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

“Watson embraced many of Patterson’s regimenting techniques as indispensable doctrine for good sales.”
― Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation

“It was nothing less than a nineteenth-century bar code for human beings.7”
― Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation

“By virtue of his extraordinary skills, Watson would be delivered from his humble beginnings as a late-nineteenth-century horse-and-buggy back road peddler, to corporate scoundrel, to legendary tycoon, to international statesman, and finally to regal American icon—all in less than four decades.”
― Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation

“That company was International Business Machines, and its chairman was Thomas J. Watson.”
― Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation

“It could rapidly perform the most tedious accounting functions for any enterprise: from freight bills for the New York Central Railroad to actuarial and financial records for Prudential Insurance.”
― Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation

“Moreover, the new reform-minded Director of the Census Bureau, Simeon North, uncovered numerous irregularities in the Bureau’s contracts for punch card machines. Hollerith was gouging the federal government.”
― Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation

“Other than his inventions, Hollerith was said to cherish three things: his German heritage, his privacy, and his cat Bismarck.”
― 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

“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

“To search generations of communal, church, and governmental records all across Germany—and later throughout Europe—was a cross-indexing task so monumental, it called for a computer.”
― Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation

“Every punch card would become an informational storehouse limited only by the number of holes.”
― 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

“IBM, primarily through its German subsidiary, made Hitler’s program of Jewish destruction a technologic mission the company pursued with chilling success.”
― 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

“Although born into a clan of tough Scottish Watsons, the future captain of industry was actually born Thomas J. “Wasson.”
― 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

“Excessive royalties, phantom machines, inconsistent pricing for machines and punch cards, restrictive use arrangements—the gamut of vendor abuses was discovered.19”
― Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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