Stranger than Science Fiction: Edwin Black, IBM, and the Holocaust

Edwin Black's IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation (New York: Crown Books, 2001) briefly achieved best-seller status soon after its publication, but sales dwindled in the face of negative reviews. While this review is also neg ative, it is important to note at the outset that Black addresses a significant issue, the continuing participation of American corporations in German affairs not only after Hitler had proven beyond doubt that he would tram ple civil rights but even after Germany was at war with the United States. It was not that foreign subsidiaries in Germany had no choice. Whereas the Nazi regime confiscated Polish and Soviet property, not to mention that of Jews, it left the capital of its enemies in the West more or less alone. It did block the transfer of foreign exchange, it did impose windfall profit taxes, and it did ration raw materials and intervene in other ways to place the economy on a war footing. But all firms, not just foreign corporations, faced such policies. The Nazis never needed to force many American (and British) firms to play greater or lesser parts in the German war economy, with all the atrocities that this entailed. If nothing else, IBM and the Holocaust should prompt us to ask why this subject has been left to someone like Black, a sci ence fiction writer with limited abilities as a historian. Black has also hit upon a somewhat clever approach, similar to that recently employed by Robert Gellately in his studies of popular support for Hitler in Germany. Black has read through the New York Times between 1933 and 1945 to establish a baseline of common knowledge about Nazi atroci ties. He juxtaposes this research with an examination of IBM's American archives and some records of its German subsidiary, Dehomag. To what extent can we reasonably expect Thomas Watson, as chief executive officer