IBM and the Holocaust (2017)
blogs.oregonstate.edu
blogs.oregonstate.edu
My mother helped interview Jewish survivors so that their stories were recorded and archived.
The were in many cases ment to store only for further processing, and were probably mostly destroyed when the nazies tried to destroy all evidence at the end of the war.
Most of the records are still stored in Germany though, and there are also records stored in Moscow.
I still run into people who think the logic Nazis used only existed in the Germany of the era, but othering logic is deeply embedded in human culture. It comes out like this in our darkest moments, but all of us are vulnerable to it. Treating someone who commits atrocities as a monster keeps us from realizing how terrifyingly human they are and how short the path can be.
Pride month is a good time for this discussion because the Allies left a certain kind of person behind in the camps to serve out their sentences under laws based on the same kind of dehumanization the Nazis preyed on.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/gay-prisoners-germany-wwii...
The famous Nazi book burning photo was of books taken out of an era-equivalent gender clinic/LGBTQ+ center.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institut_f%C3%BCr_Sexualwissen...
"In fact, our government paid Ford Motor Company and GM millions of dollars for damages done by our bombers to their plants in Germany and France, and they were permitted to retain the same managers who had operated their factories under the Nazis."
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Germany#Use_of_forced_lab...
[2]https://www.texasobserver.org/598-lets-talk-treason-how-corp...
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/chart-evolution-standard-oi...
That was one of those idealized arguments about how global capitalism is the 'end of history'. Because under ideal circumstances, you are only bombing yourselves...
This includes a lot of American companies (even Israel’s oldest bank profited by not returning accounts held by people who were killed by the Nazis to their rightful heirs).
Few ever apologized, even fewer gave reparations.
It's easy to point your finger at China while turning a blind eye to Gitmo, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, etc. Going after Iran next. The price of "freedom" was maybe a few million Arabs or Afghans.
Besides, "we all know the current state of affairs" is an assumption I would be quite careful about.
mankind is the problem.
In the IBM case, as the article explains, the technology was specifically designed by IBM for use by the Nazis.
Soon after supporting Jewish oppression, IBM decided to switch tracks to supporting black oppression[1]. They were one of the biggest tech providers to the White Apartheid government in South Africa to enforce their brutality.
[1]http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~cale/cs201/apartheid.co...
> We should be talking about cases like IBM and the Holocaust with our students and with ourselves. A majority of our students will go on to work for companies just like IBM. And if they aren’t taught that tragedies like the Holocaust happen because everyone was just doing their job, we are liable for the continued abuse of computer science.
Not sure that there is much ideology behind one or the other side though. I'd find it easier to believe that some execs then, now and ever, are trying to be in sync with the general wind direction (today it mostly comes under names such as "social responsibility" and "ecologic footprint") and not miss a good business opportunity in parallel. Of course that whole thing is hilarious when seen from outside and seems like the company is schizoid. In many ways that might not be a totally wrong outlook. These are huge multifaceted organizations and seen as a whole they don't make sense. Ideological or not though they all have to make profit or they'll die. Simple as that. It would be _very_ hard to any of them to say no to good business even if they knew it was trading with the devil. Collateral damage -such as negative publicity and potential future losses- would keep them back but only if the total net was really negative.
For what is worth though I think that IBM is one of the most inclusive companies atm (based on what I hear from LGBT/minorities people working there).
Regardless - the point of the post is valid IMO.
Did you intentionally link to a slideshow about IBM and Black history? If so... respectfully, you may have misunderstood what “IBM and the Holocaust” is about (or perhaps what the Holocaust was).
Implying that IBM’s good deeds in your link are “the other side” of the magnitude of IBM’s support of Nazi Germany is a very unbalanced comparison.
Besides setting limits to corporate immortality, we must put other restraints upon all fictitious persons, including foundations, universities, and all such entities. From 1890 there was competition among the States to lower the restraints on corporations. Originally, when a corporation was set up, its charter specified what it was entitled to do, sell hamburgers to the public or whatever. Today there are no restrictions, no restraints, no reporting."
