Edwin Black

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Edwin Black is an award-winning New York Times bestselling American author and journalist specializing in corporate and historical investigations. He has published fifty-six editions in thirteen languages in sixty-one countries. He has also written numerous newspaper and magazine articles, published throughout the United States, Europe and Israel.

Contents

[edit] Work

[edit] The Transfer Agreement

Edwin Black's first nonfiction book was The Transfer Agreement, originally published in 1984 and then subsequently republished in 1999, 2001 and 2002. The book details the painful and controversial 1933 agreement between the Nazis and the Zionist Organization to rescue European Jews and their assets by transferring them to Jewish Palestine. The Nazis insisted that the transfer was conditioned on the purchase and resale of German goods. The more goods the Zionist sold, the more Jews the Third Reich released. This program effectively broke the Jewish-led anti-Nazi boycott working to topple the Hitler regime in its first year. As such, the deal tore the Jewish and Zionist communities apart because one could not fight against Hitler by boycotting German goods and at the same rescue Jewish victims of Nazi oppression by selling those same German goods. Black's book was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and was given the Carl Sandburg Award for the best nonfiction book of the year. The book was met with a firestorm of publicity and incredulity when it was originally published. Although Black was originally attacked by Jewish communal leaders for revealing the bitter details of the Transfer Agreement, he later became a popular Jewish journalist, considered by many to be one of the Jewish community's most ardent and credible defenders precisely because of the explosive nature of The Transfer Agreement.

[edit] IBM and the Holocaust

Main article: IBM and the Holocaust

Black's second nonfiction book was IBM and the Holocaust which in February 2001 was published simultaneously in 40 nations in 9 languages and is now sold in 60 nations in 13 languages. In brief, IBM and the Holocaust "tells the story of IBM's conscious involvement-directly and through its subsidiaries-in the Holocaust, as well as its involvement in the Nazi war machine that murdered millions of others throughout Europe". Black's book documents how IBM's New York headquarters and CEO Thomas J. Watson acted through its overseas subsidiaries to provide the Third Reich with punch card machines that could help the Nazis to track down the European Jewry (especially in newly conquered territory). The book quotes extensively from numerous IBM and government memos and letters that describe how IBM in New York, IBM's Geneva office and Dehomag, its German subsidiary, were intimately involved in supporting Nazi oppression. The book also includes IBM's internal reports that admit that these machines made the Nazis much more efficient in their efforts. A 2003 documentary film The Corporation showed close-ups of several documents including IBM code sheets for concentration camps taken from the files of the National Archives. Prisoner Code 8 was Jew, Code 11 was Gypsy. Camp Code 001 was Auschwitz, Code 002 was Buchenwald. Status Code 5 was executed by order, code 6 was gas chamber.

One extensively quoted IBM report written by the company's European manager during WWII declared “in Germany a campaign started for, what has been termed … ‘organization of the second front.’” The memo added, “In military literature and in newspapers, the importance and necessity of having in all phases of life, behind the front, an organization which would remain intact and would function with ‘Blitzkrieg’ efficiency … was brought out. What we had been preaching in vain for years all at once began to be realized.” IBM has never denied the details of the book, [1] [2] and even stated that Black's "case is long and heavily documented." But the company added, "yet he does not demonstrate that I.B.M. [sic] bears some unique or decisive responsibility for the evil that was done." [3] The book won two major 2001 awards from the American Society of Journalists and Authors: Best Book of the Year and Best Investigative Article of the Year for "IBM and Auschwitz" which was based on the book. IBM and the Holocaust has been featured in hundreds of news articles, magazine stories, TV shows and documentaries, virtually none with rebuttal from IBM.

[edit] War against the Weak

Black's third nonfiction book was War Against the Weak, published in 2003, documenting the forgotten rise of genocidal American eugenics in the first decades of the 20th Century, that is, the drive to create a white, blond, blue-eyed master race. The campaign forcibly sterilized some 60,000 Americans by virtue of racist, pseudoscientific legislation in 27 states eventually upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court and made the law of the land. The book also documents the American eugenics movement's direct financial, political and sponsorship of Nazi eugenics after the rise of Adolf Hitler in 1933 through the efforts of the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harriman railroad fortune. These groups inspired Adolf Hitler to move his German nationalism into biological supremacy. They financed vast eugenic research networks. The Carnegie Institution helped create the mathematical formulas defining a half-Jew, quarter-Jew, sixteen Jew and so forth which became enshrined as the Nuremberg Laws. The Rockefeller Foundation, according to the book, financed the program that sent Mengele into Auschwitz seeking twins for monstrous experimentation. After World War Two, the eugenics movement recoiled and renamed itself "human genetics." War Against the Weak was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and eventually won the 2003 International Human Rights Award from the World Affairs Council.

[edit] Authored books

[edit] Contributions to anthologies and other books

  • 2004 - Contributor, technical translator, The Nazi Census: Identification and Control in the Third Reich by Götz Aly, Karl Heinz Roth, Edwin Black, Assenka Oksiloff (Temple University Press)
  • 2005 - Chapter Contributor, The Secret Histories: Hidden Truths That Challenged the Past and Changed the World, edited by John Friedman (Picador Books)
  • 2006 - Essay Contributor, What Israel Means to Me: By 80 Prominent Writers, Performers, Scholars, Politicians, and Journalists, edited by Alan Dershowitz (Wiley Books)

[edit] Notable articles

[edit] Major documentary appearances

  • 2002 - The King of Capitalism, BBC
  • 2002 - The Corporation, theatrical release
  • 2007 - Saddam and the Third Reich, History Channel
  • 2007 - Racism – A History, BBC

[edit] References

  1. ^ The Nizkor Project: IBM and the Holocaust.
  2. ^ Probing IBM's Nazi connection.
  3. ^ Addendum to IBM Statement on Nazi-era Book and Lawsuit.

[edit] External links

Languages