30. How IBM’s Iconic Leader Facilitated the Holocaust
Thomas J. Watson was a great American businessman and industrialist who served as chairman and CEO of International Business Machines (IBM) from 1914 to 1956. During that time, he oversaw IBM’s transformation from a prosaic entity once known as The Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company and into a global giant. When Watson took over, the company had 1300 employees and annual revenues of $9 million. When he died in 1956, IBM had grown to a juggernaut with 72,500 employees, and annual revenues of $897 million.
In 2001, IBM and the Holocaust, a bombshell book by Edwin Black, questioned Watson’s relationship with Nazi Germany. Drawing on thousands of documents from numerous countries’ archives, the book described a twelve-year alliance between IBM and the Third Reich. While numerous American companies had done business in Germany, even after Hitler and his Nazi crowd took over, most of them severed their ties once WWII began. Not IBM, which continued doing business with the Nazis, who used its cutting-edge technology to facilitate the Holocaust’s administration.