-Caveat Lector-
-------- Original Message --------
IBM link to Final Solution revealed
http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/2001/02/11/stifgnusa02005.html
Tom Rhodes, New York
Technical assistance: even after the war began the IBM chairman Thomas J
Watson, above, allegedly oversaw the company's German subsidiary, whose
card-index system was used by the Nazis
http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/2001/02/11/STN1121WAT.300x246.j
pg
IBM's card-index system helped the Nazis to list Jews
http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/2001/02/11/STN1121BM.300x205.jp
g
Technical assistance: the Nazis used the IBM punch card and card-sorting
system
http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/2001/02/11/STN1121NAZIZ.300x201
.jpg
IBM, the American computer giant, faces detailed charges today that it
collaborated in Hitler's persecution of the Jews.
More than half a century after the second world war, an American
investigative writer, Edwin Black, says he has found extensive evidence that
the Holocaust depended not on German efficiency but on American technology.
Black writes that IBM punch card-sorters, a precursor of computers, were
used to facilitate all aspects of Nazi persecution - from the identification
of Jews in censuses in Germany and occupied Europe to the running of
concentration camp slave labour. His book, IBM and the Holocaust, is
serialised today in The Sunday Times and published tomorrow in America and
Britain.
"For the first time in history, an anti-semite had automation on his side.
Hitler didn't do it alone. He had help."
Black says Hitler's quest to destroy the Jews was "greatly enhanced and
energised" by IBM and its creator and chairman, Thomas J Watson.
Watson expressed admiration for Hitler and was awarded the Merit Cross of
the German Eagle with Star by the Führer. The Nazis regarded him as a
powerful friend, but his interest was profit, not ideology. He micromanaged
Dehomag, the company's German subsidiary, writes Black. "IBM NY understood -
from 1933 - it was doing business with the upper echelon of the Nazi party."
IBM has long acknowledged that its German subsidiary used punch card
technology in a 1933 census, soon after Hitler took power; but its role in
subsequent events has not been suspected, let alone investigated. The firm
has had good relations with organisations representing Holocaust survivors.
Two months ago, it donated hardware to help the Jewish Claims Conference
disburse German compensation payments.
Watson's son, Thomas J Watson Jr, who moved IBM into computers after the
war, disagreed with his father's attitude to the Nazis. "Dad's optimism
blinded him to what was going on in Germany," he once wrote.
According to IBM, its links with its Nazi-era German subsidiary were severed
in 1940. Black, however, has produced letters that indicate the IBM chairman
sent an emissary to Berlin to resolve problems in late 1941, when America
was about to enter the conflict.
The charges made by Black, whose parents, Polish Jews, both escaped death
during the Holocaust, arise from research into archives in America, Germany,
Britain, Israel, Holland, Poland and France. With the help of more than 100
people, he assembled over 20,000 pages of documentation.
"Examined singly, none revealed the story," says Black. But put together,
they showed "IBM's conscious involvement - directly and through its
subsidiaries - in the Holocaust".
Black produces evidence that, although IBM protected its legal position by
instructing its subsidiaries not to trade with enemy countries, "elaborate
document trails were fabricated to demonstrate compliance when the opposite
was true".
IBM first became involved with Nazism because of Hitler's desire to identify
Germany's Jewish population before destroying it, Black says. "To search
generations of records all across Germany - and later Europe - was a
crossindexing task so monumental it called for a computer."
Equally, the mass movement of European Jews into ghettos and then into
concentration camps also required the powers of a computer. None existed;
but the IBM punch card and card-sorting system was available from its German
subsidiary.
Nazi demand for IBM technology became so great that the firm built a factory
near Berlin, vastly increasing its investment in the German subsidiary.
The book seems certain to cause a furore in America. It has been endorsed in
advance of publication by several prominent Jewish figures.
"Edwin Black has put together an impressive array of facts which result in a
shocking conclusion never realised before," said Simon Wiesenthal, the
director of the Jewish Documentation Centre in Vienna.
Michael Whine, the director of defence and group relations division of the
Board of Deputies of British Jews, called it a "vital book".
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