- Carrol Quigley, LIFE, LECTURES & COLLECTED WRITINGS, p. 203
It turns out that authoritarian regimes still like to buy IBM products including mainframes, and IBM is happy to sell to them. IBM lawyers are very aware of this.
Strictly speaking it’s also incompatible with the GPL.
"We don't care what you do with this as long as you reshare/etc" encourages a misleadingly narrow focus within the bigger picture of corporate and professional ethics.
IMO there's no realistic presumption of unquestioned goodness on the part of GPL. If someone wants to create code with a "No evil" license, they're perfectly entitled to apply one. Everyone else has to live with the consequences, just as they have to live with GPL etc.
I don’t consider that a solution for the ethics problem, though. What’s good and what’s evil is a very grey area. Ambiguous terms don’t make a good license. Most people consider themselves good. Many Facebook engineers consider themselves good, I’d wager. Does that make Facebook good? Russian intelligence officers probably consider themselves good. Does that make their use of JSlint good? Even Nazis considered themselves good. The entire ideology was centered around that narrative. So how can a license using those terms solve the ethics problem?
On a more serious take: I support causes that a lot of fundamental Christians could consider evil. Equality for queer people, for example. Marriage for all. Am I allowed to use JSlint for a website that supports those goals?
Why do lawyers worry about things like that? Because it’s their job. Unclear definitions worry them, which is good. Ambiguity ends you up in court.
Copyrights can be inherited, too. Who knows if the estate doesn’t have a particular view on good and evil and spends the entire inheritance suing small scale developers just to prove a point.
Now, in this case, it’s a fairly obviously benign case, but for good reasons, (corporate) lawyers stick to well-known licenses and risk avoidance.
You must be very new or very young.
https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/6/11/18660531/tech-companies...
Taking a census is a perfectly normal thing, although the questions asked on that census and how the information obtained from it may ultimately be used can be controversial. (Take, for example, the current kerfuffle over the possibility of a "citizenship" question being included on the upcoming 2020 U.S. census.) For the German census, it would be useful to know whether they were asking very pointed questions like "Are you a Jew?", or was it more general questions related to ethnicity and religion and so on.
>tabulating machines were housed at the concentration camps. Each prisoner had a card that detailed their health, skills and location as prisoners of good health were transported according to labor needs. Finally, the card also indicated the way the prisoner died: by natural causes (which would include being worked or tortured to death), execution, suicide, and special treatment (including gas chamber).
The first part of the post details how the cards and machines had to be coded or prepared by IBM itself (or its subsidiary). It wasn't possible to just add "fields" to a card.
The machines weren't general purpose like the computers of today. Everything had to be setup specifically for the precise problem being solved by the manufacturer.
The post also goes into more detail about how the Nazis wanted to know if a person was even partially Jewish by ethnicity. Regardless of whether or not they were practising Judaism.
But I was referring specifically to the census. IBM was in the census business at the time, after all, and Germany had a legitimate need for their services, which they provided at least until the war broke out. IIRC, some years passed between when Hitler and the Nazis came to power in Germany, and when they came to be considered "evil incarnate". Which was plenty of time for folks to do business with them which they might later come to regret.
For the record, the context is that of a fascist regime invading its neighbours (enemies, neutrals and allies alike) and rounding up their undesirables.
>I don't recall IBM coming out smelling like a rose
After building the census systems to identify targets, IBM built a train scheduling system for transporting those people to work and concentration camps. Then, they built a punch card system for optimizing the exploitation of that slave labour and exterminating the rest.
But yes, "IBM was in the census business at the time, after all."
Please.
Perhaps you should actually read the book, read the contemporary discussions of it, and maybe IBM's response to the whole affair before, you know, just jumping to conclusions based on this one article.
