Washingtonpost.com on IBM & Nazis

[Doug Millison]

  "IBM technology put the blitz into the blitzkrieg and the 
fantastical numbers into the Holocaust," argued Edwin Black, a former 
journalist and son of Holocaust survivors who spent three years 
studying IBM's involvement in Nazi Germany for his book, "IBM and the 
Holocaust." "The Holocaust would have occurred with or without IBM -- 
but the Holocaust that we know of, the Holocaust of the fantastic 
numbers, this is the Holocaust of IBM technology. It enabled the 
Nazis to achieve scale, velocity, efficiency." [snip]  Hollerith 
technology offered the Nazis a powerful tool of social control, as 
IBM officials quickly recognized. A few weeks after Hitler came to 
power in 1933, the head of IBM's German subsidiary, Willy Heidinger, 
boasted that the machines would help the Fuhrer maintain the "purity" 
and "health" of the German body politic. "We have the deepest trust 
in our Physician [Hitler] and will follow his instructions in blind 
faith," Heidinger pledged. [snip] After 1941, Dehomag became brazen 
about the licensing of Hollerith technology for the persecution of 
Nazi victims. Records show tha!
t the Hollerith machines were used in at least a dozen concentration 
camps, including Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Dachau. Prisoners were 
assigned individual Hollerith numbers and given a designation based 
on 16 categories, such as 3 for homosexual, 8 for Jew and 13 for 
prisoner of war.

  While there is no evidence that IBM New York knew Hollerith machines 
were being used in places such as Auschwitz, Black maintains that the 
company profited from Dehomag's activities and was fully reimbursed 
after the war.  "IBM was paid for the cards," Black said. "They did 
not say that these cards were issued without their permission. The 
last Reichmark paid to IBM was a check handed to a U.S. military 
officer."  William Seltzer, an expert in demographic statistics at 
Fordham University in New York City and a former consultant to the 
U.N. war crimes tribunal, said: "To me there is no doubt that [IBM] 
technology was used for evil ends. To me that is not the issue. The 
issue is whether Watson knew; I am not saying that Watson was a Nazi. 
He was out for his company and out for his technology, and pretty 
blind to the way it was being used."

To view the entire article, go to 
http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54557-2001Feb10.html

So, what does this have to do with Pynchon, at least one (and perhaps 
more) of you will ask.  Good question. The Holocaust in GR' the 
explicit link between the factory system, the German long range 
rocket program, and the death camps that Pynchon discusses in his 
Luddite essay, the computer imagery in COL49 (binary code, the kind 
used to program computers), the role that computers play in the 
arguably neo-Nazi resurgence that Pynchon depicts in Reagan-era 
Vineland -- you get the picture.  Or not. For my money, it's 
interesting to see Pynchon's popularization of the notion that 
multinational corporations profited from the War -- in GR -- and the 
Holocaust that was at the heart of that War (WWII, at least) borne 
out by subsequent revelations by historians. Your mileage will vary, 
of course.

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