IBM and the Holocaust .

I decided post this in its own thread to provide some back story to caligirl's thread on:
60 Terabytes: thats what the gov wanted to store digital conversations
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=132&topic_id=2345802&mesg_id=2345802

http://www.ibmandtheholocaust.com/
IBM and the Holocaust is the stunning story of IBM's strategic alliance with Nazi Germany -- beginning in 1933 in the first weeks that Hitler came to power and continuing well into World War II. As the Third Reich embarked upon its plan of conquest and genocide, IBM and its subsidiaries helped create enabling technologies, step-by-step, from the identification and cataloging programs of the 1930s to the selections of the 1940s.
Only after Jews were identified -- a massive and complex task that Hitler wanted done immediately -- could they be targeted for efficient asset confiscation, ghettoization, deportation, enslaved labor, and, ultimately, annihilation. It was a cross-tabulation and organizational challenge so monumental, it called for a computer. Of course, in the 1930s no computer existed.

But IBM's Hollerith punch card technology did exist. Aided by the company's custom-designed and constantly updated Hollerith systems, Hitler was able to automate his persecution of the Jews. Historians have always been amazed at the speed and accuracy with which the Nazis were able to identify and locate European Jewry. Until now, the pieces of this puzzle have never been fully assembled. The fact is, IBM technology was used to organize nearly everything in Germany and then Nazi Europe, from the identification of the Jews in censuses, registrations, and ancestral tracing programs to the running of railroads and organizing of concentration camp slave labor.

IBM and its German subsidiary custom-designed complex solutions, one by one, anticipating the Reich's needs. They did not merely sell the machines and walk away. Instead, IBM leased these machines for high fees and became the sole source of the billions of punch cards Hitler needed.


http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0609607995/103-9130371-1048663?v=glance&n=283155
Amazon.com
Was IBM, "The Solutions Company," partly responsible for the Final Solution? That's the question raised by Edwin Black's IBM and the Holocaust, the most controversial book on the subject since Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners. Black, a son of Holocaust survivors, is less tendentiously simplistic than Goldhagen, but his thesis is no less provocative: he argues that IBM founder Thomas Watson deserved the Merit Cross (Germany's second-highest honor) awarded him by Hitler, his second-biggest customer on earth. "IBM, primarily through its German subsidiary, made Hitler's program of Jewish destruction a technologic mission the company pursued with chilling success," writes Black. "IBM had almost single-handedly brought modern warfare into the information age virtually put the 'blitz' in the krieg."
The crucial technology was a precursor to the computer, the IBM Hollerith punch card machine, which Black glimpsed on exhibit at the U.S. Holocaust Museum, inspiring his five-year, top-secret book project. The Hollerith was used to tabulate and alphabetize census data. Black says the Hollerith and its punch card data ("hole 3 signified homosexual ... hole 8 designated a Jew") was indispensable in rounding up prisoners, keeping the trains fully packed and on time, tallying the deaths, and organizing the entire war effort. Hitler's regime was fantastically, suicidally chaotic; could IBM have been the cause of its sole competence: mass-murdering civilians? Better scholars than I must sift through and appraise Black's mountainous evidence, but clearly the assessment is overdue.

The moral argument turns on one question: How much did IBM New York know about IBM Germany's work, and when? Black documents a scary game of brinksmanship orchestrated by IBM chief Watson, who walked a fine line between enraging U.S. officials and infuriating Hitler. He shamefully delayed returning the Nazi medal until forced to--and when he did return it, the Nazis almost kicked IBM and its crucial machines out of Germany. (Hitler was prone to self-defeating decisions, as demonstrated in How Hitler Could Have Won World War II.)

Black has created a must-read work of history. But it's also a fascinating business book examining the colliding influences of personality, morality, and cold strategic calculation. --Tim Appelo

nt

One of the punchcard used...note the logo!!

This is one chilling tale.

:kick:

"The Hollerith was used to tabulate and alphabetize census data."

I can just imagine the conversation... :sarcasm:

NAZI Buyer: Ve vish to buy und alphabetized counting machine.

IBM Sales Rep: Why?

NAZI: Why do you ask why?

IBM: Here at IBM, unlike every other business that has existed in the history of mankind, we demand to know exactly what reason our customers have for buying any of our equipment.

NAZI: We wish to use it for our census.

