IBM helped automate Hitler's holocaust death machine, author reveals
It is not known that one of America's most successful technology companies was complicit in helping Nazi leader Adolph Hitler build a more efficient killing machine before and during World War II, one author charges.
Edwin Black, who's groundbreaking work, "IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation" (Crown Books, 2001, and Three Rivers Press, 2002), has just re-released this powerful book of a decade ago in paperback. In the original version, Black says Hitler's Nazi regime developed an "alliance" with IBM that helped the 20th century's most notorious dictator "to accelerate and in many ways automate key aspects of his persecution of Jews, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, and others the Nazis considered enemies."
Black says, based on his research, the alliance, which he says was engineered by IBM's president, Thomas J. Watson saw the transfer of technology that enabled Hitler to create the world's most sophisticated killing apparatus. It involved the use of special IBM punch cards which were developed and utilized by the Nazi regime to help "organize and manage the initial identification and social expulsion of Jews and others, the confiscation of their property, their ghettoization, their deportation, and, ultimately, even their extermination."
He went onto say the technology was provided through a special wartime Polish subsidiary that reported to IBM New York, "mainly to its headquarters at 590 Madison Avenue." During the war years, and even after reports surfaced that Hitler's Nazi Germany was engaged in mass extermination of Jews and other undesirables, "not a single sentence written by IBM personnel has been discovered in any of the documents questioning the morality of automating the Third Reich," Black wrote.