Edwin Black - IBM and the Holocaust

This book is a detailed demolition job. Edwin Black explores in great detail, with solid evidence what IBM, one of the largest, wealthiest and most important multinationals did during World War II. As such, the book also tells us something about the priorities of business.

Edwin Black argues that IBM's desire to maximise profits and in particular, the instincts and priorities of Thomas Watson, its chairman directly contributed to the Holocaust. IBM Germany, or Dehomag as it was known during the Hitler era, was run by "openly rabid Nazis" and IBM New York "always understood - from the outset in 1933 - that it was courting and doing business with the upper echelon of the Nazi Party".

Thomas Watson could not claim to be unaware of what was happening in Germany. Edwin Black uses the New York Times to illustrate exactly what was being reported about events in Germany following Hitler's election and occupied countries after the beginning of the war. He chooses this newspaper because it was the major newspaper of the city in which Watson lived and worked, and the city from where he frequently travelled to Germany, or sent representatives, to micro-manage IBM's business.

Black begins his story with the background to IBM and the key individuals who founded the business. Their ruthless business instincts make for fascinating reading, particularly in the light of later events. IBM's business and its fortune were based on mechanical counting and sorting machines. These machines, constantly being innovated and jealously guarded by patent, used punched cards to store data. IBM had sold these machines to the US government for use in censuses. For the first time detailed information could be stored and analysed, without laborious human work. With their introduction it was possible for the government to count the number of people with particular skills, or in age-groups or match up groups of people to almost any desire. Work that would previously have taken months now took hours. The success of the machines in the US census quickly meant that IBM could sell the technology to other governments and organisations. Soon, most of the capitalist world was using IBM technology to guide trains, count people or sort information.

Edwin Black details the rise of Hitler and Nazi Germany. He spends time dwelling on some of Hitler's plans and ideas. This is more than a simple rehash of history, Black is demonstrating as much as possible, the type of government that IBM was prepared to do business with. Anyone who sold counting machines to Hitler's Germany for censuses, and used their technical expertise to detail and prepare the punch cards required, could not have helped but know to what use they would be put to. IBM kept a monopoly on the manufacture and sale of the punch cards, essential to the work of the sorting machines. They did this for two reasons, one so they could continue to make profits from the machines once they had been leased and secondly to protect their monopoly of the business. IBM made themselves essential to Hitler's Germany and what they did.

That is not to say that IBM only did business with Fascist regimes, though their particular need to identify groups of individuals meant they were in high demand. IBM also sold machines to Allied governments. At one point IBM machines were being used to store information on movements of military equipment for both sides. IBM technology was used to decode Germany military messages at Bletchley Park. It was also used by the German's to encode them prior to transmission. As the German's invaded Poland, Czechoslovakia and France the machines were captured and put to use by the Nazis. IBM made sure that its company was kept up to date with the location of all the leased machines, understanding that its interests would be protected as a company from a country that was not yet involved.

As the years passed since Hitler's coming to power, popular opinion in the US turned heavily against the Nazis. As each story of atrocity emerged, more and more people and companies joined a boycott of Germany business. This boycott bit hard into the German economy. Thomas Watson became a central figure in arguing against the boycott. He was Germany's business man in the US. Free Trade to bring the world closer together and prevent war was his mantra. So pleased were his friends in Berlin that they gave him a medal at a glittering ceremony and party in the capital. Watson ensured that few in the US knew IBM's business links and Watson's relished his role as unofficial ambassador.

A Hollerith machine, as used by the Nazi regime. Note the IBM logo.

The Holocaust needed IBM punch cards. When the SS arrived in a town and produced a list of Jews they wanted, the names were sorted on the basis of data organised using IBM equipment. When those Jews were packed into cattle cars and taken to concentration camps, the trains ran to a timetable organised using IBM equipment. When the Jews were selected for forced labour, their skills and experiences were listed on cards. And when they were killed or sent to their deaths, the punch cards were marked to list their deaths. In Dachau, prisoners understood that the removal of the cards meant those individuals had been selected to die.

