A little more than a year ago, the investment management company BlackRock sparked outcry with the announcement that it would launch a major investment initiative in China. Even George Soros, hardly a figure of the right, criticized BlackRock chairman Larry Fink’s turn towards Chinese investment in a scathing op-ed for The Wall Street Journal.
But BlackRock’s foray into China is by no means the first time an American company has sought to strengthen commercial ties with a country that posed a threat to both basic human rights and to American foreign policy interests.
Perhaps the most striking example of this is IBM’s relationship with Nazi Germany, as detailed in Edwin Black’s IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation. Though most people today probably associate IBM with its computer software, the company’s original flagship product was an electromechanical tabulating machine. Invented at the end of the 19th century by Herman Hollerith, the machine worked by “reading” punch cards to collect data. The United States and almost every single country compiling a census report at this time recognized the machine’s utility and leased the technology. In 1933, Germany, which was then under the chancellorship of Adolf Hitler, likewise became an IBM customer.
