IBM and the Holocaust

The future may seem like the time when computing could serve dark purposes, but the past also has a story to tell. The company IBM is the unfortunate protagonist, providing the technology that would be used during the Jewish Holocaust to carry out the most documented systematic killing in history. Edwin Black's book, called IBM and the Holocaust, recounts the dealings between the multinational company and the German regime, where punched cards became an efficient tool for carrying out a labor with dark purposes for which they were not originally intended.

The Birth of Punched Cards

The genesis of computers had its baptism of fire starting in 1920, where its use was intended for the correct calibration of industrial machines and even photography cameras, like the remembered Kaufmann Posograph. Information, already in those young years of the past century, was a high-cost good, and for that methods of accounting and segmentation were needed that were akin to the productivity levels that heavy industry demanded.

Since the end of the 19th century, the idea of punched cards had been in the head of a young employee of the United States Census Bureau. Herman Hollerith conceived a concept of cards whose perforations were standardized in a binary system and used to represent different types of information about those counted, such as occupation, gender, nationality and others.

IBM Takes Over the Market

By the late 1880s, the cards had been created and Hollerith rewarded for it because thanks to his punched cards the State had saved a lot of money in the census. After forging his company Tabulating Machine Company and gaining a monopolistic position, a rival would come who would take his business away by creating faster and cheaper machines. His name was Willy Heidinger and he was the owner of Dehomag. Hollerith's company would then be sold to Charles Flint, who gave the power of it to Thomas J. Watson, a successful salesman.

CTR, as the company was called then, began to gain ground in the punched card market from Dehomag, consumed by the German inflation of the beginning of the 20th century. After going bankrupt, Dehomag had to become a subsidiary of CTR and transfer 90% of its shares to Watson. By 1924 and with the battle of the young niche won, Watson renamed CTR and called it International Business Machines (IBM).

The Role in Nazi Censuses

According to writer Edwin Black, it is from a few years later when IBM comes closer to Hitler's recent electoral victory. Its relationship begins when the Nazi regime decides to establish a political prisoner camp in Bavaria, on the outskirts of Munich. In only 3 months, more than 60,000 people were arrested for various reasons, especially political resistance, foreign status, religious beliefs and sexual orientations. But it is only that month that the Nazi government declares war on the Jews and the world begins its boycott of Nazi Germany.

However, a North American company resists the boycott and continues collaborating with the Germans: IBM, through its subsidiary Dehomag. When a census is announced in 1933, the intention of the Germans was to identify the inhabitants to violently separate the Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, communists and other groups of people that were recognized as “enemies of the pure German people” by the Hitlerite regime. To do this, the assistance of Dehomag was essential and 41 million Prussians were cataloged.

A Carnal Relationship

The author points out that IBM did not carry out the work, because it was destined for the United States, but it did financially fund Dehomag and even Watson traveled to Germany to supervise his recent re-investment in the German subsidiary. The same year, IBM would finally build its first factory in Berlin, emphasizing a financial relationship with the Nazi regime. After the “Nazified” Dehomag was given powers to operate outside the limits of Germany, in conquered zones, to co-opt other factories and contribute with more punched cards in those territories, the relationship had the Nazi government as the second largest client of IBM during all those years.

The 1933 census showed what the punched cards funded by IBM and developed by Dehomag, additionally to the tabulation services, strongly contributed to the identification of the “internal enemies” of Nazism. From one week to the next, millions of Jews and other minority groups that believed they could go unnoticed before the Aryan clause, in force since the late 19th century, were exposed thanks to the precision of IBM's technology, which made crosses between the data captured by the census to detect anomalies in declarations and compare blood traits and ethnic differences. Of 600 thousand estimated Jews, the specific data of the tabulations indicated that the true number was approximately 2 million.

By 1935, German intelligence had everything needed to act and the Law for the Protection of German Blood was enacted to take away German citizenship from Jews and prohibit sexual crossing with the Aryan race. In 1939 other regional censuses would come and in each country occupied by Germany. This one was more focused on estimating the number of Jews that could be “ghettoized”. Concentration camps multiplied, and IBM's technology would not be lacking in them, since there were machines and Hollerith departments assigned to provide tabulation services in every clandestine detention center.

Medical and physical records were also carried out with these punched cards. As Black writes: “Each person over twelve years of age had to fill out the census form in duplicate, then give their fingerprints. Half of the form was sealed and returned as the new identification form for the captured person. Without it, they would be shot. With it, they would be deported.”

A Truth Long Overdue

At the cost of all this, IBM and its subsidiaries kept making fortunes. But did they know what was happening in Germany and the occupied countries? IBM contradicts the evidence of Edwin Black and indicates that the company did not have much information about what was going on in these camps, because much of the information was destroyed right there. At the time of the book's launch, there were several legal encounters and its author, Edwin Black, even accused IBM of wanting to hide its participation by erasing files or preventing their review.

Also appeared journalists, human rights organizations and many other institutions with strong documentation wanting to denounce IBM as a necessary participant in the Holocaust, because without its punched cards the organization could not have been so effectively macabre. To this day, and even paying some “acknowledgments” but without accepting guilt or participation, IBM has brought down all lawsuits and Black has only won some recognitions for his research.

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