IBM, Holocaust

Wed Oct 9 06:20:24 CDT 2013

"We're beyond good and evil here, the technology, it's neutral, eh?" 
(BE, p. 89)

For me IT "does stand out" insofar as there is - in contrast to "barbed 
wire" for example - social synthesis in this technology. It's the 
abstraction that makes everything connect! The railway technology could 
run so efficiently only by the punch card system for which IBM held the 
monopoly. Unlike everybody thinks I'm not into this for the blame game 
(actually I worked several years with computer scientists in an 
'interdisciplinary' project on Distributed Artificial Intelligence). 
Thing just is that the totalitarian potential of 'Big Data' 
prototypically emerged in Nazi Germany.

IBM might or might not play a crucial role in a movie Pynchon mentions 
in VL as well as in IV. The name of that movie refers to the year (most 
of) "Bleeding Edge" takes place in: 2001.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1r5dOwUS6Y

In recent years the NSA (and related organizations) managed to digitally 
install Bentham's Panopticon to a degree bad old Jeremy could never have 
dreamed of ... Worldwide.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lx625X2u0CM

On 08.10.2013 15:09, Monte Davis wrote:
> Yes, punch-card IT did play a role. So did railroad technology (including the timing / signaling / dispatching technologies that nice young Einstein fellow had been vetting at the Zurich patent office circa 1900.) So did combustion and chemical technology, from the carbon monoxide exhaust of makeshift extermination vans in Poland 1939-1940 to Zyklon B. So, as you say, did simple bullets... and simple barbed wire, an 1870s technology that Bigfoot Bjornsen collects in IV.
>
> I can't imagine any nation-state -- *any* large organization -- that doesn't collect, store and manipulate large amounts of population data. Start with Egyptian, Akkadian and Chinese harvest/tribute/tax registries; proceed by way of the Domesday Book. At least in English, we have the very word "statistics" because it was the *state* that first needed to identify patterns in large numbers.
>
> Yes, census was Hollerith's business: the US Census adopted his punch cards because it had taken 8 years to tabulate the 1880 decennial census with paper and pen, and it was obvious that without a faster technology the 1890 census couldn't be completed before 1900...usw. By the 1930s, every nation big enough to need it and wealthy enough to afford it was using the latest data-handling technologies in *everything* it did. And when Germany chose to annihilate identifiable subsets of its own population and those of conquered territories, it used the latest data-handling technologies for that, too.
>
> Would I think better of IBM if it had severed all connection with IBM Germany in 1933 or soon after? Yes. I would also think better of every other multinational corporation doing business in Germany had they done so. (I'll bet those trains to Belsen and Sobibor and Treblinka used licensed Westinghouse coupling and brake technologies!) I would also think better of every government that maintained diplomatic and economic relations with the Third Reich had they severed those relations in 1933 or soon after.
>
> Kai, I wouldn't be a Pynchon fan -- and GR wouldn't have been the most important single novel in my life for forty years now -- if I didn't appreciate and take very seriously what it says about mass societies, their technologies, and their selective areas of moral blindness. I wouldn't be so touchy about the never-ending Wernher von Braun cycle if I didn't live in a nation that spent $5 trillion in 1950-1985 creating and perfecting the infrastructure to deliver in hours a hundred Holocausts or ten WWIIs worth of death, and periodically says to itself: "Gott in Himmel!  We're shocked -- shocked! -- to learn that an ***ex-Nazi*** played a central role in this enterprise."
>
> I guess it comes down to "selective." For me, the enabling role of IT (and IBM) in the Holocaust simply doesn't stand out from the enabling roles of many other technologies and many other corporations. I would feel differently if I had an unrealistic, ahistorical Tomorrowland / Raketenstadt view of technology ("it's inherently shiny and progressive and beneficent,  so 1930s IBM Germany is a perverted aberration!")... but I don't. I might feel differently if my underlying _parti pris_ were against the industrial revolution, modernity, and mass societies, and I found technology a convenient stick with which to beat them all... but I don't.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org  [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On Behalf Of Kai Frederik Lorentzen
> Sent: Tuesday, October 08, 2013 6:41 AM
> To: pynchon -l
> Subject: Re: IBM, Holocaust
>
>
> 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.
>>
>>
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>
>
>

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