IBM and the Holocaust
IBM and the Holocaust is the stunning story of IBM's strategic alliance with Nazi Germany -- beginning in 1933 in the first weeks that Hitler came to power and continuing throughout World War II. As the Third Reich embarked upon its plan of conquest and genocide, IBM and its subsidiaries helped create enabling technologies, step-by-step, from the identification and cataloging programs of the 1930s to the selections of the 1940s. Only after Jews were identified -- a massive and complex task that Hitler wanted done immediately -- could they be targeted for efficient asset confiscation, ghettoization, deportation, enslaved labor, and, ultimately, annihilation. It was a cross-tabulation and organizational challenge so monumental, it called for a computer. Of course, in the 1930s no computer existed. But IBM's Hollerith punch card technology did exist. Aided by the company's custom-designed and constantly updated Hollerith systems, Hitler was able to automate his persecution of the Jews. Historians have always been amazed at the speed and accuracy with which the Nazis were able to identify and locate European Jewry. Until now, the pieces of this puzzle have never been fully assembled. The fact is, IBM technology was used to organize nearly everything in Germany and then Nazi Europe, from the identification of the Jews in censuses, registrations, and ancestral tracing programs to the running of railroads and organizing of concentration camp slave labor.
Stats for nerds
37recommend
240mentions
191people
2009–2026years
17% recommend83% neutral0% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- The book “IBM and the Holocaust” is instructive here.
These are simply tools, AI and surveillance tools included.
Tools can and are used for evil.
Some tools are much easier to use for evil. Tabulating and data processing is one of them. It makes conducting mass scale atrocity a lot easier.
- Read books by Edwin Black "IBM and the Holocaust" and "War on the weak" to learn why this is a bad idea.
- Good read about the history of IBM during WWII
- Required reading on Palantir and its cousins, Dataminr etc. : "IBM and the Holocaust, The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation."
The book is good because of the extensive historical documentation of IBM practices, Nazi procurement orders, and the eagerness that IBM leaders displayed in fulfilling those orders, even though they knew the purpose:
> "The racial portion of the census was designed to pinpoint ancestral Jews as defined by the Nuremberg Laws, ensuring no escape from the Reich's anti-Semitic campaign. In addition to the usual census questions, a special card asked whether any of the individuals grandparents was Jewish."
In a not-so-unique historical inversion, the Israeli government is now using American tech firms like Palantir to assist in their ongoing ethnic cleansing and genocide programs in the West Bank and Gaza, which have certainly not ended, ceasefire or no, as any reading of the statements of Israeli government officials, bloggers, online commentators etc. demonstrates (even though Twitter no longer provides translations of Hebrew to English, it's not hard to decipher the intent).
As far as Palantir and Dataminr's agenda? Same as IBM's - delivering value to their shareholders.
- The book you want is IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black. Well-researched, well-regarded & a bestseller. 597 pages.
- If this kind of thing interests you, you could do a lot worse than picking up Edwin Black's 'IBM and the Holocaust'.
Turns out IBM had a rather... Uh, pragmatic attitude towards the uses the nazi regime found for IBM equipment.
Related
American Holocaust
2 recommend · 5
Late Victorian Holocausts
8 recommend · 17
The E-myth revisited
126 recommend · 205
Game Engine Black Book
45 recommend · 68
IBM's 360 and early 370 systems
6 recommend · 15
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
47 recommend · 133