IBM: Let me check with the home office. (places transatlantic call) New York? A German government official wants to buy one of our accounting machines to help with their census.

NY: What do they plan to do with the census information?

IBM: How do you plan on using the census information?

NAZI: The usual stuff. Taxation, urban renewal, killing Jews.

IBM: He says they plan to use it to plan for things like taxation and the extermination of the Jewish race.

NY: That "extermination of the Jewish race" doesn't sound kosher**. But I don't see anything in our written policy about genocide. So I guess that is okay. Before you let the customer get away, the US government is putting together something called "Social Security". But they don't just want our machines, they want us to build an entire government agency for this purpose. Why don't you ask your guy if he would like our help putting together an agency for killing Jews.

IBM: Do you just want the machine? Or would you like our assistance organizing a complete final solution?

NAZI: No, we just want the machines. "Final solution." I like the sound of that. You don't mind if I borrow that for our project, do you?


** Yes, that was in very bad taste. But I couldn't help myself.

Indications of trouble are already visible in the book's early pages, where Black stakes out a number of far-reaching claims that he is unable to sustain, most crucially that Hitler's quest to exterminate world Jewry was ''greatly enhanced and energized'' by the I.B.M. corporation and its leader. Together, Thomas Watson and Adolf Hitler -- one an extreme capitalist, the other an extreme fascist'' -- formed a ''technological and commercial alliance that would ultimately facilitate the murder of six million Jews and an equal number of other Europeans.''

But the evidence Black adduces never proves anything of the sort. He shows that under Watson, I.B.M.'s world headquarters in New York conducted business with Nazi Germany from 1933 up to the American entry into the war, and that Watson, a rapacious profit-seeker, even received a medal in 1937 from Hitler for his friendship with the Third Reich -- which he later had to renounce amid considerable embarrassment. By the time war erupted in 1939, I.B.M. technology -- primarily punch cards and the Hollerith machines that tabulated them -- was widely in use by the Germans in the military, the SS, the railways and other key institutions.

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/03/18/reviews/010318.18schoent.html

This is not meant to imply that I support I've Been Mugged.....

The NYT has a bad track record when it comes to the truth. Hitler's census was the only way to keep track of the Jews in Germany, and his census was made much more complete and timely using IBM technology. The book makes that clear, using IBM records no less. The NYT review is about as reliable as a Judith Miller story on Iraq.

Bill

edit:sp

Here are some rather prominent reviews...

http://www.ibmandtheholocaust.com/reviews.php
An explosive new book... Backed by exhaustive research, Black's case is simple and stunning: that IBM facilitated the identification and roundup of millions of Jews during the 12 years of the Third Reich. ... Black's evidence may be the most damning to appear yet against a purported corporate accomplice.

Michael Hirsh
Newsweek
READ REVIEW

Black clearly demonstrates that Nazi Germany employed IBM Hollerith punch-card machines to perform critical tasks in carrying out the Holocaust and the German war effort. He goes on to document that IBM managed to profit from Hitler's state throughout its existence. ...Black establishes beyond dispute that IBM Hollerith machines significantly advanced Nazi efforts to exterminate Jewry. ...IBM and the Holocaust is a valuable contribution to our understanding of the Holocaust.

Christopher Simpson
Washington Post Book World
READ REVIEW

Thomas Watson chose to tabulate the Nazi census, to accept Hitler's medal, and to fight for control of Dehomag. And he made other equally indefensible choices in his years of doing a profitable business counting Jews for Hitler-choices that are described in IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black. This is a shocking book with the help of more than a hundred researchers working in archives in the U.S., Britain, Germany, France, and Israel, Edwin Black has documented a sordid relationship between this great American company and the Third Reich, one that extended into the war years.

The Atlantic
Jack Beatty
READ REVIEW

Black's book is most interesting when he is dealing with Watson's stubborn, and unsuccessful determination to continue in control of IBM's German operation without appearing to be doing so. He was able to cut off direct relations between IBM in the US and the Germans while continuing to deal with them indirectly. He was a master of subterfuge and made a fine art of being in a position to deny collaboration with the Nazis while operating through subsidiaries who were responsive to his every wish. ... and he never forbade them to supply IBM machine that were used in sending people to camps, which they did.

