IBM & the Holocaust reveals the strategic alliance between IBM and Nazi Germany, starting in 1933 when Hitler first came to power and continuing well into World War II. As the Third Reich embarked on its conquest and genocide, IBM and its subsidiaries helped create the enabling technologies, step by step, from the identification and cataloging programs of the 1930s to the selections of the 1940s. Without IBM's technological assistance, Hitler would not have been able to achieve the staggering numbers of the Holocaust.

The fact is, IBM's technology was used to organize nearly everything in Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe, from the identification of Jews in censuses, registrations, and ancestral tracing programs to the running of railroads and the organization of concentration camp slave labor. IBM and its German subsidiary custom-designed complex solutions, anticipating the Reich's needs. They did not merely sell the machines and walk away; instead, IBM leased these machines for high fees and became the sole source of the billions of punch cards needed.

Historians were amazed at the speed and accuracy with which the Nazis were able to identify and locate European Jewry. Until now, the pieces of this puzzle have never been fully assembled. IBM & the Holocaust details the carefully crafted corporate collusion with the Third Reich, as well as the structured deniability of oral agreements, undated letters, and the use of Geneva intermediaries, all undertaken as the newspapers blazed with accounts of persecution and destruction.

Just as compelling is the human drama of one of the century's greatest minds, IBM founder Thomas Watson, who cooperated with the Nazis for the sake of profit. Only with IBM's technological assistance was Hitler able to achieve the staggering numbers of the Holocaust. Edwin Black has now uncovered one of the last great mysteries of Germany's war against the Jews: how Hitler got the names.

As the Third Reich embarked upon its plan of conquest and genocide, IBM and its subsidiaries helped create the enabling technologies, step-by-step, from the identification and cataloging programs of the 1930s to the selections of the 1940s. Only after Jews were identified--a massively complex task that Hitler wanted done immediately--could they be targeted for efficient asset confiscation, ghettoization, deportation, enslaved labor, and annihilation. It was a cross-tabulation and organizational challenge so monumental that it called for a computer. Of course, in the 1930s, no computer existed. But IBM's Hollerith punch card technology did exist, and it was this technology that aided the Nazis in automating the persecution of the Jews.

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