Edwin Black: A Teacher's Response

Thank you to everyone who came out to hear our guest speaker, Ediwn Black, at either our luncheon, the CLE lecture for lawyers, or at the public lecture at Temple De Hirsch Sinai on Tuesday!  After the event on Tuesday, we asked teachers what stood out to the most from the lecture and how/if it might effect their teaching.  The following are two examples of responses we received:

Edwin Black’s scholarship was most impressive, and although I had some vague idea that IBM had been involved with the German government, I really had no idea until hearing him speak just how closely IBM worked with the Nazis and how clear the facts are that top executives at IBM were knowledgeable and fully implicated in the ways the company actively played a role in the Holocaust.  The enlargements of several critical documents that he provided proved the extent of the role that IBM played and the fact that everything was not simply known but managed from the top executives including the president and chief counsel of the company.

Mr. Black showed how IBM’s technological innovation and the machinery it developed in the 1930s to read punch cards (the mechanical forerunner to the modern computer) were vital to the Nazis’ program for genocide.  I had a rough sense of how punch cards and those old machines worked, but I did not realize until Mr. Black explained it that IBM had created literally millions of cards over a few years that would be used to collect every type of information imaginable about Jews, based on census data.  What struck me with great force was the amount of information shared between the Nazis and IBM during the entire period of the genocide that showed just how much contact that company had with the daily business of the Holocaust, right down to the fact that each concentration camp had an IBM office with a punch card machine that had to be continually supplied with pre-printed punch card made by IBM.  The evidence Mr. Black offered overwhelmingly showed that IBM did not simply sell a few machines to the German government without knowledge of their purpose and use, but rather that IBM was involved in every step of the process of the Holocaust and that the company played the single key role in making the process so horribly efficient.

In addition to the solid chain of damning evidence of IBM’s role in the Holocaust, the other point that Mr. Black made that was both memorable and directly tied to events taking place today was the fact that IBM’s motive does not really seem to have been anti-Semitism.  Instead, it seems clear that IBM executives were just doing what business leaders always do—focus on profits and keeping shareholders happy.  Helping a murderous regime carry out its work was not really a moral concern at all but simply a smart business deal.  This is significant because it should give all of us today pause for thought about the way multinational corporation are involved today all over the world in business endeavors that bring harm to citizens in many countries, and the fact that governments tend not to hold businesses accountable when profits are up and people are happy.  We should build on Mr. Black’s work about IBM more than half a century ago to think about companies in our own time such as GE, Apple, and many others who make products that are sold to regimes abroad and used against innocent civilians.

Stephen E. Retz

History Department Chair

Seattle Academy

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When my students study the Holocuast, they often have difficulty understanding why the genocide happened.  They reason that people must have been different "then," more bigoted, less tolerant, more supportive of extremist views.  They believe our democratic institutions would prevent genocide here in the United States and, besides, the people would never allow it.

I anticipate such student reactions and offer information that forces students to consider whether genocide and genocidal policies "just happen" as a result of bigotry, or whether they're exacerbated by self-interested stakeholders.  Edwin Black's investigation into IBM's assistance to Nazi genocide -- indeed, IBM streamlined the process so successfully one wonders whether the Nazis could have achieved such horrific success without IBM's help -- provides documentary proof of a U.S. corporation's complicity in the Holocaust and strongly suggests the complicity of the U.S. government who ignored IBM's actions.  I can have my students access the long-hidden documents Black unearths and ask some hard questions about who shares responsibility for the Holocaust, and about what citizens can and should do to prevent business-as-usual from supporting another genocide.

Susan Andrews-Salmond

Highline High School

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I thought the presentation was absolutely riveting.  I remember hearing about the book at the time it was written, but just recalled that IBM computers helped to organize the timing of the trains to the concentration camps; I did not know that the entire process of census and identification was included.  Although motion pictures too often tend to depict business as cartoonishly evil (I took our daughter to see The Lorax, and hated the message it conveyed), I am gratified to hear that IBM will be made into a major motion picture, as it is a terrific story.

I teach US and World History, Government, and Social Justice.  It is heaven sent material for the Social Justice course.  I was surprised to learn that there was apparently no motive other than profit; I would have thought anti-Semitism would have played a role, or pro-Nazi/Bund sentiments.   I can very much see doing a unit on the issue, and offering extra credit for going to see the movie, if and when it comes out, or even using the movie in class.

My personal view of teaching history is that we should teach the bad and the good, and take into account what they knew then, which often is not the same as what we know now.  Still, the idea of doing business with a war machine that is trampling Europe, and traveling to Berlin, capital of a country we are at war with, in May 1942, leaves me little room to have sympathy with IBM based on the ‘what they knew then’ measuring stick.  

I did google “IBM and the Holocaust lesson plans,” and came up empty.  If the author is as passionate as he is, and is going to be as wealthy as he will be with the movie deal, he should consider hiring an educator or two to design some on-line lesson plans to encourage the use of this dramatic and compelling piece of history in classrooms nationwide.

Bob Fretz
King's High School, Shoreline