IBM at Auschwitz, New Documents

Edwin Black,
Reader Supported News
28 February 12
 
http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/328-121/10198-focus-ibm-at-auschwitz-new-documents

ewly-released documents expose more explicitly the details
of IBM's pivotal role in the Holocaust - all six phases:
identification, expulsion from society, confiscation,
ghettoization, deportation, and even extermination.
Moreover, the documents portray with crystal clarity the
personal involvement and micro-management of IBM president
Thomas J. Watson in the company's co-planning and
co-organizing of Hitler's campaign to destroy the Jews.

IBM's twelve-year alliance with the Third Reich was first
revealed in my book IBM and the Holocaust, published
simultaneously in 40 countries in February 2001. It was
based on some 20,000 documents drawn from archives in
seven countries. IBM never denied any of the information
in the book; and despite thousands of media and communal
requests, as well as published articles, the company has
remained silent.

The new "expanded edition" contains 32 pages of
never-before-published internal IBM correspondence, State
Department and Justice Department memos, and concentration
camp documents that graphically chronicle IBM's actions
and what they knew during the 12-year Hitler regime. On
the anniversary of the release of the original book, the
new edition was released on February 26, 2012 at a special
live global streaming event at Yeshiva University's Furst
Hall, sponsored by the American Association of Jewish
Lawyers and Jurists together with a coalition of other
groups.

Among the newly-released documents and archival materials
are secret 1941 correspondence setting up the Dutch
subsidiary of IBM to work in tandem with the Nazis,
company President Thomas Watson's personal approval for
the 1939 release of special IBM alphabetizing machines to
help organize the rape of Poland and the deportation of
Polish Jews, as well as the IBM Concentration Camp Codes
including IBM's code for death by Gas Chamber. Among the
newly published photos of the punch cards is the one
developed for the statistician who reported directly to
Himmler and Eichmann.

The significance of the incriminating documents requires
context.

Punch cards, also called Hollerith cards after IBM founder
Herman Hollerith, were the forerunner of the computers
that IBM is famous for today. These cards stored
information in holes punched in the rows and columns,
which were then "read" by a tabulating machine. The system
worked like a player piano - but this one was devoted to
the devil's music. First designed to track people and
organize a census, the Hollerith system was later adapted
to any tabulation or information task.

From the first moments of the Hitler regime in 1933, IBM
used its exclusive punch card technology and its global
monopoly on information technology to organize,
systematize, and accelerate Hitler's anti-Jewish program,
step by step facilitating the tightening noose. The punch
cards, machinery, training, servicing, and special project
work, such as population census and identification, was
managed directly by IBM headquarters in New York, and
later through its subsidiaries in Germany, known as
Deutsche Hollerith-Maschinen Gesellschaft (DEHOMAG),
Poland, Holland, France, Switzerland, and other European
countries.

Among the punch cards published are two for the SS,
including one for the SS Rassenamt, or Race Office, which
specialized in racial selections and coordinated with many
other Reich offices. A third card was custom-crafted by
IBM for Richard Korherr, a top Nazi statistician and
expert in Jewish demographics who reported directly to
Reichsfuehrer Heinrich Himmler and who also worked with
Adolf Eichmann. Himmler and Eichmann were architects of
the extermination phase of the Holocaust. All three punch
cards bear the proud indicia of IBM's German subsidiary,
DEHOMAG. They illustrate the nature of the end users who
relied upon IBM's information technology.

In 1937, with war looming and the world shocked at the
increasingly merciless Nazi persecution of the Jews,
Hitler bestowed upon Watson a special award - created
specifically for the occasion - to honor extraordinary
service by a foreigner to the Third Reich. The medal, the
Order of the German Eagle with Star, bedecked with
swastikas, was to be worn on a sash over the heart. Watson
returned the medal years later in June 1940 as a reaction
to public outrage about the medal during the bombing of
Paris. The return of this medal has been used by IBM
apologists to show Watson had second thoughts about his
alliance with the Reich. But a newly released copy of a
subsequent letter dated June 10, 1941, drafted by IBM's
New York office, confirms that IBM headquarters personally
directed the activities of its Dutch subsidiary set up in
1940 to identify and liquidate the Jews of Holland. Hence,
while IBM engaged in the public relations maneuver of
returning the medal, the company was actually quietly
expanding its role in Hitler's Holocaust. Similar
subsidiaries, sometimes named as a variant of "Watson
Business Machines," were set up in Poland, Vichy France,
and elsewhere on the Continent in cadence with the Nazi
takeover of Europe.