Gordon A. Craig
New York Review of Books

Black's studycontains a wealth of unknown or little-known details. The author convincingly shows the relentless efforts made by IBM to maximize profit by selling its machines and its punch cards to a country whose criminal record would soon be widely recognized. Indeed, Black demonstrates with great precision that the godlike owner of the corporation, Thomas Watson, was impervious to the moral dimension of his dealings with Hitler's Germany and for years even had a soft spot for the Nazi regime. He didn't desist even when it became clear that IBM's tabulation system was helping the regime to register its victims.

Saul Friedlander
Los Angeles Times

Black has tracked down document after document witnessing that Holleriths inventoried prisoners for death at Bergen-Belsen and other concentration camps. ...IBM and the Holocaust is a disturbing book -- all the more so because its author doesn't prescribe what should be done about sins committed more than half a century ago. It is left to readers to decide.

Ron Grossman
Chicago Tribune
READ REVIEW

Black's book is shocking. Its contents go against the grain of all that is dear to naive images of corporate America. Black has amassed a formidable mountain of coherent evidence that argues convincingly for IBM's complicity in the Holocaust. This book will be a case study in corporate ethics for years to come.

Robert Urekew
Midstream
READ REVIEW

IBM and the Holocaust is an ambitious book. The result of arduous research, it reveals in detail how IBM's Hollerith machines facilitated and hastened the Holocaust. IBM and the Holocaust is an important contribution to Holocaust studies.

John Friedman
The Nation
READ REVIEW

Black's book is carefully researched and documented. An army of assistants gathered, compiled, and analyzed data from a huge range of sources. The book adds much to our knowledge of the Holocaust and World War II. Black convincingly demonstrates the extent to which it , was central to the operation of the Third Reich.

Terry W. Hartle
Christian Science Monitor
READ REVIEW

Black makes a case that shames the IBM of the mid-20th Century. ...There will be no question... in the minds of readers that IBM officials had the ability to understand the task their machines were performing. The book succeeds as a piece of excruciatingly documented journalism.

Karen Sandstrom
Cleveland Plain Dealer
READ REVIEW

Edwin Black was moved to write this important book to answer questions that have eluded historians of the Nazi genocide. how are we to account for the methodical manner in which the Nazis were able to implement the Holocaust? Edwin Black's account of the complicity of IBM in the "Final Solution" provides us with a perspective on the Nazi genocide that departs from most other accounts of the Holocaust. Whereas much of the scholarship on the Holocaust focuses on anti-Semitism and the role that Nazi racist ideology played in bringing about the slaughter of the Jews, Black argues that the efficient manner in which Hitler's Germany was able to bring about the Holocaust was due to technical support provided by IBM. This work of prodigious research helps us to understand a previously ignored factor in comprehending the Holocaust, the profit motive.

Jack Fischel
Philadelphia Inquirer
READ REVIEW

Black ... documents IBM's sins with chilling discipline, only rarely peeling off into melodrama. ... IBM and the Holocaust lays out in numbing detail the terrible deeds of bureaucrats and business leaders, especially Watson, a handsome and utterly mercenary salesman who doled out charitable donations from his Madison Avenue perch at the same time he was providing the Nazis with the wherewithal to commit mass murder. In the end, though, this book has a subtler story to tell, one frighteningly relevant to our lives today. IBM and the Holocaust isn't about evil men at a particularly bloody point in recent history so much as it's about the dawn of the modern information age.

Douglas Perry
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
READ REVIEW

Black's argument that IBM made millions from its association with the Nazis seems almost impossible to refute.

John Mark Eberhart
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
READ REVIEW

An exhaustively researched, highly detailed look at IBM, its history and business dealings. . . . Black’s book . . . is an ugly story, hidden for years, told by a master craftsman in a compelling way. More than just another Holocaust tale . . . it’s a chilling lesson.

Richard Pachter
Miami Herald
READ REVIEW

IBM and the Holocaust...convincingly argues that the machines were among Adolf Hitler's most powerful weapons in his campaign to exterminate Europe's Jews. ... To be sure, mass murders were possible without the help of IBM equipment, but the equipment made the killing machine far more lethal.

Alan Goldstein
Dallas Morning News
READ REVIEW

More than 15 million people have visited the Holocaust Museum and seen the IBM machine there. Surely some have raised the question: How could this prestigious corporation possibly be linked to such a heinous stain on human history? With empirical evidence, Edwin Black has supplied the answer. IBM and the Holocaust makes an empirical statement. Edwin Black has made his case.

