IBM, Holocaust

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

Well, Monte, "technology = genocide" is certainly too simple, but in 
case of the Holocaust technology did play a role:

"Punch cards could only be designed, printed, and purchased from one 
source: IBM. The machines were not sold, they were leased, and regularly 
maintained and upgraded by only one source: IBM. IBM subsidiaries 
trained the Nazi officers and their surrogates throughout Europe, set up 
branch offices and local dealerships throughout Nazi Europe staffed by a 
revolving door of IBM employees, and scoured paper mills to produce as 
many as 1.5 billion punch cards a year in Germany alone. Moreover, the 
fragile machines were serviced on site about once per month, even when 
that site was in or near a concentration camp. IBM Germany's 
headquarters in Berlin maintained duplicates of many code books, much as 
any IBM service bureau today would maintain data backups for computers.

I was haunted by a question whose answer has long eluded historians. The 
Germans always had the lists of Jewish names. Suddenly, a squadron of 
grim-faced SS would burst into a city square and post a notice demanding 
those listed assemble the next day at the train station for deportation 
to the East. But how did the Nazis get the lists? For decades, no one 
has known. Few have asked.

The answer: IBM Germany's census operations and similar advanced people 
counting and registration technologies. IBM was founded in 1898 by 
German inventor Herman Hollerith 
<http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/Hollerith.html> 
as a census tabulating company. Census was its business. But when IBM 
Germany formed its philosophical and technologic alliance with Nazi 
Germany, census and registration took on a new mission. IBM Germany 
invented the racial census-listing not just religious affiliation, but 
bloodline going back generations. This was the Nazi data lust. Not just 
to count the Jews — but to identify them.

People and asset registration was only one of the many uses Nazi Germany 
found for high-speed data sorters. Food allocation was organized around 
databases, allowing Germany to starve the Jews. Slave labor 
<http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/labortoc.html> 
was identified, tracked, and managed largely through punch cards. Punch 
cards even made the trains run on time and cataloged their human cargo. 
German Railway, the Reichsbahn, Dehomag's biggest customer, dealt 
directly with senior management in Berlin. Dehomag maintained punch card 
installations at train depots across Germany, and eventually across all 
Europe.

How much did IBM know? Some of it IBM knew on a daily basis throughout 
the 12-year Reich. The worst of it IBM preferred not to know — "don't 
ask, don't tell" was the order of the day. Yet IBM NY officials, and 
frequently Watson's personal representatives, Harrison Chauncey and 
Werner Lier, were almost constantly in Berlin or Geneva, monitoring 
activities, ensuring that the parent company in New York was not cut out 
of any of the profits or business opportunities Nazism presented. When 
U.S. law made such direct contact illegal, IBM's Swiss office became the 
nexus, providing the New York office continuous information and credible 
deniability.

Certainly, the dynamics and context of IBM's alliance with Nazi Germany 
changed throughout the twelve-year Reich....Make no mistake. The 
Holocaust would still have occurred without IBM. To think otherwise is 
more than wrong. The Holocaust would have proceeded — and often did 
proceed — with simple bullets, death marches, and massacres based on pen 
and paper persecution. But there is reason to examine the fantastical 
numbers Hitler achieved in murdering so many millions so swiftly, and 
identify the crucial role of automation and technology. Accountability 
is needed."

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/IBM.html

That part about IBM's Swiss office always makes me think of "Gravity's 
Rainbow".


On 07.10.2013 14:24, Monte Davis wrote:
>
>  It’s very much along the lines of Edwin Black’s _IBM and the 
> Holocaust_, which “revealed” that ZOMG, the Nazis used IBM machine 
> tabulation  in the course of the Final Solution, just as they – and  
> the US and other governments – used it in the course of hundreds of 
> other programs. Ergo technology = genocide.
>
>

-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l