Edwin Black certainly thinks it did. In 2001, he published the fruit of years of research he and dozens of volunteers conducted into the history of the International Business Machines Corporation and how its German offspring, called Dehomag, participated in Nazi Germany's highly organized wartime actions, including the execution of six million Jews and other "undesirables." The resulting 520-page book, IBM and the Holocaust, has to be one of the most excruciatingly detailed and exhaustively researched books on any technical aspect of World War II. But if you frame the issue in terms of a legal case, the book is more like an extensive set of notes for the prosecution, rather than the prosecution itself.
To say anything meaningful about the book in the space of one column is presumptuous, but I'll try anyway. Black provides useful context by briefly describing the corporate history of IBM, which formally begins in 1911 with the founding of the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company. One of the founders was the German-American inventor Herman Hollerith, whose concept of storing information in the form of little holes in thin stiff cards gave rise to what we would now call the first data-processing machines. Salesman Thomas J. Watson, who eventually rose to head the company, expanded IBM's customer base beyond the U. S. government, which used "Hollerith cards" as long ago as the 1890 census, and by 1930 Watson was in firm control of what was now known as International Business Machines, or IBM. Almost in parallel, a German subsidiary whose full name was Deutsche Hollerith-Maschinen GmbH (abbreviated "Dehomag") was established and provided punch-card equipment to Germany and other European customers. Dehomag was owned 90% by IBM USA, which wasn't a problem until Adolf Hitler became Chancellor in 1933 and the U. S. public perception of what became the Nazi regime turned sour.
Author Black accumulated tens of thousands of documents showing exactly how Watson and IBM USA kept Dehomag going throughout World War II, despite its being taken over by Nazi-appointed trustees once the war began. Profits, which were substantial, built up in frozen accounts which were accessed after the war, and Black shows how IBM-designed and provided punch cards and processing systems allowed the Nazis to count, locate, and round up Jews and other disparaged types when the time came for the concentration camps to ramp up their killings.
From the earliest IBM-facilitated census in 1933 to the last gasp of the Nazi regime in 1945, punch-card systems helped Germany keep track of trains, coordinate production, and account for every death in every concentration camp. A secret government agency founded in 1937 and called the Maschinelles Berichtwesen (Office of Automated Reporting) kept track of punch-card equipment and supplies, and served as a central clearinghouse for all punch-card technology and operations, which consumed many millions of cards during the war. And as Black shows, the U. S. minders at IBM kept tabs on Dehomag and other European subsidiaries all the way through the war, sometimes even with the assistance of U. S. diplomatic personnel.
That sounds bad enough. But what is missing in Black's otherwise unimpeachable thoroughness of documentation is any consideration of alternatives, and a kind of moral summing up of exactly what IBM's culpability was. His book is a classic case of not being able to see, or at least talk about, the forest because of all the trees in the way. In the introduction, Black admonishes the reader to read the book all the way through, or not at all. I did what he told me to, but this meant slogging through page after page of minutiae such as examples of bills of sale and machine serial numbers.
Perhaps Black thought his job was simply to report the facts and let the facts speak for themselves. But facts never do—historians have to say something about what they mean. And what I kept wishing for was an examination of what Watson (who in a real sense was IBM at the time) could have done differently, and whether it would have made any difference.
For example, suppose Watson had simply sold Dehomag at a huge discount to whatever buyers in Germany were around in 1939, say, and walked away from the subsidiary, cutting off all communication with it. One could argue that this would have been a dereliction of responsibility to IBM's shareholders, as Dehomag was using IBM's technology and patents. But perhaps it would have been worth it for the war effort. As it turns out, Dehomag probably had enough expertise to keep going without the parent company's help, but perhaps with less effectiveness. The Nazis were not about to let go of the informational power that punch-card systems gave them, and the Maschinelles Berichtwesen would have kept the machines running somehow.
As it happened, Watson tried to walk a fine line between not appearing to favor the Nazi regime on the one hand, and not abandoning Dehomag altogether on the other hand. In 1937 Hitler awarded Watson the Merit Cross of the German Eagle with Star, but in June of 1940, Watson publicly returned the medal, and nearly lost Dehomag in the process. But intense diplomatic and other efforts kept Dehomag in IBM's orbit, however tenuously.
If punch cards had never been invented, Hitler would probably have killed a lot of Jews in World War II anyway, but maybe not as efficiently and thoroughly. One frustrating aspect of Black's book is that he clearly has only a layman's understanding of exactly how IBM's 1930s punch-card technology operated. He shows how the Nazis valued and used the technology and how much faster it allowed them to find Jews and track railroad cars, but comparisons between operations carried out with punched cards and modern-day computing are lacking.
Nevertheless, Black has shown that IBM's machines were an essential part of the Nazi war machine, and that Watson and his underlings did nothing to slow down their use—in fact, they assisted to the extent possible, always refraining from asking exactly what the Nazis were doing with their cards.
The IBM of today is a vastly different entity than it was in the 1930s, but the sordid record of its collusion with Nazi Germany is a moral lesson in the responsibilities of corporations in wartime. Black has given us plenty of material from which to draw that lesson, but the job of learning it is up to us.
Sources: Edwin Black's IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Allliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation was published by Crown (a division of Random House) in 2001.
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