The Holocaust would have happened without IBM. But the business of mechanised slaughter and forced labour, as well as the ability to wage war was facilitated by IBM. The outbreak of war with the US meant that IBM's German operations were separated from New York, but Watson could rest easy, knowing that his interests, and the company's were protected for future peacetime. To make sure that IBM did not lose out, Watson created a group of soldiers from drafted IBM personnel. These men visited company premises with the advancing armies, securing IBM equipment. When IBM's involvement was exposed, the US civil servant who broke the news to his government was eventually told to keep it quiet. The US government wanted to make sure that they could have access to IBM's particular skills after the war, to make Europe work again.

The importance of IBM's equipment and the assistance that they offered to Nazi Germany in the years before the US entered World War II cannot be under-estimated. Edwin Black documents that in Norway, the resistance tried to destroy the sister company there with bombs (the company was called Watson Norsk) to stop the Nazis using the information to organise slave workers. Watson Norsk's "longtime manager", Tellefson ensured that information had been stored off-site in anticipation of such an attack, which "allowed IBM's lucrative service to continue. In Norway, annual revenues doubled from 161,000 crowns in 1940 to 334,000 crowns in 1943."

In 1941, Watson "set the stage for IBM Europe's wartime conduct". In instructions he wrote and sent out, he said that because of the war, "we cannot participate in the affairs of our companies... as we did in normal times... you are advised that you will have to make your own decisions and not call on us for any advice or assistance". As Edwin Black points out, this instruction did not tell them to stop working with the Hitler regime, or stop selling punch cards to the concentration camps, only to stop telling the New York office what was happening.

The centrality of IBM to the Holocaust is summed up by the one small positive story that exists in the book. This concerns an individual who deserves to be known as a hero to all of us today. Rene Carmille was a French military technologist who offered to take charge of the IBM machines to process the census returns. However the anticipated lists of Jews never materialised. Instead, when the invasion of Algeria began, the US forces had a ready list of Frenchmen able to join the Free French forces. The section of the punch cards "column 11" which asked for Jewish identity was never filled in. Carmille was a double agent for the French resistance. He produced 20,000 fake identity passes and a database of 800,000 former French soldiers, but he never produced a list of Jews for the SS.

Carmille was finally arrested in 1944 and tortured by the infamous Klaus Barbie. He never talked and eventually died in Dachau in early 1945. His personal contribution to blocking the production of the lists, illustrates the importance of IBM and the role of individuals who worked for it. The Author contrasts France with Holland were in a similar situation, IBM equipment was used to create a database of Jews and send them to concentration camps.

"Of an estimated 140,000 Dutch Jews.... 102,000 were murdered - a death ration of approximately 73 percent. Of an estimated 300,000 to 350,000 Jews living in France... about 85,000 were deported... barely 3,000 survived. The death ration in France was approximately 25 percent."

The destruction of the French Jews was made infinitely harder because of the lack of a working punch card system. Carmille and his mis-use of the IBM equipment played a central role in this.

IBM has never come clean about its operations during World War II, nor those of its affiliates in Europe. Important documents remain locked in archives and historians are not allowed access. Edwin Black's own researches have been restricted and blocked by IBM. Black says that IBM seems to be "hoping the matter will simply go away." A careful reading of Black's book has left me in no doubt that members of IBM's senior management during the 1930s and the early 1940s were well aware that their equipment was being used in Germany, and had detailed knowledge of the type of work that was being done with it. By continuing to produce punch cards for that market, training individuals in Germany and other European countries and offer maintenance contracts, IBM made enormous profits. IBM should come clean about this role and open up their archives for scrutiny by Holocaust experts.

However we should be clear about one thing. Thomas Watson was not a Nazi. Nor is it likely that any others in IBM New York's senior management were pro-Hitler. Nor was Watson particularly anti-Semitic. Indeed several of his close friends were Jewish and some, in Germany suffered under the regime, as did a number of Jewish employees of IBM in Germany. The logic driving IBM's involvement with Germany and the particular work that they did was the logic of capitalist business. Watson was particularly unprincipled in this, but nobody else in the organisation criticised the source of the money flowing into the bank. IBM found itself in a unique position and its senior staff drove home this advantage.

