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Edwin Black

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This article is about a journalist. For the rhetorician by the same name, see Rhetoric.

Edwin Black is an award-winning New York Times bestselling American author and journalist specializing in corporate and historical investigations. He has published 65 editions in 14 languages in 61 countries. He has also written numerous newspaper and magazine articles, published throughout the United States, Europe and Israel. The author has been featured in, and/or has been the subject of, numerous documentaries.

Work

The Transfer Agreement

Edwin Black's first non-fiction book was The Transfer Agreement, originally published in 1984 and then subsequently republished in 1999, 2001 and 2002. The book details the 1933 Haavara 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. While it allowed about 50,000 German Jews to escape the clutches of the Nazi regime, this program effectively broke the Jewish-led anti-Nazi boycott working to topple the Hitler regime in its first year. Black's book was given the Carl Sandburg Award for the best nonfiction book of the year. Although Black was originally attacked by Jewish communal leaders, he later became a Jewish journalist. The 25th Anniversary edition was released in July 2009 with an afterword by Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League and a new introduction by the author.

IBM and the Holocaust

Main article: IBM and the Holocaust

Black's second non-fiction 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. Several documentaries, including the 2003 film The Corporation screened, C-SPAN broadcast and The Times, the Village Voice, the JTA and numerous other publications published close-ups of several documents demonstrating IBM's involvement in the Holocaust. These included IBM code sheets for concentration camps taken from the files of the National Archives. Black maintains that 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.

War Against the Weak

Black's third non-fiction book was War Against the Weak, published in 2003, documented the American eugenics program in the first decades of the 20th century. The legislation in 27 states was eventually upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court. The book also documents the American eugenics movement's direct financial and political 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. The Carnegie Institution helped create the mathematical formulas defining a half-Jew, quarter-Jew, sixteenth Jew and so forth which became enshrined in the Nuremberg Laws. The Rockefeller Foundation, according to the book, financed the program that sent Mengele to Auschwitz. The book won the 2003 International Human Rights Award from the World Affairs Council.

Banking on Baghdad

Black's fourth nonfiction book was Banking on Baghdad, which traced the history of commerce and conflict in Mesopotamia and Iraq from the onset of recorded history to the Second Gulf War. The book, which accessed numerous public, private and corporate archives, begins with the first commercial trading of the ancient world in the "Cradle of Civilization," including the origin of that term. But the bulk of the research and text centers on the Ottoman Empire, the run-up to WWI and the western imperialism and League of Nations mandate process that created the oil states and modern-day Iraq.

Internal Combustion

Black's fifth non-fiction book was Internal Combustion, published in 2006, documenting how society never needed to fuel its industrial expansion on oil, and how rulers, governments and corporations have subverted the alternatives. The book accomplishes this by chronicling the history of fuel and transportation from the beginning of recorded times to the modern day. Extensive use is made of archives and obscure research in this highly footnoted work.

Internal Combustion received four major awards, including outstanding book of the year from the American Society of Journalists and Authors, the Rockower Award for investigative reporting, the Green Globes, and the Thomas Edison Award.

The Plan

Black's sixth non-fiction book was The Plan published in 2008, and his second on the topic of energy independence and oil addiction. The Plan however does not discuss energy independence as much as a fuel crisis looming in the event of a sudden oil interruption. Black states that the U.S. consumes about 20 million barrels of oil per day, some 70 percent imported, and if only 2 million were interrupted for a protracted period of a month or more, the nation would be thrown into economic chaos.

Nazi Nexus

Black's seventh non-fiction book Nazi Nexus published in 2009, in which he again returns to exploring Holocaust connections. This time, Black has woven together five major American corporate giants into a web of pivotal corporate complicity in the Holocaust.

Black concludes that taken together, the five companies created a Nazi Nexus without which the Holocaust would have been a very different tragedy of a very different dimension.

The Farhud

Author Black details the Arab-Nazi Alliance in the Holocaust.

Authored books

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)
  • 2007 - Chapter Contributor, Das Helige Nichts, edited by Johann Wabbel (Patmos Books)

Newspapers and magazines

Edwin Black has been the editor of several magazines, and his work has appeared in many leading magazines and newspapers internationally. From 1974 and 1976, Black was the editor of Chicago Monthly, an enterprise journalism and investigative city magazine, during its three year existence; the magazine won a Folio Award for editorial excellence. From 1992 to 1997, Black was the editor of OS/2 Professional, an enterprise journalism computer monthly, during its five year existence; the magazine won a Computer Press Association Award.

As a journalist and author, Black's writings have appeared in many newspapers and magazines in several countries. In the United States, these include the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Journal of the American Bar Association, American Lawyer, Reform Judaism, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, the Village Voice, Chicago Reader, and others. Overseas, these include: The Times of London, the Guardian, the Daily Mail, Suddeutsche Zeitung, Corriere della Sera, Le Monde, the Jerusalem Post, Jerusalem Report and others.

Notable articles

Major documentary appearances

  • 2001 - "IBM's Role and the Holocaust" GNN
  • 2002 - The King of Capitalism, BBC
  • 2002 - The Corporation, theatrical release
  • 2007 - Saddam and the Third Reich, History Channel
  • 2007 - Racism – A History, BBC
  • 2009 - War Against the Weak—The Movie, film festival release

References

External links

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