Tom Watson admirers must be sickened by the revelations in "IBM and the Holocaust," the new book by Edwin Black (Crown, 2001).
Under Watson, that business role model, IBM subsidiaries sold technology to the Nazis that was of invaluable use in rounding up Jews and sending them to their deaths, according to Black.
This is not a sensational exercise by a hungry reporter. Black is the son of Holocaust survivors, both of whom still carry shrapnel in their bodies. He began his investigation by asking, "The Nazis had my parents' names. How?"
The answer was IBM's advanced punch-card sorting system, which enabled the Nazis not only to find Jews, gays and other despised persons, but also to meticulously code their deaths, he says.
In essence, the equipment leased to the Nazis by IBM's German subsidiary, Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen Gesellschaft (or Dehomag), was nothing more than an advanced mailing list system.
List veteran Bob Castle recalls that "punch cards were used in the list business, from about the mid-50's on through the late 60's, and actually beyond that--until the advent of the PC." Punch-card systems went back at least as far as 1916, when Scientific American magazine did an article on them. As Black tells it, the cards had punched holes, each of which represented a different trait; the cards were fed into "readers," and sorted into stacks on the basis of the holes.
The first use of this technology to identify Jews was in 1933 when the Nazis, with technical support from Dehomag, conducted a census, asking pointed questions about religion and ancestry, Black alleges.
"What emerged," he writes, "was a profession-by-profession, city-by-city, and indeed a block-by-clock revelation of the Jewish presence." Moreover, by cross-sorting the columns, the Nazi government was able to "identify who among the Jews would be its first targets for confiscation, arrest, imprisonment, and ultimately expulsion."
Another effort occurred in 1939, when the Nazis were about to launch the war; they even went through old church records to find Jews whose families had converted to Christianity generations before. By this time, it was apparent that punch-card technology could also be used for military purposes, and for tracking and redeployment of the German work force. The trouble was that the systems had "the disadvantage of existing for singular purposes and being incompatible with each other." (In other words, they needed an enterprise-wide system.)
Later, the punch-cards were used to code the demises of the victims, and record which ones had received "special handling" (usually, extermination in a gas chamber).
"All Auschwitz name information, including workers still alive, deaths, and transferees, was continuously punched into the camp's Hollerith system," Black continues. "Tabulated totals were wired each day to the SS Economics Administration and other offices in Berlin to process cards and lists for each inmate transferred."
What did Tom Watson have to do with all this?
Black alleges that Watson admired Mussolini, and saw some good in Hitler. Watson accepted a medal from the Nazis and he wrote to the Fuhrer that he fully valued "the spirit of friendship which underlay this honor." In 1937, he was photographed with Hitler.
Apologists might counter that this was before the Holocaust, but it wasn't before the Nuremberg Laws, or the violence and confiscations acted out against German Jews. In any event, Watson continued doing business with the Nazis through Dehomag even after Kristallnacht in 1938, and other atrocities, according to Black.
But he finally wised up—at least to the public relations implications, Black reports. In June 1940, just as Hitler was just about to enter France, Watson returned his medal, which infuriated the Nazis. There followed months of tense negotiations as IBM and the Germans vied for control of Dehomag. One thing was clear: IBM and the Nazis needed each other.
Black contends that "None of Watson's public posturing stopped him from accelerating Dehomag's ability to do Hitler's bidding throughout Europe—so long as IBM could keep its distance and Watson could remain removed from the process.
"No one will ever know exactly how many IBM machines clattered in which ghetto zone, train depot, or concentration camp," Black continues. "Nor will anyone prove exactly what IBM officials in Europe or New York understood about their location or use."
But it didn't matter--at least to IBM, he concludes. All that mattered was that the profits kept piling up.
What does this have to do with direct marketing in the year 2001? Should we be concerned with these events?
Of course. For one thing, today's solutions providers face similar moral dilemmas.
For example, what would you do if asked to supply advanced database technology to a repressive government--say, Beijing's? Would you maximize value to the shareholders?
"The concept of privacy as a fundamental human right came directly out of the Holocaust, and also out of Eastern Europe, and right-wing regimes of Southern Europe," says Marty Abrams, executive director of the Center for Information Policy, Hunton & Williams, Atlanta. "Spiros Simitas [the father of Europe's tough data protection laws], was sensitive to the fact that technology is absolutely repugnant and terrible when applied in this fashion."
Unfortunately, European data laws target private enterprise but not governments, Abrams points out. But governments, including our own, are interested in this technology.
Less than a decade ago, the U.S. Justice Department asked vendors for help in creating a national law-enforcement database. "The biggest risk is if the government usurped data that is not appropriate for the government to have," Abrams says. "Congress must have the courage to deal with this issue."
Abrams adds that the Privacy Act of 1974, in part, "came out of the direct friction between the Department of Health, Education and Welfare and the Justice Department." As Abrams tells it, HEW worried that Justice might try to get its hands on HEW's "huge data sets" to pursue the Black Power and anti-war movements.
The other question is whether IBM is being slandered, and if it should be liable for reparations.
IBM has not yet offered a detailed rebuttal, but it has already made noises that Black's expose is unfair. It may be, but there is only one way to find out: Open the corporate archives, as survivors have demanded in a class-action lawsuit.
There is no room for sentimentality in this process. If culpable, Big Blue can no more escape the verdict of history than others whose complicity in the Holocaust is now coming to light.
As Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the author of "The War Against the Jews," writes, "History, as a way of knowing the past, has survived the partisanship, the ideological distortions, the attempts to extinguish its light and even to murder its practitioners. Its most terrible chapter—the murder of the European Jews--will surely remain forever recorded."
