[CTRL] Historian: IBM not used in Auschwitz

[William Shannon]

http://www.salon.com/books/wire/2001/02/12/ibm_nazis/index.html


Historian: IBM not used in Auschwitz
 
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By Monika Scislowska
Feb. 12, 2001 | WARSAW, Poland (AP) -- Poland's leading Holocaust historian
said Monday that there was no evidence to support the claim that the Nazis
used technology made by the U.S. computer giant IBM at Auschwitz, although he
does believe it was used in other concentration camps.
Franciszek Piper, the Auschwitz museum's historian, said that contrary to a
claim made by U.S. researcher Edwin Black in a book entitled "IBM and the
Holocaust," punch-card machines made by IBM were not used in the camp.

"Black maintains that the punch-machines were used in Auschwitz, but we have
no sources to confirm that," Piper said in a telephone interview with The
Associated Press from his home in the city of Oswiecim, in southern Poland,
where Nazis built the Auschwitz camp during World War II.
According to Piper, documents from survivors of Mauthausen, the Nazis' most
notorious concentration camp in Austria, show the machines were used there to
organize information on inmates' personal data. Such files can be seen at the
Auschwitz museum exhibit, he said.
The Nazis killed some 1.5 million people, mostly Jews, in the
Auschwitz-Birkineau camps between 1940-1945.
The release of the book Monday coincided with a lawsuit accusing IBM of
providing technology to the Nazis -- knowing it could facilitate persecution
and genocide.
IBM's German subsidiary during the Nazi era, Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen
GmbH, was taken over by the Nazis. A machine made by the company -- believed
to have been used in the German census in 1933, the year the Nazis took power
-- is on display at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.
The company hasn't yet seen either the book or the lawsuit and isn't
commenting in detail, Ian Colley, IBM's European spokesman in Paris, said
Monday.