Fascism in power has close links with big business. Despite its appeal to the small businessman and the middle classes, Hitler's movement was about ensuring the continuation of the capitalist system. Hitler courted and was courted by businessmen from across the world. IBM and Thomas Watson were just one example. They were able to profit out of that relationship in spectacular ways and they should be held to account for it.

Related Reviews

Paxton - The Anatomy of Fascism
Guerin - Fascism and Big Business
Sereny - Albert Speer - His Battle with Truth

George V. Higgins - The Friends of Eddie Coyle

Described in the introduction as the "game changing crime novel of the last fifty years" it is difficult to understand the hype that surrounds The Friends of Eddie Coyle. It certainly is a well written novel, a tale told almost entirely through conversations between central characters. But while the conversations certainly allow the author to demonstrate his skills, but this isn't enough to make the novel as brilliant as many claim.

Eddie Coyle is a small time, and fairly inept gangster. Facing jail for his part in a minor crime, he is offered a way out if he is prepared to tell the police about other, bigger crimes he knows of. Coyle is a small cog in a larger, wider criminal network. Amongst these acquaintances are gun-smugglers, murders and bank robbers.

The choice Eddie faces, which "friend" to sell out makes up the central part of the story. The problem is that the police want more, and once Eddie has begun the journey of selling out his friends, it is difficult to go back. The conclusion is not-unexpected, but at least the drama mounts and the story holds till the end.

I'm not sure that this really is "one of the greatest crime novels ever written". But it is fairly enjoyable and it'll keep you off the streets yourself for an hour or so.

Richard Fortey - Trilobite! Eyewitness to Evolution

I used to think that the trilobite was merely one of those instantly recognisable fossils, sort of like an elongated and flattened woodlouse. The sum total of my knowledge of trilobites was, in the style of a foot note to a child's introduction to fossils, that they were distant relations of the modern horseshoe crab. Growing up in Birmingham, I'd never seen a horseshoe crab, though on visits to Dudley Zoo, I should have become more acquainted with its older ancestor. Trilobites are found in vast numbers in quarries around that Midland town, and the 'Dudley Locust' as it was known, features on the town's crest.

Richard Fortey's book on trilobites is full of such facts. However it is much more than the sort of history that rests everything on a collection of similar pieces of information. The trilobite forms an important moment in the evolution of life on Earth, and its very success has enabled scientists like Fortey to contribute enormously to our understanding of the history of the planet.

The tale is also the tale of Fortey's own career. From his early discovery of a trilobite as a young boy looking for fossils, "other boys discovered girls, I discovered trilobites" to exhibitions as wide-spread as Spitsbergen, Canada and China, his studies of the thousands of trilobite species have led him to be one of those few individuals lucky enough to be pursuing a career in a childhood passion. But Fortey's own interests are much wider than trilobites. Alongside detailed explanations of natural history and planetary geology, his book is peppered with literary quotes and poems. All this makes for a readable and fascinating account.

So why are these animals so important. Its not their size. Few of the species seem to have grown more than a foot or so, many of them were a few centimetres in size. Their sheer numbers are stunning. Some of the pictures in the book of enormous quantities of fossils and pieces of fossil, piled on top of each other, are testament to the numbers of trilobites that must have existed on sea bottoms and in the depths of the water. Trilobites were amazingly successful. They came into being when the continents themselves were part of earlier arrangements - before the Pangean super-continent, stretching back millions of years. They lasted for 300 million or so years, far longer than our own species.

Its this longevity that in part explains tribolite importance. Mapping out the places that their fossils are found can help identify the locations of ancient seabeds and coastlines. The very movement of the Earth's plates, and hence the continents, around the globe are marked by were fossils of trilobites can be found.

A trilobite fossil, yesterday.

There's much more too. Despite the 540 million or so years since they lived, trilobites were not primitive creatures. Their hard shells demonstrate eons of evolution themselves. Able to curl up and protect themselves from predators, or on occasion produce spears and tridents to help get their food, scientists have identified trilobites that roamed the surface, swam in the Cambrian oceans and lived under the mud.

A few lucky scientists have made careers from bridging the boundaries of their disciplines. Most trilobites could see, growing crystals of calcite that focused light onto sensitive cells. The very notion of an animal with eyes partially made from the same substance as rocks or shells is stunning, and Fortey devotes a fascinating chapter to the evolutionary and biological questions that this throws up.

