Edwin Black > Quotes

“Behind every text footnote is a file folder with all the hardcopy documentation needed to document every sentence in this book at a moment’s notice. Moreover, I assembled a team of hair-splitting, nitpicking, adversarial researchers and archivists to review each and every sentence, collectively ensuring that each fact and fragment of a fact was backed up with the necessary black and white documents.”
― Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation

“Eventually, America's eugenic movement spread to Germany as well, where it caught the fascination of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi movement. Under Hitler, eugenics careened beyond any American eugenicists's dream. National Socialism transduced America's quest for a "superior Nordic race" into Hitler's drive for an "Aryan master race.”
― Edwin Black, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race

“Der Führer’s obsession with Jewish destruction was hardly original. There had been czars and tyrants before him.”
― Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation

“The Carnegie Institution continued to back eugenics long after its executives became convinced it was a worthless nonscience based on shabby data.”
― Edwin Black, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race

“The machines could render the portrait of an entire population—”
― Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation

“it interests me only so far as the tank ditch is completed for Germany.”12”
― Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation

“But in 1933, no computer existed.”
― Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation

“Some 200,000 Germans of all backgrounds had been sterilized by 1937. After that the records were not published.”
― Edwin Black, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race

“language abilities needed for work battalions.”
― Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation

“Throughout the first six decades of the twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of Americans and untold numbers of others were not permitted to continue their families by reproducing. Selected because of their ancestry, national origin, race or religion, they were forcibly sterilized, wrongly committed to mental institutions where they died in great numbers, prohibited from marrying, and sometimes even unmarried by state bureaucrats. In America, this battle to wipe out whole ethnic groups was fought not by armies with guns nor by hate sects at the margins Rather, this pernicious white-gloved war was prosecuted by esteemed professors, elite universities, wealthy industrialists, and government officials colluding in a racist, pseudoscientific movement called eugenics. The purpose: create a superior Nordic race.”
― Edwin Black, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race

“It could compute, that is, the technology could record data, process it, retrieve it, analyze it, and automatically answer pointed questions.”
― Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation

“His card sorter was more than just a clever gadget. It was a steel, spindle, and rubber-wheeled key to the Pandora’s Box of unlimited information.”
― Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation

“Computations were completed with unprecedented speed and added a dramatic new dimension to the entire nature of census taking.”
― Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation

“First, he sold himself—like any adroit salesman—and then worked around their collective worries about his conspiracy conviction.”
― Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation

“not to stop Dehomag from its genocidal partnership with the Third Reich, but to ensure”
― Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation

“North suspected that even the Russian Czar was paying far less than Uncle Sam.”
― Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation

“Hitler and his hatred of the Jews was the ironic driving force behind this intellectual turning point.”
― Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation

“Watson recruited men to carry supplies in on their backs until the goods reached Dayton—all to cheering crowds.57”
― Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation

“This nightmare was Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, a special Hell on Earth created by Nazi Germany.”
― Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation

“The destruction of the Jewish people became even less important because the invigorating nature of IBM’s technical achievement”
― Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation

“In 1903, Watson was called to Patterson’s office and instructed to destroy second-hand dealers across the country.”
― Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation

“Bottled water and paper cups were distributed to flood victims along with hay cots for sleeping.”
― Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation

“In other words,” said Flint, “you want part of the ice you cut.”
― Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation

“Census and statistical departments in Russia, Italy, England, France, Austria, and Germany all submitted orders.”
― Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation

“Within “the lion’s den” was a room for the Arbeitsdienstführer, the Labor Service Leader.”
― Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation

“The American masses were not rising up demanding to sterilize, institutionalize and dehumanize their neighbors and kinfolk. Eugenics was a movement of the nation’s elite thinkers and many of its most progressive reformers.”
― Edwin Black, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race

“and who could be cost- effectively sent to the gas chamber.”
― Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation

“As a nineteenth-century international economic adventurer, Flint believed that the accretion of money was its own nurturing reward,”
― Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation

“But his quest was greatly enhanced and energized by the ingenuity and craving for profit of a single American company and its legendary, autocratic chairman.”
― Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation

“French looms, simple music boxes, and player pianos used punched holes on rolls or cards to automate rote activity.”
― Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation