From: Tech_Savvy00
EMail: boolwormz99@yahoo.com
Apr 15, 2001
Big Bad Blue
The final solution?
IBM'S PROUD slogan is that it is the 'solutions company'. But an explosive new book contends that the American company played a central role in Nazi Germany's Final Solution.
According to Edwin Black's IBM And The Holocaust, IBM supplied the technology which enabled the Nazis to carry out their programme of genocide with unprecedented efficiency.
The book was kept under tight wraps by publisher Little, Brown & Company. But since hitting the market in late February, it has shot up non-fiction bestsellers lists in America and Britain. In Singapore, it has climbed equally quickly into the top 10 lists here.
It has also inspired a class action suit in the United States.
Five Holocaust survivors in the US, Czech Republic and Ukraine are suing the Big Blue, alleging that IBM was not only complicit in the Holocaust but that it also has denied access to its business archives for the purposes of investigation.
PANDORA'S BOX OF UNLIMITED INFO
THE story begins with a punch card machine. Invented by an American of German descent named Herman Hollerith, the machine was 'a steel, spindle, and rubber-wheeled key to the Pandora's Box of unlimited information'.
Before there were computers, Hollerith's punch card machine was the only means of performing tedious data-sorting functions in a fraction of the time it took human operators.
This machine, Black argues, was what enabled the Nazis to quantify and identify Jews with such speed. He points out: 'Only after Jews were identified could they be targeted for asset confiscation, ghettoisation, deportation, and ultimately extermination'.
But 'to search generations of communal, church, and governmental records all across Germany - and later throughout Europe - was a cross-indexing task so monumental, it called for a computer. But in 1933, no computer existed...
'However, another invention did exist: the IBM punch card and card sorting system - a precursor to the computer.'
CENSUS SEPARATING JEWS FROM ARYANS
WHEN Hitler came to power in January 1933, one of the first things he did was order a census of the 41 million Germans living in Prussia. And he wanted the results within a record four months.
IBM's German subsidiary, Dehomag, stepped into the breach. The subsidiary, 90 per cent owned by IBM, won the lucrative contract, worth 1.35 million reichsmarks.
Designing a punch card to Nazi specifications, Dehomag processed census questions designed to extract information about language, race and religion, separating the Jews from the Aryans: 'What emerged was a profession-by-profession, city-by-city, and indeed a block-by-block revelation of the Jewish presence.'
The census was a great success. The Nazis declared triumphantly in one of their statistics journal that the census results meant that 'the government now has the road map to switch from knowledge to deeds'.
For Dehomag, it was both a technical triumph and a financial windfall that promised yet more dividends.
Thomas J. Watson, chief executive of IBM, moved immediately to expand Dehomag's presence and capabilities.
The company increased its German investment from 400,000 reichsmarks to 7 million reichsmarks. Watson even travelled to Germany to oversee Dehomag's new investments personally.
More crucially, during his trip, he made a pact with Willy Heidinger, who owned the other 10 per cent of Dehomag. Under the agreement, 'subject to IBM NY (New York) oversight', Dehomag was allowed to set up branches in Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Belgium, France and Holland.
The result: 'Where census, registration, and other statistical operations did not exist, or where they could be updated along the lines of Germany's anti-Semitic model, Dehomag could now move in.'
The implications of this are chilling. Although Black does not spell it out, the suggestion is that Dehomag's business expansion might have supplied the Nazi regime with keys to the Jewish populations in other European countries as well.
If there is a villain in Black's book, it is indisputably Watson, a born salesman with a ruthlessly capitalist bent.
The man cultivated a cult-like following within his company. He demanded that his employees dress uniformly.
In return for their hard work and loyalty, he rewarded them handsomely with not just money but a sense of belonging to an extended family: 'Watson embodied more than the boss. He was the leader. He even had a song.'
Black acknowledges Watson 'was no fascist. He was a pure capitalist. But the horseshoe of political economics finds little distance between extremities'.
Watson, who was elected chairman of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) in 1937, was regarded by the Nazi regime as an important ally. So much so that Hitler gave him a medal, the Merit Cross of the German Eagle with Star, which 'ranked second in prestige only to Hitler's German Grand Cross'.
As Germany headed deeper into war, IBM profited handsomely from lucrative contracts from every aspect of the German war juggernaut. Hollerith machines were used for everything from keeping track of train schedules to counting bullets.
And when the Nazis finally put their Final Solution - extermination - into action, Dehomag's machines helped the concentration camps keep track of the millions of victims shuttled in and out from across Europe. The system, as Black points out, needed 'population management'.
In one of the most chilling chapters, Black details how Hollerith machines kept the camps organised. The infamous tattoos on inmates of Auschwitz originated as code numbers on Hollerith's punch cards.
Each prisoner's details were recorded by punch cards. Cards were coded with numbers that classified prisoners into 16 categories, including homosexual (3), clergy (5), Jew (8) and gypsy (12).
The cards kept track of each prisoner's occupation so that prisoners could double as slave labour to earn money for the Nazis and, as a bonus, be worked to death instead of costing the Reich the expense of a bullet or gas.
The cards even encoded cause of death. C-3 meant death by natural causes, D-4 meant execution and E-5 was suicide. Most chilling of all was F-6, a secret code which Black discovers meant 'an order for extermination, either by gas chamber or bullet'.
PROFITEERING BY AMERICAN COMPANIES
BLACK concedes that IBM was not the only company guilty of war profiteering and that many American companies 'refused to walk away from the extraordinary profits obtainable from trading with a pariah state such as Nazi Germany'.
And try as he might, Black never finds the 'smoking gun' - concrete evidence that IBM NY masterminded Dehomag's every move.
Yet his exhaustive mapping of IBM's corporate intrigues is sufficiently damning that one cannot find fault with Black's argument that Dehomag 'designed, executed, and supplied the indispensable technologic assistance Hitler's Third Reich needed to accomplish what had never been done before - the automation of human destruction'.
By providing automation, 'IBM had almost single-handedly brought modern warfare into the information age (and) virtually put the 'blitz' in the krieg.'
The language may be a tad overheated, but Black is scrupulously exact in building his case. There are more than 60 pages of footnotes and source listings.
Ironically, just as Dehomag was vital to Germany's war effort, IBM was equally crucial to the Allies. Hollerith machines were the key to the Allies' great triumph - the breaking of the Enigma code.
Indeed, the American government was not unaware of IBM's ties with Nazi Germany - it was simply unsure, and unable to prove, the depth of the connection.
When it became evident that the Allies would win, the Nazis' Hollerith machines became crucial to the Allies as well.
'As early as December 1943, the United States government concluded that Hitler's Holleriths were strategic machines to save, not destroy. Dehomag's equipment held the keys to a smooth military occupation of Germany and the other Axis territories.'
So strategic, in fact, that the US military formed Machine Record Units (MRUs), comprising IBM employees or IBM-trained soldiers, to retrieve Hollerith machines in the wake of Allied victories.
And this is where Black's book becomes truly terrifying in its implications. Because it demonstrates, with chilling clarity, the ease with which a multinational company's reach supersedes even a national government's.
This book not only unearths an important part of history, but it also ought to make every thinking reader reconsider seriously the ominous undertones to the soundbite of 'Think global, act local' when applied to multinational behemoths.
Copyright © 2001 Singapore Press Holdings Ltd. All rights reserved.