The trilobite is a humble creature. Fortey says that he has given up hope that there remains a remote ocean-valley holding a still living colony of these creatures. It seems, sadly, that despite the animal's success, it was unable to survive the changing environment. However, the insight that we can gain from its life into sciences as varied as plate-tectonics, genetics and evolution, surely gives this animal an importance far beyond its own humble life. Richard Fortey's wonderful book is a brilliant insight into all of these subjects and far beyond.

Related Reviews

Cadbury - The Dinosaur Hunters

Neil Gaiman - American Gods

I read the "author's preferred text".

I will start this review by making a very clear statement about the book under scrutiny. Neil Gaiman's American Gods is one of the best fantasy novels of the last twenty years. I am sure that most readers of this blog will know the feeling you get when you discover a new author that ticks all of your boxes. From almost the first page of this story I knew that I would eventually devour everything that Gaiman has written. The only question is one of speed.

Gaiman's view of the United States is not one that the American government would like. His America is one that is more than the superficial niceness of shopping malls, or the repetitive nature of identikit roadside restaurants. Gaiman peers through this to the uneven, dirty America beneath. One of poverty and shallowness, of kindness and hope mixed with despair. For most people, hope has been replaced by the short-term desire for objects and feelings that will numb the over-riding feeling of pointlessness.

Gods arise out of belief. When the first farmers gave thanks for their crops, or the hunters turned to the skies and praised those that had given them an easy kill, Gods were created. They drew strength from their followers. The more that made sacrifice or prayers the more powerful they were. America, a land populated by immigrants from the time of the last ice-age has many imported Gods. Those who arrived on the shores and gave thanks to the old Gods, created new versions of them on the new continent. The vikings (and other more fantastical visitors such as the Egyptians) brought Odin and Loki and numerous others. But the worship dwindled with the failure of those communities. Later immigrants brought Gods from Ireland and elsewhere. Some prospered, some are reduced to poverty, themselves praying for followers and urging worships.

But new Gods prosper and grow strong. The Gods of commodification and short-term pleasure. Gods of money and electricity, of railways and engineering. These might be seen as an analogy for capitalism itself, its dynamism throwing up new objects of worship, which are rapidly eclipsed like steam power gives way to electricity. The Gods engage in a final battle for supremacy, and Shadow, the hero of the piece is drawn in. As bodyguard and then as a central piece in the chess game itself. The battle between old and new is a metaphor for America itself. The backdrop is the very development of the continent and the lives of the people who made it.

The idea of Gods having strength from worship is not new. Nor is the mortality of Gods who lose their followers. Pratchett did it in Small Gods and Douglas Adams also played it for laughs in Dirk Gently. Gaiman creates a many-layered world of belief and magic, parallel to, but not separate from our own world. The differences between good and bad are blurred here. The unity of the Gods, old versus new, obscures the fact that both sides have their own divisions. For most of the Gods, humans worship them, but are also objects to satisfy their own base desires. People to be seduced, laughed at and scorned. You could if you want, employ a further metaphor here, human life generates the religious value that the Gods crave and need to continue their blind, irrational lives. The further accumulation of belief requires the further use and abuse of humans, even if some Gods enjoy the exploitation less than others.

I will avoid the temptation to draw out the detail of the story. The climatic battle between old and new here does not necessarily herald a change in the human world, though one is left with the feeling that a world were the only Gods that exist are ones that represent Internet shopping and machine guns would not be a good things for ordinary folk. Whether humanity ever ever throw off the Gods themselves is left to the imagination. His voyage through America as Shadow explores the other world that he has hitherto not observed, is a work of detail. From the small towns, with their delicious undercurrent of pain and suffering, to the rank, sterile life of shopping malls and banks, the book is part travelogue, part crime caper, part fantasy and in large part, a tale of retribution and revenge. It is a wonderful read that will suck you into an alternate world, but one that is strangely familiar.

Philip José Farmer - The Dark Design

Volume three of Philip José Farmer's Riverworld series is one of those novels were you wonder if the series is about to "jump the shark". The two earlier ones, set as they are, on a baffling and fantastic planet were the vast majority of humans from all epochs of history have been resurrected, are excellent reads.

