IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation-Expanded Edition

The book was in excellent condition as described.

Bought for my husband and he has thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. Found it very interesting, surprising in places and historically factual.

翻訳の古本の価格が高かったので原著を買いました。たしか、"This book will be hard to read. It was hard to write." のようなことがどこかに書いてあったと思います。その通りでした。自分で出典の一々を確認することまではしていませんが、緻密な記述に圧倒されました。

This is another hard read from Edwin Black, but it is a very important topic. It is a troubling topic in so many ways. First and formost, to know that corporations you grew up with aided the Nazi extermination of Jews, Jehovah's Witnesses, Gypsies, and others borders on the unfathomable. TO see such raw greed, with a complete lack of any moral fiber, is alarming.Thomas Watson was such a person. He was the president of IBM, and continued operations in Nazi Germany, throughout the war, using deceptive accounting and other ruses to hide this fact. The facts are, that the tabulating machines that IBM owned and sold and serviced, were used to do the census in Germany and subsequently in all the countries that became part of the Greater Reich, after they were overrun by the Nazis. The census was how they knew who and where the Jews were. They pinpointed them with ease, and then used these same machines, again owned and serviced by IBM, to efficiently move them to concentration camps or slave labor camps by trains organized and scheduled with utmost efficiency. There acts were treasonous, as they were aiding the enemy! They were never charged, though they were investigated, because IBM was playing both sides, ingratiating themselves with the war efforts on this side of the Atlantic. They did not care where or how their money was made, or who from. They wanted more. I am ashamed of this "American" company.This story troubles me when thinking about how long governments and corportions have been gathering information about us. For over a century. The results can be devastating. I think of all the information the NSA has been collecting about us, and don't find it difficult to imagine that it would be used against us. When George Orwell wrote 1984, and talked about Big Brother, he was warning us about information technology run amok! It happened before, and it can happen again. This gives me a chill!This was an excellent read, my only criticism being the amount of material and detail which can be daunting. Nonetheless I believe it is a 5 star read.

Fascinating history of IBM. I thought it was interesting that it was IBM that originally developed punched card technology and actually stored whole databases using these cards. In the media we are taught that the first computer was the Collosus developed by the British during World War II, yet it would seem that IBM had already developed remarkable punched card technology previously that would be used as input to many mainframe systems prior to this. It was also interesting how Thomas Watson was ruthless in business and would not let any form of morality usually accepted in society stand in the way of profit or company success.