,”7 Whites, and their undesirable mixed-race offspring. In 1928, Davenport chose the island of Jamaica for the study.
Enter Thomas J. Watson and IBM.
To identify mixed-race individuals in Jamaica, Davenport required a robust system of collecting, storing, and analyzing copious amounts of information. IBM’s punch cards and Hollerith machines provided just what Davenport needed. With Watson’s newly minted company eager for the business, IBM engineers worked with the ERO at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory to design a punch card format for collecting all the information needed to report on racial characteristics. Watson’s engineers also worked out the details of adjusting the various sorters, tabulators, and printers to provide Davenport and the ERO with the output they required.
Thanks to IBM’s assistance, the success of the Jamaica Project allowed the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, and Davenport, to announce plans for a global study to identify mixed-race individuals as a first step toward their elimination in favor of “racially pure stock.”8
In a tragic coda to this early story of eugenics, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory was still enmeshed in the controversy over eugenics as recently as January 2019, this time through the disgraceful racist utterances of Nobel laureate James D. Watson, cofounder of the DNA double helix and one of the laboratory’s longtime fellows, whom they stripped of his honorary titles.9
My father came of age when talk of “racial purity” was everywhere. Red Summer, when Whites attacked Blacks in more than three dozen cities across the country, happened within months of his birth in August 1919. Throughout the 1920s, newspapers ran accounts of the latest so-called advancements in racial science and featured cartoons demonizing Blacks and other “racially impure” groups. Lynchings reigned across the South. As the darkest child in his family, it’s not surprising that my father entered into adulthood with a deep-seated belief in his own inferiority.
By the end of the 1920s, IBM’s involvement in advancing racial purity had only just begun. Thomas J. Watson understood the power of harnessing information technology in the service of racial purity. Five years after his involvement with the Jamaica Project, he placed IBM in the service of Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich, using the lessons learned in creating Davenport’s racial identification system to help Hitler identify and exterminate Jews. The IBM punch card templates for the Jamaica Project on miscegenation and for Nazi Germany’s campaign against the Jews bore a striking resemblance.10
Thomas J. Watson hired my father less than two years after the end of World War II, two years after he had finally recouped the extensive profits his company made in support of Hitler and the Third Reich. These are facts that IBM refuses to admit, secrets that the company would prefer forever remain hidden.11 From 1933 to 1945, prior to and during World War II, Watson and IBM worked tirelessly to help Germany automate every aspect of Hitler’s dictatorship—from counting livestock for food, to planning troop movement for war, to counting Jews prior to their extermination.12
IBM machines identified and counted Jews, traced back their ancestry for generations, marked them for transport to concentration camps, managed the railroads that transported them there, kept track of which Jews were killed and which remained alive, identified which Jews possessed what skills and helped Nazis allocate them for slave labor, monitored the health and fitness of Jews for barbaric medical experiments or being worked to death, kept records of the torture and execution of Jews in all concentration camps, kept track of all German soldiers, planned German tank and troop movements against the Allies, and scheduled Luftwaffe bombing runs.13
These were not IBM machines bought by the Germans and then employed for nefarious purposes. IBM neve
r sold machines to the Third Reich; they leased them through a German subsidiary micromanaged by Thomas J. Watson and his team directly from New York. IBM engineers designed custom solutions for the Nazis to assist them in handling their “Jewish problem.” IBM supplied and trained Nazi operators on their equipment. IBM authorized German and European subsidiaries to manufacture equipment and spare parts. And IBM kept all of their equipment in the Third Reich in good working order. When Germany invaded Czechoslovakia and other European countries, IBM pre-positioned equipment, solutions, and personnel, willingly offering service to occupying Nazi forces. All business with Hitler’s Germany took place at market rates that afforded IBM “fantastical” profits.14