Farmer's orginal idea though, was so vast in scope that there was no way that it could be limited to one or two books. Indeed, in the preface to this novel he explains that the story continued to grow. What was meant to be the final volume became the penultimate.

Farmer is trying to tie up lose ends here. His various characters, or groups of characters are all famous individuals from Earth's history. Unlikely groupings of people like Mark Twain and Cyrano de Bergarac, Jack London and Richard Burton are some of the figures that are trying to find their way to an enormous tower at the centre of an arctic sea. As suggested by its name, Riverworld is dominated by a single river that stretches from pole to pole and back around the other side of the globe. This continuously flowing stream is surrounded by millions of humans. Despite these numbers, chance encounters seem common enough. Certainly enough that Farmer can experiment with the lives (both actual and fictional) of his characters.

Despite some good ideas here the plot occasionally feels of artifical. In one area of the planet the stone age society (there are limited metals and minerals on Riverworld) is running short of the flint it needs for tools and weapons and society is moving backwards. Yet elsewhere, one of the planet's founders has been able to divert an asteroid to provide a huge variety of material for technological development. So some explorers, travelling now by assorted balloons, steam boats and blimps have helicopters and lasers, which seems to me to undermine the point of the story somewhat. Elsewhere the novel seems to have been limited by its editorship. Do we really need to have every measurement in both imperial and metric values? The following sentence, for instance, should win a prize;

"In this deep, cold cup the water surrendered warmth, so much that the temperature at 1524 metres or 5000 feet was 2 degrees above Centigrade."


On the same page, on character orders de Bergarac, the pilot of his airship to 'Take her down to 1530 metres, Cyrano'. The exactness of the figures seems unnecessary.


The quest to get to the tower dominates the lives of the characters, the sole point of the world that the author has created is to beg the question why has this happened and why have human's been resurrected upon it. The quests to the tower, initiated by a rogue member of the intelligent beings that created the planet are part of finding the answers. Yet the story keeps running away from the author. It is non-linear too, Farmer weaving plot-lines around each other in a confusing mix. Farmer created a wonderful fantasy world here. I just hope that the final parts of the story answer the questions posed early on and don't confuse things more.

Related Reviews

Farmer - To Your Scattered Bodies Go
Farmer - The Fabulous Riverboat

David J. Breeze - The Antonine Wall

The northern-most frontier of the Roman Empire, marked out by the Antonine Wall is often overlooked by its more impressive southern cousin built by Hadrian. The history of the Antonine Wall is much shorter, and according to David Breeze, it was likely to have been built by a new Emperor, keen to extend his Imperial boundaries in order to win a triumph. But extending the borders like this didn't really win the Emperor much, Breeze points out that he conquered "territory which had once been Roman and, we might expect, had been kept under Roman surveillance ever since."

Unlike Hadrian's wall, much of Antonine's was constructed from turf, rather than stone. An impressive military way would have shadowed the wall, and forts and fortlets helped soldiers patrol and guard the approach. Again, as with Hadrian's wall, this was less of a military defence and more of a border or statement of power. Breeze locates the wall in a wider "military landscape", with Roman forts, settlements and patrols extending over a wider area, north and south of the actual border line.

For those academically interested, there is a wealth of detail here - distances and sizes, lists of military forces based at particular points and so the like. There is also a smidgen of humour, I liked that the chapter dealing with the day to day life of the soldiers stationed on the wall, is called "Life on the Edge". For those soldiers who may have served, or originated in Africa, as evidence of ancient cooking styles implies, this cold northerly location at the most extreme end of the Empire must have felt very isolated indeed. Very much an edge between the known and unknown.

Sadly little of Antonine's wall survive. Extensive parts have fallen foul of the plough, but Breeze's book provides a useful guide to the best places to view the wall. From personal experience I recommend Rough Castle, not simply for the remains, but because of the sense of the wider landscape that the Romans would have been located in. This is a useful introduction to the history of this part of the Roman world and some of the debates and discussions that are still absorbing academic minds. Breeze is honest enough to admit that he has emphasised the evidence that backs his own theories, but I suspect that much of this would mean little to the lay reader anyway, and is unlikely to detract from a useful introduction to a small part of Roman Britain.

