IBM and the Holocaust

[Originally posted at OnEnsemble.org as "Recent book reviews — April 2012"]

IBM and the Holocaust, The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation
Edwin Black
pub. 2001, 519p
source: LAPL

IBM and the Holocaust reveals in painstaking detail the role of International Business Machines in the Nazi strategy to destroy all European Jews. IBM maintained shocking connections with the Third Reich, through majority-owned subsidiaries like the German Dehomag company. With subterfuge to mask his involvement, IBM-president Thomas Watson personally micro-managed the subsidiaries, indifferent to his machines’ cruel uses. IBM was integral to every step of the Nazi plan, designing custom punchcard machines for the census programs
identifying Jews with record speed. These “Hollerith” punchcard machines processed the capture of Jews, their forced work, and their eventual extermination. IBM equipment existed in nearly every concentration camp, serviced by employees of Dehomag, with Nazi staff trained by IBM subsidiaries. The numbers used to identify concentration camp prisoners in place of names, in many cases stemmed from the IBM punchcard machines.

IBM and the Holocaust provides a unique and terrifying perspective on the holocaust. It is a great contribution to the literature on the subject, but it’s a difficult read. More than the pain of reading about the atrocities, I struggled to resist my own feelings of moral indignation. It was tiring to continually resist the temptation to brand individual Nazis as simply “evil”. I was also frustrated in drawing conclusions from the book. I sense that beneath the obvious warnings against greed and the blind pursuit of profit displayed by Watson and his followers, there are more specific moral lessons. But my attempts to draw parallels to current technology companies are undone by the overwhelming horror of the holocaust. Certainly, tech companies like FinFisher and Amesys are complicit in Syria’s use of internet monitoring to find and kill political dissidents. Apple is damaging the internet and our freedoms in its lust for control and consumer pacification. AT&T and Verizon are collaborators in the over-reach of US government. But in damning these companies, I hesitate to make comparisons to IBM for the overwhelming scale and horror of the holocaust.

If nothing else, the book has inspired me to reflect on the technology in my life. In what ways am I a collaborator in dehumanizing others? I bought a hard-drive last month, for example, concerned only with whether the device met my technical specifications. I don’t know if its maker (Western Digital) treats its workers well and tries to minimize its negative environmental effects. Research would likely have proven fruitless, but all the same, I am embarrassed I didn’t try. In the future, I want to be more careful to consider humanitarian issues alongside technical specifications.

When the Final Solution sought to efficiently transport Jews out of European ghettos along railroad lines and into death camps, with timing so precise the victims were able to walk right out of the boxcar and into a waiting gas chamber, the coordination was so complex a task, this too 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. IBM, primarily through its German subsidiary, made Hitler’s program of Jewish destruction a technologic mission the company pursued with chilling success.

Every day, transports of slave laborers were received. Prisoners were identified by descriptive Hollerith cards, each with columns and punched holes detailing nationality, date of birth, marital status, number of children, reason for incarceration, physical characteristics, and work skills. Sixteen code categories of prisoners were listed in columns 3 and 4, depending upon the hole position: hole 3 signified homosexual, hole 9 for anti-social, hole 12 for Gypsy. Hole 8 designated a Jew.

When Hitler rose to power, German intellect descended into madness. The Nazi movement was not merely a throng of hooligans pelting windows and screaming slogans. Guiding the Brown Shirts and exhorting the masses was an elite coterie of pseudo-scientists, corrupted professionals, and profit-blinded industrialists. Nazi jurists, medical doctors, and a clique of scientists — each with their prestigious academic credentials — found ways to pervert their science and higher calling to advance the cause of Aryan domination and racial persecution.

From the very first moments and continuing throughout the twelve-year existence of the Third Reich, IBM placed its technology at the disposal of Hitler’s program of Jewish destruction and territorial domination. IBM did not invent Germany’s anti-Semitism, but when it volunteered solutions, the company virtually braided with Nazism. Like any technologic evolution, each new solution powered a new level of sinister expectation and cruel capability.

During the frenetic rush to expand business with the Nazis and automate more and more Reich projects, never once was a word of restraint uttered by Watson about Dehomag’s indispensable activities in support of Jewish persecution. No brakes. No cautions.