Particularly powerful are the newly-released copies of the
IBM concentration camp codes. IBM maintained a customer
site, known as the Hollerith Department, in virtually
every concentration camp to sort or process punch cards
and track prisoners. The codes show IBM's numerical
designation for various camps. Auschwitz was 001,
Buchenwald was 002; Dachau was 003, and so on. Various
prisoner types were reduced to IBM numbers, with 3
signifying homosexual, 9 for anti-social, and 12 for
Gypsy. The IBM number 8 designated a Jew. Inmate death was
also reduced to an IBM digit: 3 represented death by
natural causes, 4 by execution, 5 by suicide, and code 6
designated "special treatment" in gas chambers. IBM
engineers had to create Hollerith codes to differentiate
between a Jew who had been worked to death and one who had
been gassed, then print the cards, configure the machines,
train the staff, and continuously maintain the fragile
systems every two weeks on site in the concentration
camps.

Newly-released photographs show the Hollerith Bunker at
Dachau. It housed at least two dozen machines, mainly
controlled by the SS. The foreboding concrete Hollerith
blockhouse, constructed of reinforced concrete and steel,
was designed to withstand the most intense Allied aerial
bombardment. Those familiar with Nazi bomb-proof shelters
will recognize the advanced square-cornered pillbox design
reserved for the Reich's most precious buildings and
operations. IBM equipment was among the Reich's most
important weapons, not only in its war against the Jews,
but in its general military campaigns and control of
railway traffic. Watson personally approved expenditures
to add bomb shelters to DEHOMAG installations because the
cost was born by the company. Such costs cut into IBM's
profit margin. Watson's approval was required because he
received a one-percent commission on all Nazi business
profits.

Two telling U.S. government memos, now published, are
remarkable for their telling irony. The first is a State
Department memo, dated December 3, 1941, just four days
before the attack on Pearl Harbor and as the Nazis were
being openly accused of genocide in Europe. On that day in
1941, IBM's top attorney, Harrison Chauncey, visited the
State Department to express qualms about the company's
extensive involvement with Hitler. The State Department
memo recorded that Chauncey feared "that his company may
some day be blamed for cooperating with the Germans."

The second is a Justice Department memo generated during a
federal investigation of IBM for trading with the enemy.
Economic Warfare Section chief investigator Howard J.
Carter prepared the memo for his supervisors describing
the company's collusion with the Hitler regime. Carter
wrote: "What Hitler has done to us through his economic
warfare, one of our own American corporations has also
done ... Hence IBM is in a class with the Nazis." He ended
his memo: "The entire world citizenry is hampered by an
international monster."

At a time when the Watson name and the IBM image is being
laundered by whiz computers that can answer questions on
TV game shows, it is important to remember that Thomas
Watson and his corporate behemoth were guilty of genocide.
The Treaty on Genocide, Article 2, defines genocide as
"acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in
part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group."
In Article 3, the treaty states that among the "acts
[that] shall be punishable," are the ones in subsection
(e), that is "complicity in genocide." As for who shall be
punished, the Treaty specifies the perpetrators in Article
4: "Persons committing genocide or any of the other acts
enumerated in Article 3 shall be punished, whether they
are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials,
or private individuals."

International Business Machines, and its president Thomas
J. Watson, committed genocide by any standard. It was
never about the antisemitism. It was never about the
National Socialism. It was always about the money.
Business was their middle name.

-----

Edwin Black is the author of IBM and the Holocaust, The
Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most
Powerful Corporation, newly released in the Expanded
Edition.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for
this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with
credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

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