Justice delayed: IBM's collaboration with Nazi Germany

REVIEW ESSAYS

IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's most Powerful Corporation. By Edwin Black. New York: Crown Publishers, 2001.

The year is 1993. At the US Memorial Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, Edwin Black surveys the exhibits with his parents, both survivors of the Holocaust. The first is a Hollerith punch-card sorting machine bearing an IBM logo. "Why is this here?" he asks himself. "Did this machine help the Nazis identify and arrest my parents?" Black did more than ask the question: he sought an answer. After years of exhaustive research, he concluded that the IBM corporation facilitated the Nazi regime's brutally efficient methods of identifying Jews and sending them to extermination camps, confiscating their assets, and automating the German war machine. These are discoveries Black reveals in his shocking book, IBM and the Holocaust.