Washington awarded IBM an on-going contract so substantial it permanently boosted IBM into a corporate class of itsown. Watson’s people boasted that Social Security was “the biggest accounting operation of all time.” Actually, it was the second biggest. The dress rehearsal had already taken place in Germany in 1933. It will never be known whether the collator was invented in Germany or the United States, or as a collaborative effort of IBM’s cross-Atlantic development programs. But shortly after it appeared in the United States, the collator also appeared in Dehomag’s inventory. … As a result of massive American taxpayer-funded research, more people-managing punch card capabilities than ever before would be available to the Hitler regime.

… Hitler would bestow upon Thomas Watson a medal — the highest it could confer on any non-German. The Merit Cross of the German Eagle with Star was created for Thomas Watson to “honor foreign nationals who made themselves deserving of the German Reich.”

Watson sermonized to his followers after one trip to Germany, adding “If you do not agree with everything he does, cooperate with him in the things you do believe in. Others will cooperate with him in the things they believe in.” On another occasion, Watson illuminated his steeled indifference this way: “I am an American citizen. But in the IBM I am a world citizen, because we do business in 78 countries and they all look alike to me — every one of them.”

The Nazi quantification and regimentation of Jewish demographics in Warsaw and indeed all of Poland was nothing less than spectacular — an almost unbelievable feat. Savage conditions, secrecy, and lack of knowledge by the victims would forever obscure the details of exactly how the Nazis managed to tabulate the cross-referenced information on 360,000 souls within forty-eight hours.

But this much is known: The Third Reich possessed only one method of tabulating censuses: Dehomag’s Hollerith system. Moreover, IBM was in Poland, headquartered in Warsaw. In fact, the punch card print shop was just yards from the Warsaw Ghetto at Rymarska Street 6. That’s where they produced more than 20 million cards.

Within sixty days of the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, Watson unveiled a fully equipped 140,000-square-foot manufacturing facility, staffed by 250 employees. The first product was a 20mm anti-aircraft cannon. Eventually, Munitions Manufacturing Corporation produced approximately thirty-two different weapons and other military items… IBM logos were stamped on most of the products, including the carbine rifle butts. By 1943, eventually two-thirds of IBM’s entire factory capacity had shifted from tabulators to munitions.

On Sunday, December 7, 1941, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Within forty-eight hours, the Bureau of the Census published its first report on Japanese Americans entitled Japanese Population of the United States, Its Territories and Possessions. … Using IBM applications, the Census Bureau had tracked the racial ancestry of Japanese Americans based on their responses to the 1940 census. Census Director J. C. Capt confirmed, “we didn’t wait for the [American] declaration of war [which was proclaimed Monday afternoon, December 8]. On Monday morning, we put our people to work on the Japanese thing.” Since only 135,430 Japanese Americans lived in the United States, the results were tabulated quickly. A single sort was necessary: race. …

If locating the Japanese by census block was insufficient, the Census Bureau was willing to take the next step to deliver actual names and addresses. “We’re by law required to keep confidential information by individuals,” Census Director Capt declared at the time. He added, “But in the end [i]f the defense authorities found 200 Japs missing and they wanted the names of the Japs in that area, I would give them further means of checking individuals.”

In some camps, such as Dachau and Storkow, as many as two dozen IBM sorters, tabulators, and printers were installed.

Zentral Institut‘s elaborate Hollerith banks at Block F, 129 Friedrich-strasse were expensive Dehomag systems. But the SS could more than justify the cost because slave labor was sold by the SS Economics Administration and managed as a profit center. Enterprises as large as the heavy industries of I.G. Farben, as delicate sa Hotel Glasstuben, and as small as a local business, routinely contracted for slave labor with Department DII, which governed all slave labor assignments. For instance, in late July 1942, farmer Adam Bar of
Wurzelbrunn, short on farmhands for his beet fields, applied to DII for two farm slaves from Flossenburg.

World War II finally ended in Europe on May 8, 1945. Almost immediately, IBM rushed in to recover its machines and bank accounts from enemy territory. … there was no realm where IBM would not trade, and none where they failed to collect — country by country.

The IBM Brussels executive [Belge Watson] declared: “It is none of our business to judge the reasons why an American corporation should or would help a foreign Government, and consequently Mr. Decker and myself have left these considerations entirely out of our line of thought … we were, as IBM men, interested in the technical side of the application of our machines.”

Every bloodstain and barracks blueprint in the camps was examined, catalogued, and probed. Machines such as Dachau’s D11-A, inspected by Chauncey, and those at Auschwitz, Buchenweld, Westerbork, and at the Warsaw Ghetto, were simply recovered and reabsorbed into the IBM asset list. They would be deployed another day, another way, for another client. No answers or explanations would be provided. Questions about Hitler’s Holleriths were never even raised.