As I recall the book itself was quite one-sided and basically what we would today refer to as "clickbait", but I could be wrong about that. (My memory here is weak.) But too many folks these days want to buy into clickbaity stuff without doing any due diligence first. This is something that I've tried to instill in my college-age daughter. That is, don't get all worked up about something that you've read on the internet or seen on the news or whatever, until you've done enough due diligence on the matter to be able to say that you are quite familiar with both sides of the story. If you still want to be all worked up about it at that point, fine, but as often as not whenever my daughter actually does this she ends up calming down quite a bit.
Along those lines, the book's author claims to have uncovered new evidence here of the "smoking gun" variety. But I can tell that whenever I've looked at various "smoking gun" documents myself (in other contexts), very often these turn out to be nothing of the sort. Instead such claims are often just the product of lazy/incompetent/dishonest journalism, which is why I usually try to review documents for myself before coming to any conclusions. I wish more people would do that kind of thing.
Interesting admission considering elsewhere in this thread you've twice admonished me for not having read it.
>I haven't really kept up with the matter since then, though
You might want to read this summary, straight from the researcher himself, of the 2012 update to the book which you seem to be unaware of.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ibm-holocaust_b_1301691?gucco...
From the article:
>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.
Then you'd better freakin' get on it, huh? And remember I said to read not only the book but discussions and potential responses to it, too. Whatever I've read (or not) of this stuff myself in the past, apparently it's been far more than you have so far. I readily admit to not being up on the latest, though.
> 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.
See my response to you elsewhere in this thread.
If I've said or quoted something untrue please point it out rather than relying on argument from authority and condescension. It's rude and immature.
Everything I've claimed has been sourced. All you've been able to muster is generalizations and vague recollections about a book and commentary that you may (or may not... you're really not sure) have read.
Edit: Actually never mind. I see that your comment history shows the same pattern over and over. Along with the same ideological slant as you've exposed in this thread.
If an American company was making and selling trains to Germany during the war specifically tailored for transporting people in large quantities knowing what they were using it for, then I imagine most people would see multiple issues with that.
I admit I've only read the article, not the book but it seems hard to match your statements and "I think i've read the book" with the articles description of it.
Did IBM in USA get money for use of trademarks, patents, etc., From IBM in Germany?
The Edwin Black book makes this clear, lays it all out in an interesting story.
>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.
Separately:
>... 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.
It seems to me that there is evidence of direct involvement at least up until the US declared war in December 1941.
Source
That said, the author also makes mention of new documents in order to back up his claims. I would have to review such documents for myself (and I may do this when I get the chance), because it's been my experience that when the press or whoever claims to have "smoking gun" documents, those documents often don't necessarily say what they're being claimed to say.
Not likely. From Wikipedia:
In the early 1990s Black served as the editor-in-chief for OS/2 Professional magazine and OS/2 Week and reported on OS/2 users and technology.
>the author also makes mention of new documents in order to back up his claims. I would have to review such documents for myself (and I may do this when I get the chance), because it's been my experience that when the press or whoever claims to have "smoking gun" documents, those documents often don't necessarily say what they're being claimed to say.
Ah yes, the old "fake news" defence.
He's a journalist, not a techie. Just because he did some tech reporting and such back in the day doesn't necessarily mean that he has a clue, especially given the vintage of the tech that we're discussing here.
> Ah yes, the old "fake news" defence.
Yeah, you should maybe get a clue about that yourself! :)
And you should know that if and when various "smoking gun" documents turn up in court, as has been happening quite a bit lately, judges tend to react rather harshly if they don't actually say what they're claimed to say. This has also been happening quite a bit lately.
The trains were just pretty much standard cattle and freight cars, AFAIK, just like the IBM equipment was standard tabulating fair. And I doubt pretty seriously that any real direct corporate communication was going on between Dehomag and the folks back at IBM HQ during the war; maybe indirectly though.
From https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ibm-holocaust_b_1301691 :
>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.