In recognition of Watson’s extraordinary importance to Nazi Germany, in 1937 Hitler created the Merit Cross of the German Eagle with Star, festooned with swastikas, which he pinned on Watson. Then, in 1940, shortly before America entered the war, Watson returned the medal to bolster his public image, an action that Watson’s apologizers have pointed to as evidence of his redemption. But it was a duplicitous public-relations ploy at best. Edwin Black points out, in his extensively researched, well-documented, and peer-reviewed book IBM and the Holocaust, that “a subsequent letter dated June 10, 1941, drafted by IBM’s New York office, confirms that IBM headquarters personally directed the activities of its Dutch subsidiary set up in 1940 to identify and liquidate the Jews of Holland.”15
Before America entered the war, Watson planned the construction of bomb shelters in Germany to protect IBM equipment.16 During the war, IBM’s widespread business with the Third Reich went into receivership, operated by a German national to whom orders from IBM’s New York office were relayed through neutral IBM European headquarters in places like Switzerland. The German receiver ran the IBM business, charged the Third Reich applicable lease rates for IBM equipment, and deposited payments in frozen German bank accounts.17 When the war ended, IBM leapfrogged to the head of the line of corporations seeking to reclaim assets in Germany, bypassed Allied regulations on war reparations, and obtained a tidy fortune.18
Even while Watson supplied Nazi Germany with the automated equipment to make the extermination of Jews more successful and more efficient, when America entered World War II, he supported the war effort. Watson founded factories that made munitions and supplied the US military with advanced IBM equipment. Without IBM machines, for example, Alan Turing could not have built the Enigma machine that broke the German code. Watson was the consummate “war profiteer.” It did not matter so much what side he assisted as long as IBM’s equipment remained in use and IBM’s profits kept rolling in.
“How did they know?” It’s a persistent question raised by Holocaust scholars. How did Nazi troopers know exactly where Jews lived—their names, their ages, their addresses? How did the Nazis know who was Jewish and who was not, given the many Catholic conversions, name changes, and nonobservant Jews? How did the Nazis know that they could place Jews on a train car and that, within an hour of reaching their destination, those Jews would be marched to a gas chamber or in front of a firing squad, so the train could be quickly reused?
They knew because IBM’s technology helped them know. And IBM technology could help the Nazis know because of the information encoded in punch cards. Herman Hollerith’s genius lay in engineering a means for punch card holes to represent desired properties. IBM engineers helped Nazi Germany encode every aspect of people’s lives—their names, their dates of birth, their addresses, and especially their religions. All Germans were assigned identification numbers. Those numbers were correlated with punch cards. Those punch cards, collected and compiled by the millions, held critical information on German citizens. A Jew’s identification number might be punched into columns 75 through 80, and a corresponding number tattooed on his or her body.19
Every concentration camp had a room with a door marked Arbeitseinsatz (labor supply office) that was filled with IBM Hollerith equipment and punch cards with data on every prisoner in the camp. Thousands of Hollerith machines were located throughout Nazi Germany, placed there under the watchful eye of Watson and IBM. Hollerith equipment required punch cards—millions upon millions of them, created to exacting specifications. By patent and by design, only IBM could create, print, and sell punch cards for its Hollerith machines. So IBM made and shipped cards, and authorized its European subsidiaries to create factories to do the same, to satisfy the Nazi bloodthirst for 1.5 billion punch cards per year.20
The Third Reich collected population information on all who came under its control. Massive keypunch operations were established to enter collected data onto punch cards. At one point, IBM’s Nazi German subsidiary demanded a daily quota of 450,000 punch cards from its several hundred employees working on behalf of the Third Reich.21 Once cards were punched, they would be bundled and stored by the millions. Many years before the term big data was first used, Nazi Germany—with IBM’s assistance—stored massive amounts of data it collected on its citizenry.
Want to find all Jews between certain ages? Drop a deck of punch cards into the hopper of an IBM Hollerith machine, sort cards based on the column and row punched for religion, and then sort on the column and row punched for age. Associate identification numbers with names and street addresses. Sort and print a list. Then send out the gestapo to round up everyone on the list for transport to concentration camps. Thanks to IBM, it became just that simple. Here was one of the earliest uses of modern digital technology to identify, suppress, and even exterminate people deemed undesirable by politicians in power.