Louisville Courier-Journal

More than a half-century after the Holocaust, brought the shocking disclosure that the jewel in America's industrial crown provided the technology that fueled Hitler's plan for the destruction of European Jewry.

Helen Davis
Cleveland Jewish News
READ REVIEW

This may very well be the most important work that I have come across regarding ethics and computer science, military informatics, and technology. While it is not focused directly on either ethical theory or analysis, it is very much about the consequences of pragmatic business and technology decisions made without consideration for their very human consequences; plausible deniability is certainly presented as a key theme. Evil is not only perpetrated by those with blood literally and directly on their hands; it can be facilitated by those championing their business interests above human tolls. Albert Camus said, "If I can not lessen evil, at least let me not add to evil."

Sam Nitzberg
Bulletin of Institute of Business, Technology and Ethics
READ REVIEW

A- Rating. This damning chronicle of IBM's collusion with the Nazis exposes, in horrific detail, the corporation's opportunistic ride on Hitler's tail.

Charles Winecoff
Entertainment Weekly

IBM and the Holocaust is a damning indictment of IBM's conduct before and during the Second World War and a provocative exploration of boardroom savagery. ... Black presents a thoroughly convincing case against IBM's conscious collaboration. Routing orders through its Geneva office and using cryptic references for its activities, senior managers in New York deliberately strove to obscure their involvement. But IBM and the Holocaust lucidly hacks through the corporate tangle. Tracing IBM's alliance with Hitler was a prodigious effort in historical detection. Black and his team of researchers and translators scoured widely dispersed papers to assemble more than 20,000 pages that revealed its scope. Black's achievement is to reveal how deep runs the guilt--if not the shame--for murder committed on the scale of the Holocaust.

Tod Hoffman
Montreal Gazette

Edwin Black's IBM and the Holocaust provides a stark tutorial. The book can be read as a withering indictment of Thomas J. Watson, painted as a profit-crazed monopolist who makes Bill Gates look like Mr. Rogers. It's also a red flag, a warning about corporate responsibility and information technology for our wired, global economy. IBM and the Holocaust should instruct corporate chieftains as they scour the planet for profits. It's tough reading, but Black manages a forceful argument against business-as-usual.

Kevin Coughlin
Technology Writer
Newark Star-Ledger

Black has unearthed undeniably bad news for the official IBM version of its role in World War II. Black clearly demonstrates that Nazi Germany employed IBM Hollerith punch-card machines to perform critical tasks in carrying out the Holocaust and the German war effort.

Santa Rosa Press-Democrat

Black's argument that IBM's shady dealings with Nazi Germany accelerated the Holocaust is strengthened by the archival information that the author uncovered that IBM did not just sell a technology that fell into the wrong hands, but leased the machines, trained personnel, maintained the machines at their sites (which were often located within concentration camps), and sold millions of punch cards per month. Black convincingly contends that Watson sustained a relationship with Hitler in order to keep his IBM Germany going. In the face of daily reports of Jewish persecution prior to the war Watson continued to make public statements in favor of Hitler's Fascist beliefs, so much so that Hitler conferred the second highest Nazi honor on Watson. Meticulously researched and exhaustively documented, Black leaves no stone unturned.

Jill Barett
Confluence Magazine

Black's carefully researched study examines how Dehomag's technology was extended to all parts of Nazi-conquered Europe. Dehomag's demonic achievement reached its zenith with the extraordinary efficiency in rounding up and transporting Jews to Auschwitz. This study contributes to understanding the Holocaust trauma-pointing out technology and profit-seeking, when unguided by moral or ethical considerations, can help destroy peoples and civilizations.

William Korey
Hadassah Magazine

IBM and the Holocaust should be required reading not only for all Holocaust scholars but also for those contemporary celebrants of computerized access to information as a virtue in itself, little short of technological utopia.

