IBM and the Holocaust | Hacker News Reader

IBM and the Holocaust

en.wikipedia.org

55 pointsareoform11 comments

previous related discussion here on HN

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21268248

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20122053

Anyone working in tech should ask themselves whether the team they're part of would have passed the test that IBM failed here

I may have missed it in the article, but it's worth mentioning that IBMs involvement was so substantial that they actually created a metal for him.

> Thomas Watson was more than just a businessman selling boxes to the Third Reich. For his Promethean gift of punch card technology that enabled the Reich to achieve undreamed of efficiencies both in its rearmament program and its war against the Jews, for his refusal to join the chorus of strident anti-Nazi boycotters and isolators and instead open a commercial corridor the Reich could still navigate, for his willingness to bring the world’s commercial summit to Berlin, for his value as a Roosevelt crony, for his glitter and legend, Hitler would bestow upon Thomas Watson a medal — the highest it could confer on any non-German.

> The Merit Cross of the German Eagle with Star was created for Thomas Watson to 'honor foreign nationals who made themselves deserving of the German Reich.' It ranked second in prestige only to Hitler's German Grand Cross.

Extract from IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black

Wow did not know this.

IBM's firing of Lynn Conway (inventor of superscalar execution and, later, principles of large-scale chip design that enabled exploiting Moore's Law) entirely because she pursued sex change treatment, was of a piece with their close sympathy with the Nazi regime:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institut_f%C3%BCr_Sexualwissen...

After the war, the machines were returned to IBM, which already had the money paid for them.

Being trans myself, I'd think that Conway's firing (in the late 60s, nearly 25 years after the end of the war) has more to do with American attitudes than German ones.

Nobody suggested Germans fired her.

It has everything to do with attitudes of IBM management, which eagerly participated in the Holocaust, and manifestly continued sympathy beyond two decades after the war ended.

You could be transphobic without being a nazi, even though it probably helps. I believe most of the world at the time was *phobic.

Gay prisoners liberated from the concentration camps (they were marked with a pink triangle) were sent back to prison for the crime of homosexuality.

And the Allies were little better - Alan Turing was convicted of homosexuality, chemically castrated and stripped of his security clearance and eventually committed suicide.

Those attitudes were absolutely the norm at the time. As was anti-semitism, which while not as virulent as in Germany, was not at all uncommon in the West at the time, particularly among American business leaders. IBM wasn't as much of an anomaly as people want to believe.

Still, not too many other American business leaders were personally awarded a custom-designed Iron Cross by Hitler himself. So there's that.

You might of missed a small fact, it was Thomas J. Watson, Jr. who fired Conway. As in the son of Thomas J. Watson the recipient of the Nazi medal.

[IBM Apologizes for Firing Computer Pioneer for Being Transgender 52 Years Later] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25146271

Picture of daddy chilling with Hitler https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/punched-cards/2/1...

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