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Issue # 125
| Ellen
Rose
IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black. (New York: Crown Publishers,
2001)
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| The
War Machine |
"The Nazi apparatus appeared to be among those which had best understood
and applied the fusion between state and technique. It utilized all techniques
to the maximum possible degree, reducing them unconditionally to its service…"
Ellul, The Technological Society
The knock on the door in the middle of the night: it's the Gestapo,
come with blitzkrieg efficiency to rid Germany, and then Austria, and
Czechoslovakia, and Poland, and Norway, and all the other conquered European
nations, of the Jewish menace. And amidst all the fear and horror, the
question, rarely asked and never answered, is: How did they know? How
were they able to target, with such brutal accuracy, the homes of all
people of Jewish decent?
And what about the skillful coordination with which trains were shuttled
around to ensure the rapid transportation of the thousands of men, women,
and children to concentration camps? Again, the unasked and unanswered
questions: How did they do it? How were they able to keep track of the
thousands of people, people who were being uprooted, dispossessed, transported
long distances? How did they always know?
The question has at long last been both asked and answered by Edwin
Black in IBM and the Holocaust, the unlikely bestseller which charts
with extraordinary detail the unholy wartime alliance between Nazi Germany
and IBM.
Black, himself the son of holocaust survivors who managed to escape
their captors (his mother was left for dead in a shallow mass grave and
rescued only when his father discovered her leg protruding from the snow),
first stumbled upon the idea for the book during a 1993 visit to the United
States Holocaust Museum in Washington. There, prominently displayed, but
with little explanation for its presence in the museum, was an IBM Hollerith
machine, the punch card sorter upon which the IBM empire was built, years
before the advent of personal computers.
Invented in New York city at the end of the nineteenth century-a time
of mass immigration, massive commerce, and "clickety-clack industrial
ingenuity"-the Hollerith machine was a tribute to the new American fascination
with mechanical devices and the drive to use those devices to achieve
workplace efficiencies. The Hollerith was specifically developed to speed
the tabulation of the 1900 census data, which, with manual counting and
cross tabulation, could only have been expected to yield results several
years after the actual data collection. Herman Hollerith, the young inventor
of the machine, had the idea of putting the data on punch cards, one punch
card per person. Each card would have standardized holes, each hole representing
a different trait, such as gender, nationality, and occupation. The Hollerith
machine would then "read" these cards and sort them into stacks based
upon a specified series of punched holes. "It was," says Black, "nothing
less than a nineteenth-century bar code for human beings."
From this initial urge to quantify human beings, to reduce them to easily
managed statistics, the IBM empire was born. And, by 1914, control of
the company was in the hands of Thomas Watson, a man whom Black represents
throughout the book as brutal, ruthless, and totally without scruples.
For the Jews of Europe, this would prove to be a deadly combination: a
machine that reduced people to anonymous numbers (literally, since concentration
camp inmates would eventually be tattooed with their Hollerith punch card
numbers), and a man who was willing to go to any lengths to maintain and
extend the power and wealth of his corporation. IBM's expansion into Germany,
in the form of a subsidiary called Dehomag, paralleled the Nazi party's
rise to power. The Nazis were statisticians; the party's "scientific soldiers"
played a key role in providing Hitler with the information he needed to
categorize and control a population. The new Fuhrer was quick to see the
power of IBM's tabulators ;while, for his part, Watson was enthusiastic
about the prospect of the rise of a political regime that had an almost
limitless need for Hollerith machines. In 1933, Hitler commissioned Dehomag
to conduct a census which would allow the Reich to identify precisely
who was an Aryan and who a Jew. Census-taking soon became an indispensable
part of the Nazi strategy: as each new country was conquered, its citizens
were quickly reduced to punch cards, and from there to lists of names.
Statistics, the study of anonymous masses, thus became very personal,
and in this way, through the joint efforts of IBM and the Nazis, "the
concept of massively organized information quietly emerged to become
a means of social control, a weapon of war, and a roadmap for group destruction."
Black emphasizes, as he no doubt must to avoid litigation, that the
Holocaust would have happened with or without IBM and its Hollerith machines.
Nevertheless, the purpose of the book is clearly not just to document,
in often excruciating detail, IBM's role in the Fuhrer's plan to rid Europe
of Jews, but to suggest that it was by means of the Holleriths that the
Nazis were able to organize in order to annihilate millions. IBM, which
now markets itself as "The Solutions Company," was willing and able to
provide technological solutions to the Third Reich's Jewish problem: "When
Germany wanted to identify Jews by name, IBM showed them how. When Germany
wanted to use that information to launch programs of social expulsion
and expropriation, IBM provided the technologic wherewithal. When the
trains needed to run on time, from city to city or between concentration
camps, IBM offered that solution as well. Ultimately, there was no solution
IBM would not devise for a Reich willing to pay for services rendered."
But machine-like efficiency was only part of the equation; IBM punch card
technology also played the important role of making the mass extermination
of human beings something that could be contemplated through scientific
eyes, something that could be dispassionately documented and analyzed
by Nazi raceologists and population experts. (During the war years, statistical
publications in the Third Reich would feature such detailed data as Jewish
population per square metre, with sliding projections of decrease resulting
from forced labour and starvation.) And so the Hollerith codes, compilations,
and rapid sorts became the tools and techniques of genocide.