Related Reviews


Watkins - The Roman Forum
Parenti - The Assassination of Julius Caesar
Beard - Pompeii; The Life of a Roman Town
Beard - The Roman Triumph

Gitta Sereny - Albert Speer: His Battle With Truth

Gitta Sereny's detailed and scholarly examination of one of the key figures in Hitler's leadership is also extremely readable and powerful, two qualities rare in biography. At times it is terrible to read, the subject matter by necessity must examine details of the Holocaust and the use of slave labour that is repugnant. There is a compelling fascination though. For anyone who has ever wondered how the Holocaust could happen, how fairly ordinary men and women could be complicit in the mass murder of six million Jews, and millions of communists, socialists, trade unionists, Gypsies, gays and lesbians and countless other "undesirables" there is a desire to try and understand the reality of life under German Fascism.

There is meticulous research behind this book. Sereny seems to have spent a lifetime in archives, reading documents and interviewing every conceivable participant who knew the individual she was writing about. From his secretaries and servants in Hitler's bunker, to his wife and prison guards. But most of all, she interviewed Speer himself.

Following his trial at Nuremberg for his involvement in war-crimes, Speer was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Even before the trial itself he was undergoing a transformation. By the time of his release, he seemed obsessed with expressing his own repentance. Many of his existing circle of friends disowned him - they could not understand his desire to distance himself from Hitler, nor criticise the former Fuhrer. This process had begun, at least publicly, for Speer in the dock, when he'd attacked the man to whom he owed so much. Even in Spandau prison, several of his co-defendants could not forgive him for this.

Sereny's biography beings with Speer's childhood. Given the realities of German life in the early twentieth century, Speer was lucky to be the son of a prosperous, if unloving architect. The stilted and cool atmosphere of the middle class upbringing shaped Speer's own inability to display warmth. No doubt, his later relationship with Hitler carried echoes of the relationship that Speer would have liked to have had with his own father. However, to reduce their complex friendship to this would make nonsense of the other factors and realities of Speers' life.

By chance Speer found himself the favoured architect of Hitler. Speer had never been a party man, though he rapidly found himself at the heart of the Nazi organisation, joining formally in the early 1930s. However his rise was startling, and by the time of the war, he had moved on from designing homes to prominent Nazis, to heading up some of the most important industries of the German war economy. He proved extremely able. Even during the height of the bombing campaigns Speer helped ensure that the German economy continued to produce munitions and equipment for the armed forces. Central to this was the question of slave labour, labour that originated in the concentration camps, from Jew's exiled from their homes and from captured prisoners.

At the heart of the book, and indeed most articles about Speer is the question of his knowledge. To what extent was he aware of the mass murder taking place? Sereny's answer is couched in riders. Firstly she argues that it wasn't true that everyone in Germany was aware of the mechanised slaughter taking place at death-camps in Poland. This is not to say that people didn't think killing was taking place, or that something was going on. She includes Speer in this - he must have been aware that large numbers of people were being transported away from their homes, just has he must have known that hundreds of thousands of labourers were coming from somewhere.

Central to this debate, is whether or not Speer was present at an infamous speech that Himmler made to leading members of the SS. The text of Himmler's speech, which mentioned the slaughter and what needed to be done to solve the Jewish question, refers to Speer on several occasions, as if Speer himself was in the hall. Speer admits that he was there in an earlier session, speaking on questions of wartime production, but claims to have left. When the speech was made public, Speer spent many long hours trying to prove that he wasn't there, by sitting in the archives looking for evidence.

It is worth at this point noting Sereny's own brilliance as a researcher and historian. She examines Speer's life day by day, sometimes hour by hour, trying to tease out exactly where he was and when. What could he have known, who else was with him, what might he have heard. The detail is almost overwhelming, but builds up her central thesis, that Speer knew far more than he let on. This level of detail is important for Sereny too, because Speer spent many many ours creating his own story in an attempt to free himself of suspicion.

