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01-16-2007, 07:28 PM
Probing IBM's Nazi connection
By Paul Festa
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
June 28, 2001, 4:00 a.m. PT
Since its publication in February, Edwin Black's book "IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation" has stirred unprecedented controversy among students of the Holocaust, American enterprise and information technology.
On the book's release, Holocaust survivors filed suit against IBM for its alleged role in the Holocaust; Gypsies earlier this month threatened their own lawsuit.
Though the first suit was withdrawn and the second has yet to be filed, hundreds of critics and historians have weighed in against the company, with others coming to its defense. The range of the controversy can be gleaned from the pages of BusinessWeek alone, which in a March review excoriated the "illogical, overstated, padded, and sloppy" book for fostering "a new myth--the automated Holocaust," and in an April commentary said the "enlightening" book "should be required reading for every first-year MBA student."
At the heart of Black's argument is that information technology--in the form of IBM's Hollerith punch-card machines--provided the Nazis with a unique and critical tool in their task of cataloguing and dispatching their millions of victims.
As the book's title suggests, Black attempts to establish that IBM didn't merely vend its products to Hitler--as did many American companies--but maintained a strategic alliance with the Third Reich in which it licensed, maintained and custom-designed its products for use in the machinery of the Holocaust.
IBM has responded to questions about its relationship with the Nazis largely by characterizing the information as old news.
"The fact that Hollerith equipment manufactured by (IBM's German unit) Dehomag was used by the Nazi administration has long been known and is not new information," IBM representative Carol Makovich wrote in an e-mail interview. "This information was published in 1997 in the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing and in 1998 in Washington Jewish Week."
IBM also maintains, in a February statement to which it refers most questions on the matter, that the Nazis took control of its German unit before and throughout the war, and that the company "does not have much information about this period or the operations of Dehomag." Black vehemently disputes both claims.
IBM also defended Chairman Thomas Watson for his dealings with Hitler and his regime.
"As chairman of a major international company and a strong supporter of international trade, he met and corresponded with senior government officials from many, many countries, Hitler and Germany among them, in the 1930s," Makovich wrote. "As far as we know, the nature of the contacts between IBM executives and German government officials during the 1930s were similar to those with other government officials in other countries and consistent with IBM practices in the various countries in which the company did business during that era."
CNET News.com's Paul Festa discussed the issues with Black in a recent interview.
Q: What first got you interested in this subject?
A: When I first went to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., I went with my parents, both of whom are Holocaust survivors. The first thing you see in the Holocaust museum is IBM's Hollerith tabulator. And on the front of the Hollerith is a large nameplate: IBM. For me these two words, IBM and Holocaust, did not compute.
I was literally frozen for some time staring at the machine, thinking of IBM and looking back at the map of Europe. And then it came to me. We have investigated the military intelligence, the diplomatic dispatches, the financial dealings, and the actual mechanisms of genocide, but no one has yet explored information technology. Indeed, until the current age in which we find ourselves, the Computer Age, where we have an understanding that information technology can make the pivotal difference in any campaign of peace or persecution--until the Computer Age, we could not even formulate the questions.
How did you go about researching IBM's role?
We assembled a team of 100, including researchers, historians, translators, archivists, children of Holocaust survivors, and World War II intelligence people. They worked in seven countries in some 50 archives and yielded 20,000 documents, which I organized and cross-indexed. Then some 35 historians reviewed every line of my manuscript before publication.
But I finally assembled this dark puzzle that had eluded the 15 million people who have seen this machine in the Holocaust museum. I finally connected the dots. And those dots are that IBM engineered a strategic business alliance and joint planning program with Nazi Germany from the very first moment in 1933 and extending right through the war that endowed the Hitler regime with the technology and the tools it needed to expedite and, in many ways, automate, all six phases of Hitler's war against the Jews. Those six phases are identification, expulsion, confiscation, ghettoization, deportation and ultimately even extermination.
Five years ago I started working on this seriously and two years ago went 24/7 with the team of 100. I spent those first years in the project finding out that virtually nothing's been written on IBM's role in the Holocaust. Indeed, many of the documents and facts I discovered seem to be boring, innocuous corporate details. It's only when juxtaposed with other facts from other countries and archives that these shards of glass come together to form this heartbreaking picture window, exposing the tremendous vista of IBM's global relationship with Nazi Germany.
IBM claims that its German subsidiary came under Nazi control both before and during World War II.
We're not just talking about the German subsidiary. We're talking about the Swiss, the Swedish, the Italian, the Spanish, the Polish, the Romanian and Brazilian subsidiaries--more than 20 subsidiaries located across Europe and elsewhere. This was, in fact, a global commitment by IBM to support the Hitler machine as it conquered Europe and as it destroyed ethnic peoples: Gypsies, Jews and others.
