- IBM, the American computer giant, faces detailed charges
today that it collaborated in Hitler's persecution of the Jews.
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- More than half a century after the second world war,
an American investigative writer, Edwin Black, says he has found extensive
evidence that the Holocaust depended not on German efficiency but on American
technology.
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- Black writes that IBM punch card-sorters, a precursor
of computers, were used to facilitate all aspects of Nazi persecution -
from the identification of Jews in censuses in Germany and occupied Europe
to the running of concentration camp slave labour. His book, IBM and the
Holocaust, is serialised today in The Sunday Times and published tomorrow
in America and Britain.
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- "For the first time in history, an anti-semite had
automation on his side. Hitler didn't do it alone. He had help."
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- Black says Hitler's quest to destroy the Jews was "greatly
enhanced and energised" by IBM and its creator and chairman, Thomas
J Watson.
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- Watson expressed admiration for Hitler and was awarded
the Merit Cross of the German Eagle with Star by the Führer. The Nazis
regarded him as a powerful friend, but his interest was profit, not ideology.
He micromanaged Dehomag, the company's German subsidiary, writes Black.
"IBM NY understood - from 1933 - it was doing business with the upper
echelon of the Nazi party."
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- IBM's card-index system helped the Nazis to list Jews
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- IBM has long acknowledged that its German subsidiary
used punch card technology in a 1933 census, soon after Hitler took power;
but its role in subsequent events has not been suspected, let alone investigated.
The firm has had good relations with organisations representing Holocaust
survivors. Two months ago, it donated hardware to help the Jewish Claims
Conference disburse German compensation payments.
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- Watson's son, Thomas J Watson Jr, who moved IBM into
computers after the war, disagreed with his father's attitude to the Nazis.
"Dad's optimism blinded him to what was going on in Germany,"
he once wrote.
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- According to IBM, its links with its Nazi-era German
subsidiary were severed in 1940. Black, however, has produced letters that
indicate the IBM chairman sent an emissary to Berlin to resolve problems
in late 1941, when America was about to enter the conflict.
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- The charges made by Black, whose parents, Polish Jews,
both escaped death during the Holocaust, arise from research into archives
in America, Germany, Britain, Israel, Holland, Poland and France. With
the help of more than 100 people, he assembled over 20,000 pages of documentation.
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- "Examined singly, none revealed the story,"
says Black. But put together, they showed "IBM's conscious involvement
- directly and through its subsidiaries - in the Holocaust".
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- Black produces evidence that, although IBM protected
its legal position by instructing its subsidiaries not to trade with enemy
countries, "elaborate document trails were fabricated to demonstrate
compliance when the opposite was true".
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- IBM first became involved with Nazism because of Hitler's
desire to identify Germany's Jewish population before destroying it, Black
says. "To search generations of records all across Germany - and later
Europe - was a crossindexing task so monumental it called for a computer."
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- Equally, the mass movement of European Jews into ghettos
and then into concentration camps also required the powers of a computer.
None existed; but the IBM punch card and card-sorting system was available
from its German subsidiary.
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- Nazi demand for IBM technology became so great that the
firm built a factory near Berlin, vastly increasing its investment in the
German subsidiary.
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- The book seems certain to cause a furore in America.
It has been endorsed in advance of publication by several prominent Jewish
figures.
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- "Edwin Black has put together an impressive array
of facts which result in a shocking conclusion never realised before,"
said Simon Wiesenthal, the director of the Jewish Documentation Centre
in Vienna.
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- Michael Whine, the director of defence and group relations
division of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, called it a "vital
book".
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