Throughout its thirteen year alliance with Nazi Germany, IBM practiced
a policy of careful "deniability" which involved keeping misleading logs,
falsifying dates, and faking correspondence-all of which greatly complicated
Black's efforts to create a detailed record of the alliance. Watson was
a micro-manager, but much of his massive correspondence was written in
a "reserved and cleverly cautious" manner which ensured that there was
never a paper trail between his New York office and the hugely profitable
German subsidiary, Dehomag. And when Watson did send an "uncharacteristically
verbose and belabored" letter to the manager of a European subsidiary,
demanding that it immediately forego all dealings with blacklisted firms,
he knew that his manager could be trusted to ignore the letter, which
was, according to Black, but another link in the long chain of deniability.
One thing IBM could not deny, however, was knowledge of the atrocities
being committed in Europe. Before the war, American newspapers regularly
attested in bold type to brutalities against the Jews, and Watson and
his associates could not have avoided the evidence of rampant anti-Semitic
violence during their frequent trips to Germany. And later, as each concentration
camp was equipped with its own tabulators for keeping strict track of
inmates, IBM technicians were in frequent attendance to service the leased
machines. Watson clearly knew the role that his company's machines played
in annihilating a race; but, says Black, while others looked on in horror,
Watson "saw not revulsion, but opportunity-not horror and devastation,
but profit and dividends."
While Black confines himself largely to facts, and resists, for the
most part, the urge to render Nazi atrocities in purple prose, he often
goes too far in his efforts to depict IBM leader Thomas Watson as the
black-hearted villain of this story. If his book teaches anything, it
is that a tendency to filter reality through a statistical lens is fundamentally
dehumanizing, reducing victims to animals and their tormenters to unfeeling
machines. "The dawn of the Information Age," says Black, "began at the
sunset of human decency." But then, as he marshals his own extensive data
(referenced in over sixty pages of chapter notes), Black seems to ignore
this message and to determinedly use factual evidence in such a way as
to paint a picture of Watson as the most unprincipled, greedy, and duplicitous
fiend imaginable, someone who we constantly find suppressing competitors,
hatching conspiracies, breaking rules, and otherwise doing everything
in his power to make a market opportunity out of a bloody war. In fact,
Black encourages us to see the parallels between Watson's calculating
drive to extend IBM's domain and Hitler's conquest of Europe and destruction
of its Jewry. "Watson," says Black, "was no Fascist. He was a pure capitalist.
But the horseshoe of political economics finds little distance between
extremities. Accretion of wealth by and for the state under a strong autocratic
leader fortified by jingoism and hero worship was appealing to Watson.
After all, his followers wore uniforms, sang songs, and were expected
to display unquestioned loyalty to the company he led."
Black would have us believe that Watson alone condoned Nazi atrocities,
and that, while other companies were so appalled by the blatant anti-Semitism
that they ceased their dealings with the Reich, IBM alone remained, happily
turning a blind eye to violence against the Jews in order to turn a profit.
But, ruthless and unprincipled as Watson may have been, he was surely
not the only capitalist eager to reap the profits of war. People may have
scruples, but organizations do not: it is in the nature of corporations
to look the other way, to pursue lucrative opportunities regardless of
the unsavoury or politically compromising circumstances from which they
arise. Take, for example RCA/NBC, which as Joyce Nelson notes in The
Perfect Machine, built, with US government assistance, a national
TV system for South Vietnam, and then continued to supervise broadcasting
for this system in the midst of the Vietnam war.
Ultimately, then, Black compromises the value of his historical record
through his pursuit of what smacks of a personal vendetta against IBM
and, more particularly, Thomas Watson. In a day and age when we tend to
view technology as operating according to its own run-away imperatives,
historical reconstructions of this kind can play an important role in
disrupting the aura of inevitability that surrounds technology, and suggesting
that the myth of technological progress has more to do with human machinations
than it does with the autonomous forward thrust of machines. And Black's
detailed exposé of the economic and political underpinnings of the IBM-Nazi
alliance does, to a certain extent, serve this valuable purpose-even while
it, at times, makes for rather dull reading. But rather than presenting
his evidence as part of a larger global phenomenon-the techno-imperialistic
drive to eliminate borders, to create a worldwide dependence upon data
which is, truly, the essence of the global village-instead of situating
his evidence within this larger context, Black goes to great lengths to
insist that only IBM, and only Thomas Watson, were evil and unprincipled
enough to seek to profit from Nazi crimes against humanity.
If, however, we can transcend this single-minded vision-if we view IBM
and the Holocaust not as the record of one company's involvement in
Nazi atrocities but as part of a larger story about the way in which the
technology that was supposed to empower individuals is tending instead
to accrue obscene amounts of power to global monopolies, which proceed
to endanger our lives through their continued disregard of anything but
profit and growth-if we see the book in these terms, then the story becomes
not simply a record of past events but a grim statement about the present
and even the future, and not simply a depiction of the alliance between
IBM and the Nazis but an interrogation of the uneasy relationship between
human beings and their technologies. And if we see the story in these
terms, then surely its implications become much, much more chilling.
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