WAS THE HOLOCAUST powered by IBM? That's the question that Edwin Black hopes to answer with his latest book, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation. Black thinks the answer is yes, arguing that Big Blue was responsible for much of the Nazis' vaunted efficiency, abetting Hitler's regime and its fantastically thorough elimination of the Jews. Weirdly, despite its provocative argument, and its place on the best-seller list for two weeks in a row, Black's book has received only a tepid response, media-wise. Not even a suit against IBM has really aroused sleepy reviewers and readers.

But Black is convincing, and the story he tells sordid. He makes his case primarily by untangling the complex, often obscured history of IBM, then headquartered in Endicott, New York, and its German subsidiary, Dehomag. Relying on thousands of documents including much IBM internal correspondence, Black shows how nearly every facet of the Third Reich relied on IBM machines. The American owned and operated company essentially installed Nazi Germany's information infrastructure, which is exactly what allowed Hitler to enact his policies with nearly magical speed and precision. And then, just as IBM's intimate relationship with the Nazis became untenable (in its earlier open-Kimono fashion), CEO Thomas J.Watson, Sr. adapted his technology to the Allies' needs. War is good for profits, no doubt. But Watson and company did more than merely cash in on human need exacerbated by wartime conditions. Through its technology, Black argues, IBM helped create the conditions for war.

The story goes roughly as follows: In the late 1800s, Herman Hollerith, an employee in the U.S. Census Bureau, developed an electromechanical tabulator that used punch cards to sort and analyze data of all kinds. The company Hollerith formed eventually became IBM. Despite a succession of mergers and acquisitions in its early years (including a buyout of Hollerith himself), Hollerith's electromechanical tabulator was the foundation of IBM's spectacular growth. From the outset, IBM was selling "solutions": the company would lease Holleriths to its clients and assist them -- be they census bureaus, railways, or insurance companies -- in configuring the system and developing the appropriate design for punch cards. In addition to having a near monopoly on tabulators and sorters, IBM had a definitive monopoly on punch cards. For bigger jobs, customers would require millions of punch cards a year. Germany was one of IBM's biggest markets outside of the United States. There, the Reichsbahn, the Reich Statistical Office, Krupps, and the Luftwaffe were among its clients. Diplomatically speaking, Watson was also well positioned. In 1935, Watson was elected head of the International Chamber of Commerce, and from this pulpit he preached peace: code for maintaining commercial ties to an increasingly violent, anti-Semitic, and rapacious Germany.

Black goes to great lengths to support his case, which is by definition circumstantial. But three damning facts are hard to dismiss: To locate Jews (a population that especially in Germany was fairly assimilated and thus hard to identify), Hitler compiled extensive, frequently updated census data. Hollerith machines were designed to process exactly this kind of data and installed expressly for this purpose. IBM's business model dictated that its employees work closely with clients, and consequently IBM was privy to the uses its machines were being put to. And finally, up until the U.S. entered the war, Watson was determined to maintain control over Dehomag.

Some, including the New York Times' Richard Bernstein (and a whole bunch of Plastic readers who haven't read the book), believe that IBM behaved just like many other American companies. That IBM deserves no special distinction based on its contribution to the Third Reich is contradicted by none other than the Fuhrer himself. In 1937, well after published reports of violence against German Jews, Hitler created a medal for Watson -- the Merit Cross of the German Eagle with Star -- which "honor[ed] foreign nationals who made themselves deserving of the German Reich." (Charles Lindbergh, Henry Ford, and James Mooney, General Motor's chief executive for overseas operations, were the only other Americans to receive medals of honor from Hitler.) Watson did not return the medal until 1940, a year after war had been declared in Europe.

Black, tightly focused on business transactions, does skimp a bit on context. Indeed, IBM was doing business with Nazi agencies in an era when mistreating racial and ethnic minorities was still an acceptable modus operandi in democratic nations. Here at home, these were the days when separate but equal was still the law of the land, and would be for more than another decade. It's also true that Germany would likely have come up with a way to identify people and send them to their deaths without IBM's Holleriths. This merely shifts the issue to one of timing. In the 1930s, Germany's infrastructure was still hobbled by World War I. IBM's technology was ready to go, it's paper supply for punch cards nearly inexhaustible. (When the Nazis, offended by Watson's return of the medal, investigated the possibility of creating their own tabulator cartel they discovered just how difficult it would be to replace IBM's machines.) The voluminous evidence Black presents suggests that without IBM's Holleriths the process of finding and deporting Jews would have been so clumsy that its very inefficiency would have spared hundreds of thousands of lives.

From all reports so far, it's likely that IBM will endure no more than a minor public flogging and a suit that will drag on for years -- neither in proportion to its dominance of the Third Reich's information architecture. Meanwhile, reparations are still being meted out. After negotiations with the United States, Germany, and lawyers for Holocaust survivors, German industry has set up a foundation to compensate former slave workers in the Third Reich. So far, the fund totals $2.5 billion. You have to wonder if IBM's German subsidiary is contributing. And from Black's book, you'd assume that it's not.

Still, the relatively quiet response is hard to explain. Maybe it's boredom. We have a Holocaust Museum now (that displays a Hollerith machine prominently). Most of the survivors are dead or dying. Multinational corporations have long seemed to exist beyond the law. But we can't assume the moral dilemma is behind us. Imagine if Milosevic's regime were still in power and Serbia were in need of a Web interface for tracking its population. Imagine if some struggling dot.com decided to increase shareholder value by providing just such a system even as thousands of Muslims were killed and displaced. Would our somnolence persist then?