March 30, 2006

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    The Atlantic Monthly


    Atlantic Unbound | April 4, 2001
     
    Politics & Prose | by Jack Beatty
     
    Hitler's Willing Business PartnersA shocking account of IBM’s complicity with the Nazis is a reminder that people bear moral responsibility for the actions of the corporations, a point that critics have failed to grasp.


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    Y ou are Thomas Watson, the founder of IBM, and you face a choice. Hitler has just come to power in Germany, and you are considering whether to direct your German subsidiary, Dehomag, to bid for the job of tabulating the results of a census the Nazi government wants to conduct. While you are making up your mind in your New York office, the local papers swell with stories of anti-Semitic outrages committed by that government. On March 18, 1933, The New York Times reports that the Nazis have ousted all Jewish professionals—lawyers, doctors, teachers—from their jobs. A front-page story under the headline “German Fugitives Tell of Atrocities at Hands of Nazis” describes Brown Shirts dragging Jews out of a Berlin restaurant and forcing them to run a gauntlet of kicks and blows such that the face of the last man through “resembled a beefsteak.” Other stories tell of Jews being forced to clean the streets with toothbrushes, of book burnings, of 10,000 refugees fleeing Germany, and of 30,000 people—Jews, political prisoners, gays, and others—imprisoned in concentration camps. On March 27, virtually outside your window on Broadway, a crowd of more than 50,000 at a Madison Square Garden mass rally demands that American firms boycott Nazi Germany. In these circumstances, with this knowledge, will you, Thomas Watson, bid for the census contract?