IBM’s role flew under the radar. At the time when Watson changed CTR’s name to IBM, the company encompassed all of Herman Hollerith’s overseas licensees, including Deutsch Hollerith Maschinen Gesellschaft—the German Hollerith Machine Company—or Dehomag, for short, which leased Hollerith equipment for use in Germany. It was Dehomag that helped automate the German census of 1933, allowing IBM both distance and plausible deniability, even though that same year, IBM, under Watson, squeezed Dehomag into selling Watson a personal 90 percent share of the company. It’s hard not to equate Watson’s role here with his many years spent at the Cash as its principal “knock-out man.” Watson ran Dehomag with an iron grip from his offices in New York.22
IBM’s Hollerith business benefited from improvements to its machines made by German engineers. IBM also signed manufacturing agreements enabling their Hollerith machines to be constructed in Germany. By the early 1930s, more than half of IBM’s overseas revenue came from the Third Reich through Dehomag.23
When Hitler rose to power in 1933, many American corporations faced the soul-searching question of whether to do business with Nazi Germany and risk economic or political retaliation from an American public that mainly found Hitler’s Germany repulsive. Everyone recognized corporate names such as Ford and General Motors—their international impact by the 1930s was unmistakable. But few knew the extent of IBM’s international operations. Fewer still knew the name Dehomag, IBM’s German subsidiary run by Willy Heidinger. While the power of automotive technology rolled along clearly and understandably, the power of punch cards and digital technology remained hidden. Watson and his company had the perfect cover, as Edwin Black writes:
The storyline depended upon the circumstance and the listener. Dehomag could be portrayed as the American-controlled, almost wholly-owned subsidiary of IBM with token German shareholders and on-site German managers. Or Dehomag could be a loyal German, staunchly Aryan company baptized in the blood of Nazi ideology wielding the power of its American investment for the greater glory of Hitler’s Reich. Indeed, Heidinger and Watson both were willing to wave either banner as needed. Both stories were true. Watson had seen to that.24
Through Dehomag, Watson orchestrated IBM’s support of the Nazi’s Jewish pogrom and, once Germany invaded its neighbors, the extensive Nazi war machine. IBM engineers in America, working with their German counterparts, designed the punch card formats used by the Third Reich to collect data; ad
justed the sensitive Hollerith equipment to correctly read, tabulate, and print out information from the cards; trained Dehomag and Third Reich employees in the use of the Hollerith equipment; and maintained and repaired Hollerith machines to keep them in good working order. Before America entered World War II, Watson made certain that IBM received payment for leases of the Hollerith equipment. During the war, Watson made certain that IBM equipment and other assets were managed profitably by a Nazi receiver. And after the war, Watson made certain that IBM extracted its substantial profits from Germany and a war-ravaged Europe.
As the Nazi war machine ramped up for battle in Europe and for the extermination of the Jews, Watson and IBM never once backed down. In fact, just the opposite was true. In the fall of 1935, the Reichstag (the German parliament) unanimously passed two laws: one to deprive Jews of their German citizenship (Law of the Reich Citizen), the other to prohibit intermarriage and sexual relationships between Germans and Jews (Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor). Shortly after the passage of the Nuremberg Laws and after detailed decree by the Third Reich defining who would be considered a Jew and who not, Watson traveled to Berlin to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of IBM’s German subsidiary.
Even as Joseph Goebbels warned Jews to leave Germany to the Germans, Watson attended a lavish dinner at the Hotel Adlon in Berlin, where he celebrated IBM’s German success. Afterward, Watson expanded IBM’s presence in Nazi Germany, through its German subsidiary, ordering crates of new equipment to be shipped to Berlin, ordering millions of punch cards from the United States until German factories could produce their own, and building new German manufacturing facilities to produce spare parts for IBM machines.
* * *
IBM’s deep involvement in the Holocaust began with der Führer’s need to count.
Out of a German population of 67 million, Dehomag’s automated 1933 census tabulated only a half million Jews, or less than 1 percent of the population. Where were the others, the Third Reich demanded to know? Had they changed their faith or left it? Had Jews infiltrated the fabric of German social and cultural life so deeply that they now infected the country as a whole? Nazi Statisker der Rasse (race statisticians) devised bizarre, pseudo-mathematical formulas grading Jews by the supposed amount of Jewish ancestry in their blood: fully Jewish, half Jewish, quarter Jewish, and so forth. In this way, these German raciologists stole a page directly from the hideous playbook of American slavery, where slaves were classified based on the amount of African ancestry: mulatto (one-half), quadroon (one-quarter), octoroon (one-eighth), and so on.
Think Black Page 15