IBM and the Holocaust (Paperback)

IBM AND THE HOLOCAUST is the stunning story of IBM's strategic alliance with Nazi Germany - beginning in 1933 in the first weeks that Hitler came to power and continuing well into World War II. As the Third Reich embarked upon its plan of conquest and genocide, IBM and its subsidiaries helped create enabling technologies, step-by-step, from the identification and cataloguing programmes of the 1930s to the selections of the 1940s. Only after Jews were identified - a massive and complex task that Hitler wanted done immediately - could they be targeted for efficient asset confiscation, ghettoisation, deportation, enslaved labour, and, ultimately, annihilation. It was a cross-tabulation and organisational challenge so monumental it called for a computer. Although, in the 1930s no computer existed, IBM's Hollerith punch-card technology did. 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 did Hitler get the names?