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The Dark Side of Great Historic Figures

Khalid Elhassan December 11, 2020 33 min

Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton & Susan B. Anthony - Elizabeth Cady Stanton — Susan B. Anthony, left, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. NJTV

30. How IBM’s Iconic Leader Facilitated the Holocaust

Thomas J. Watson. Computer History Museum

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.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.