@konrad It's an excellent question, and many books have been written on the subject of how the nation of Beethoven and Schiller ended up producing the most industrialized mass murder in human history. It's fascinating, and one of the reasons I've spent a lifetime reading about it.
The man I referred to meeting was named Kurt Krüger, and he was an early Nazi and an enthusiastic supporter of the Party program (and the father of the woman who became my high school German teacher). Something apparently changed for him when he got to Poland after the camps were established, and he saw (and by his own account, enabled) the atrocities, and he was one of the Germans lucky enough to survive Soviet captivity, but unlucky enough not to be released until 1955. One can only wonder what ten years in the gulag taught him. It did change him in some ways. By the time I met him, he was in his 80s and had become an enthusiastic Green Party member, and was living in a small town in the Schwarzwald.
Everything I've read leads me to believe that Hitler and the Nazis could not have taken and held onto power if their only supporters were the obvious ones, the demobilized soldiers, the men in brown shirts and their families. It also required the willing assistance of the industrialists like Thyssen and Krupp, the auto manufacturers like the Quandt family, the lawyers, the salesmen, the booksellers, the grocers, the teachers, the farmers, the priests and pastors, and the Volksdeutsche in places like the Sudetenland.
The ones who actively supported the party were, without question, deserving of the label "Nazi." The opportunists also did. What about the people like your wife's family, who kept their head down and just tried to survive, and who did not actively resist? Their lack of resistance enabled the regime to some degree, but it's worth noting that by 1934, the Enabling Act had been passed, the Gestapo had been established, and the first KZ-Lager had been built at Dachau. After that point, resistance required significant risk, not only to oneself but also to one's family. I'm not going to condemn those who were just trying to live long enough to see another day. There's a reason why we call the ones who did resist, who hid Jews from the SS and saved lives, heroes.
All of the above is why I and many others have sounded the alarm about what's going on in my country. If you understand how and why Hitler (and other dictators) came to power, and how he held onto power, you have insight into the risks we all face and what could come next. It is not yet too late here, but nobody should be complacent. We're just not that special.
Oh, and to answer your question about IBM: corporations are made up of people, and the people who organized the information that allowed the Holocaust to happen are every bit as guilty as the SS-Oberscharführer who dropped the Zyklon-B crystals into the gas chamber.
// @matigo @gtwilson