Howard P. Segal
Nature Magazine

What a stunner: IBM in cahoots with Nazi Germany. Beginning in 1933, in the first weeks of Hitler's rise to power, and continuing well into the Third Reich's plan of conquest and genocide, IBM and its subsidiaries helped create enabling technologies so that Jews could be identified -- a massive and complex task that Hitler wanted done immediately -- and targeted for efficient asset confiscation, ghettoization, deportation, enslaved labor, and, ultimately, annihilation. Black takes you through the carefully crafted corporate collusion with the Third Reich, as well as the structured deniability of oral agreements, undated letters, and the Geneva intermediaries -- all undertaken as the newspapers blazed with accounts of persecution and destruction. Just as compelling is the human drama of one of our century's greatest minds, IBM founder Thomas Watson, who cooperated with the Nazis for the sake of profit.

Booksense

Images of past genocides have often been shaped by the means most commonly used to accomplish the destruction. . . . The Holocaust is portrayed as an industrial genocide involving complex train schedules, prussic acid gas chambers and assembly-line oven cremetoria. Edwin Black adds to this image the new element of mass killing through use of data processing and statistics, with IBM's German subsidiary Dehomag (Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen Gesellschaft) enabling the Nazi authorities to systematize the persecution of European Jews. . . . One employee of Dehomag using these machines for the Nazi Government to tabulate the population censuses of 1933 and 1939 , 'We are very much like physicians,' he told his Nazi audience, 'in that we dissect, cell by cell, the German cultural body... these are not dead little cards; quite to the contrary, they prove later on that they come to life when they are sorted at 24,000 an hour according to certain characteristics.'

Prevent Genocide International

Watson did business with Nazi Germany because it was profitable. Hitler may have burned books, but he invested heavily in information technology. As "Greater Germany" expanded, so did the Hollerith market. Persecution, conquest, and genocide were good for business.

Vince Juliano
Looking at Books
Connecticut Libraries
READ REVIEW

Edwin Black's exposé of IBM's, or rather founder Tom Watson's, relationship to Nazi Germany and Hitler is indeed shocking and mind-numbing in its scope and detail.

AudioFile Magazine

Amidst all the fear and horror, the question, rarely asked and never answered, is: How did they know? How were they able to target, with such brutal accuracy, the homes of all people of Jewish decent? And what about the skillful coordination with which trains were shuttled around to ensure the rapid transportation of the thousands of men, women, and children to concentration camps? Again, the unasked and unanswered questions: How did they do it? How were they able to keep track of the thousands of people, people who were being uprooted, dispossessed, transported long distances? How did they always know? The question has at long last been both asked and answered by Edwin Black in IBM and the Holocaust, the unlikely bestseller which charts with extraordinary detail the unholy wartime alliance between Nazi Germany and IBM.

Ellen Rose
Antigonish Review

Now--60 years later--Edwin Black and his 100 researchers have blown the whistle. The book offers documentation that would be the envy of any trial lawyer. Watson had to know what the Nazis were doing with IBM's technology.

Sheldon Willens
The Squire Express

This is the story of IBM's conscious involvement in the Holocaust. To this very day, people ask "How could it happen? Why did it happen?" How did the Nazis get the names? How did the German schedule operate to transport people to Treblinka in precise timing, to keep lists of names of those gassed? It was a challenge only a computer could handle in an age before computers were used. But IBM's punch card technology did exist. And this company was headed by Thomas Watson, its founder, whose need for profit was well known. Thus, he collaborated with Hitler. This book will be uncomfortable to read and as the author states, "It was uncomfortable to write."

Lifestyles Magazine

No one can say that author Edwin Black didn't do his homework for this book. More than 100 people in seven countries participated in the research of his book. Its more than 500 pages are a painful but imperative read for friends of Israel, for it details the conscious involvement of IBM in America and its German subsidiary in the Holocaust. A single American company with an autocratic, greedy chairman, Thomas J. Watson, head of IBM during WWII, provided what no previous Jew-haters ever had: an early form of technology.

Olive Tree Reviews

but i'm not about to tell him to quit his job. i remember about 30 years ago the russians came to IBM to buy computers. my husband's superior at the time was a jew, but that day he did not wear his "let my people go button".

he had heard something to that effect and that he wouldn't be shocked.

say that I have fishished the whole book, because it is so disturbing. It takes time to digest. The rank and file people who work for IBM are not anti-semetic, it is the major decisions and policies made by the higher ups that chills one to the bone. The author uses their own records for his research.

I got about halfway and got bogged down, sometime around 1942. The trouble is, I know the ending.

Bill