And I found the following statement quite telling; emphasis mine:
"They [the punch cards] illustrate the nature of the end users [the Nazis; not IBM/Dehomag] who relied upon IBM’s information technology. "
Hitler's anti-Semitism and his use of paramilitary thugs to beat up political opponents were well known before he came to power. He wrote about his plans for German conquest of Europe and racial purity in Mein Kampf in the 1920s. The only question, when he came to power, was whether he would put this extreme views into action, and whether the people who installed him in power would constrain him.
He didn't waste much time showing that he was going to pursue a radical agenda, violently suppressing almost all political and cultural institutions that opposed him (the "Gleichschaltung"), having himself "voted" dictatorial powers (the "Ermächtigungsgesetz," and I put "voted" in quotes because he had to throw the Communist parliamentarians in jail in order to get the measure passed), enacting a boycott of Jewish businesses, kicking Jews out of positions in the bureaucracy and universities, and passing strict racial separation laws (the Nuremberg race laws). There was also, before long, the overt remilitarization.
I've studied and written about tabulators a lot, and this is overstating the difficulty of using a tabulator. Adding a new field is trivial, just type the data into that field on a card. (Unless you want nice custom-printed cards.) And configuring a tabulator is a lot easier than writing a program. You plugged wires into a plugboard connecting fields on the card to columns on the printer, or to counters to compute totals. To sort cards on a field, you set the sorter to sort on that column and ran the cards through. Tabulators could do some extremely complex things (such as differential equations), but normal tasks were pretty straightforward.
If you want to learn more about tabulators, there are lots of manuals on Bitsavers. This one is a good place to start: http://bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/punchedCard/Training/22-6275-0_...
(Obviously I'm not supporting IBM's actions; I just want people to understand better how tabulators work.)
The researcher does say:
>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
Source https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ibm-holocaust_b_1301691
Though it's not clear in this passage whether he is referring to IBM itself or its German subsidiary.
If there was an "Aryan", 'an upstanding German', that had turned to practicing Judaism did the Nazis treat them the same as someone with Jewish ancestry?
There are plenty of reasons to track prisoners and while it’s not acceptable today, tracking religion and other sensitive demographics was not at all uncommon.
You also just have to remember that while you might disagree with something being done it’s a national government asking you to do it. You think there aren’t things being done today that people would disagree with? We don’t even need to look to Saudi Arabia or Syria or Indonesia to find corruption and technology being used to oppress people, there’s plenty of that in the US.
Witold Pilecki, quite possibly the bravest man I ever read about, went under cover to Auschwitz in 1940. His Polish resistance network - ZOW - first started forwarding reports into the holocaust at Auschwitz Birchenau to the Polish government in London in March 1941. He was the main source of information on the holocaust in the early war, which was shared with all allies.
His landmark report produced after escaping from several years under cover in Auschwitz as an inmate was produced in 1943[1]. He'd also organised a resistance network within the camp, and regularly smuggled information out to ZOW during his time there.
Earlier? It was well known what Germany was doing well before the war (no apology for copy pasting a few snippets direct from Wikipedia):
Germany passed the sterilisation and euthanasia laws in 1933, with Action T4[2]
California eugenics leader returned to the US from Germany in 1934, talking of the fine program that existed in Germany, when Germany was forcibly sterilising 5,000 a month.[3]
Eugenics researcher Harry H. Laughlin often bragged that his Model Eugenic Sterilization laws had been implemented in the 1935 Nuremberg racial hygiene laws[3]
The forced sterilization program engineered by the Nazis was partly inspired by California's.[4]
The Rockefeller Institute funded Mengele before he went to Auschwitz.
Not forgetting the many refuges that found their way to British, American, Canadian and other shores in the years leading up to 1939. Many of whom would have been able to report exactly what was going on before war broke out.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witold's_Report
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aktion_T4
So in the context of OP's comment it seems very unlikely that many were completely unaware of what Germany was doing along similar lines, and going so much further. Whether that was still viewed as OK in the context of the time - a time before the holocaust - is of course far harder to judge.