Continued: http://news.com.com/Probing+IBMs+Nazi+connection/2009-1082_3-269157.html
By Paul Festa
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
June 28, 2001, 4:00 a.m. PT
Since its publication in February, Edwin Black's book "IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation" has stirred unprecedented controversy among students of the Holocaust, American enterprise and information technology.
On the book's release, Holocaust survivors filed suit against IBM for its alleged role in the Holocaust; Gypsies earlier this month threatened their own lawsuit.
Though the first suit was withdrawn and the second has yet to be filed, hundreds of critics and historians have weighed in against the company, with others coming to its defense. The range of the controversy can be gleaned from the pages of BusinessWeek alone, which in a March review excoriated the "illogical, overstated, padded, and sloppy" book for fostering "a new myth--the automated Holocaust," and in an April commentary said the "enlightening" book "should be required reading for every first-year MBA student."
At the heart of Black's argument is that information technology--in the form of IBM's Hollerith punch-card machines--provided the Nazis with a unique and critical tool in their task of cataloguing and dispatching their millions of victims.
As the book's title suggests, Black attempts to establish that IBM didn't merely vend its products to Hitler--as did many American companies--but maintained a strategic alliance with the Third Reich in which it licensed, maintained and custom-designed its products for use in the machinery of the Holocaust.
IBM has responded to questions about its relationship with the Nazis largely by characterizing the information as old news.
"The fact that Hollerith equipment manufactured by (IBM's German unit) Dehomag was used by the Nazi administration has long been known and is not new information," IBM representative Carol Makovich wrote in an e-mail interview. "This information was published in 1997 in the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing and in 1998 in Washington Jewish Week."
IBM also maintains, in a February statement to which it refers most questions on the matter, that the Nazis took control of its German unit before and throughout the war, and that the company "does not have much information about this period or the operations of Dehomag." Black vehemently disputes both claims.
IBM also defended Chairman Thomas Watson for his dealings with Hitler and his regime.
"As chairman of a major international company and a strong supporter of international trade, he met and corresponded with senior government officials from many, many countries, Hitler and Germany among them, in the 1930s," Makovich wrote. "As far as we know, the nature of the contacts between IBM executives and German government officials during the 1930s were similar to those with other government officials in other countries and consistent with IBM practices in the various countries in which the company did business during that era."
CNET News.com's Paul Festa discussed the issues with Black in a recent interview.
Q: What first got you interested in this subject?
A: When I first went to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., I went with my parents, both of whom are Holocaust survivors. The first thing you see in the Holocaust museum is IBM's Hollerith tabulator. And on the front of the Hollerith is a large nameplate: IBM. For me these two words, IBM and Holocaust, did not compute.
I was literally frozen for some time staring at the machine, thinking of IBM and looking back at the map of Europe. And then it came to me. We have investigated the military intelligence, the diplomatic dispatches, the financial dealings, and the actual mechanisms of genocide, but no one has yet explored information technology. Indeed, until the current age in which we find ourselves, the Computer Age, where we have an understanding that information technology can make the pivotal difference in any campaign of peace or persecution--until the Computer Age, we could not even formulate the questions.
How did you go about researching IBM's role?
We assembled a team of 100, including researchers, historians, translators, archivists, children of Holocaust survivors, and World War II intelligence people. They worked in seven countries in some 50 archives and yielded 20,000 documents, which I organized and cross-indexed. Then some 35 historians reviewed every line of my manuscript before publication.
But I finally assembled this dark puzzle that had eluded the 15 million people who have seen this machine in the Holocaust museum. I finally connected the dots. And those dots are that IBM engineered a strategic business alliance and joint planning program with Nazi Germany from the very first moment in 1933 and extending right through the war that endowed the Hitler regime with the technology and the tools it needed to expedite and, in many ways, automate, all six phases of Hitler's war against the Jews. Those six phases are identification, expulsion, confiscation, ghettoization, deportation and ultimately even extermination.
Five years ago I started working on this seriously and two years ago went 24/7 with the team of 100. I spent those first years in the project finding out that virtually nothing's been written on IBM's role in the Holocaust. Indeed, many of the documents and facts I discovered seem to be boring, innocuous corporate details. It's only when juxtaposed with other facts from other countries and archives that these shards of glass come together to form this heartbreaking picture window, exposing the tremendous vista of IBM's global relationship with Nazi Germany.
IBM claims that its German subsidiary came under Nazi control both before and during World War II.
We're not just talking about the German subsidiary. We're talking about the Swiss, the Swedish, the Italian, the Spanish, the Polish, the Romanian and Brazilian subsidiaries--more than 20 subsidiaries located across Europe and elsewhere. This was, in fact, a global commitment by IBM to support the Hitler machine as it conquered Europe and as it destroyed ethnic peoples: Gypsies, Jews and others.
Continued: http://news.com.com/Probing+IBMs+Nazi+connection/2009-1082_3-269157.html