This desire to clear his name shaped Speer's later life. His defence at Nuremberg, was to denounce Hitler and his actions, accepting his responsibilities, but not his guilt. However once his imprisonment began, he seems to have begun to construct a careful web of stories that highlight his independence and criticism of Hitler as well as ignore his links to the aspects of the regime that would have acknowledged his awareness of the Holocaust. One example of this, is in the description of his final meeting with Hitler. Speer claims in his book, Inside the Third Reich, that he re-afirmed his personal loyalty, but admitting to working to countermand Hitler's final scorched earth policies. In a famous paragraph, Sereny points out that:

"Psychologically, it is possible that this is the way he remembered the occasion, because it was how he would have liked to behave, and the way he would have liked Hitler to react. But the fact is that none of it happened; our witness to this is Speer himself." [529]

Speer's original draft manuscript for the book, written in prison, contained no such story - surely something that would have been at the forefront of his mind. In fact the opposite is then claimed, Speer saying that he did not confess to Hitler. Similar examples abound in Sereny's book, as she uncovers the detailed process that Speer went through, before presenting his carefully selected story to the world. Speer makes much of his break with Hitler - his desire to protect the German people. So much so, that Speer claimed to have made plans to kill the Fuhrer.

After reading over 700 pages of Sereny's detailed account, its difficult to believe anything that Speer says. Not necessarily because he deliberately lied all the time, but because he was keen to portray himself in a particular way. He was after all, one of the last remaining figures from Hitler's inner circle and few could contradict him.

Sereny doesn't limit herself simply to telling, or criticising Speer's story. She spends time examining other aspects to the story of Nazi Germany. Some of the powerful parts are the tales of those that did know about the Holocaust and sought to alert the world. Some of these tales are tragic, as the fairly to be believed or listened to, drove individuals to despair and suicide. Sereny highlights these tales, to argue that some people were brave enough to stand up, or at least find out what was going on. Those who argue that the only chance to survive the dictatorship was to keep ones head down, may have been accurate, but they took a particular moral path.

Speer did not do this. He feigned ignorance and enjoyed his privileged life as long as he could. That said, he did clearly break with Hitler. He seemed to be one of the few who could challenge Hitler's madness, though Speer was not brave enough to break completely. There is an element, at least in how SEreny describes it, of love between the two men. Or perhaps hero worship by Speer. His return to Berlin to see Hitler one last time, smacks vaguely of the behaviour of a lover who cannot quite bring themself to say a final goodbye.

Sereny shows that many of those who knew Speer, during the war, during his imprisonment and after his release seem to have fallen into a kind of spell. Speer was clever, articulate, handsome and dashing. But she reminds us, he worked closely with people who had inspected concentration camps. Drank champagne with men who organised the Holocaust and had visited the slave labour camps. Even if the experience here shocked him enough to demand improved conditions for the workers.

Sereny concludes by quoting an exchange with Speer. An article she'd written quoted some word's of Speer's, written in 1977:

"However to this day I still consider my main guilt to be my tacit acceptance [Billigung] of the persecution and the murder of millions of Jews."

After he had checked this with her, and added a clarifying footnote which, if anything, strengthens the statement, Sereny asks why he was saying this now, after denying it for so long. The article he had written was in response to a Holocaust denial book, and Speer explained that he could no longer "hedge" the question, "for this purpose". Sereny comments that had Speer said this at Nuremberg, he would have hung with the other Nazis.

Sereny's book leaves little doubt that Speer knew far more than he admitted. His survival at Nuremberg and the second career he carved out as a writer stem from his ability to selectively tell a horrific story. But it is also clear that Speer was himself horrified by what had been done. The Holocaust was the outcome of the coming to power of a powerful political force that had been moulded by Hitler. The Fascist bands that made Germany safe from socialist revolution relied on racism and prejudice to cement the street gangs together. They broke the communists and the trade unions, but they also opened the door to mass murder. Speer, and many of the industrialists that he came to work closely with during the war, found the world of Hitler one that they could do business with. A tiny number turned their backs and walked away, Speer and many others did not.

Related Reviews

Paxton - The Anatomy of Fascism
Guerin - Fascism and Big Business
Lipstadt - Denying the Holocaust, the Growing Assault on Truth and History