IIRC, the full extent of what was actually going on in Germany didn't become apparent until near the end of the war, as Allied troops started liberating the concentration camps. Even Germans who lived near those camps claimed to not know what was going on there, although nobody was in any particular mood to believe them at the time. Many of them may have been telling the truth, though.
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.
I feel like you maybe didn't read the post? For example:
>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.
> It wasn't possible to just add "fields" to a card.
> Everything had to be setup specifically for the precise problem
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.
As someone who has programmed tabulators, I can confirm this is correct. Once IBM delivered the machine, customer personnel were able to wire the panel to perform calculations and print reports.
Thanks for your input. I'm not familiar with these machines so I look forward to reading that link.
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
Yeah, but you think there’s no businessy way to explain that?
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.
Not only did I read the article, but I'm pretty sure that I actually read the book when it first came out, or at least lots of discussion about it, from several angles. This isn't exactly "new" news, after all. It might behoove you to track down some of the discussions from the time. I don't recall IBM coming out smelling like a rose, though, even if you gave them some benefit of the doubt.
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.
I find it curious to selectively focus both your comments so far on the census services and ignore the rest. Certainly, when taken out of context those census services are easy to defend.
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."
But wasn't the later stuff done by Dehomag, the German subsidiary started by IBM? IBM's direct involvement in Germany apparently ended when the war started in 1941, although Dehomag kept using their equipment. Just because they used "IBM technology" doesn't mean that IBM still had a hand in it. I mean, if you want to go down that route, shouldn't we be pointing a finger of blame at the train manufacturing folks, too, for example, since their trains were being used for transport?
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.
The article makes a point that the books length is largely due to establishing extensive proof that IMB's direct involvement and management over Dehomag throughout the war means they would have known exactly what the various uses of their systems were...
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.
Having read the original book, it made a reasonable (perhaps even convincing) case that IBM knew, or should have known what their tabulators would be used for - it also made a reasonably convincing case that IBM America had little control over its German subsidiary after 1936-7. The only thing IBM could have done was to declined to sell to the German government, which would have resulted in a prompt nationalization.
I'm not sure how much of this was detailed in the original book (I haven't read it) but the 2012 update claims to have revealed new material:
>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.
A quick read of the linked article suggests that maybe the author is somewhat confused about the difference between writing "computer code(s)" (software), which often requires extensive skill, and the assignment of simple numerical codes to various things for tracking purposes within the computer system, which is as straightforward as it sounds. The former is more of an engineering function while the latter is more clerical. Also, it is not at all surprising that the equipment and cards and whatever that the Nazis were using might bear the names/logos of IBM and Dehomag and such, even if those folks were completely out of the loop by then.
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.
>A quick read of the linked article suggests that maybe the author is somewhat confused
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
>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.
Dude, as I explain in another comment, assigning such codes is mostly a clerical function, meaning that IBM or Dehomag or whoever didn't necessarily have a hand in it. I'm not saying that they didn't, but this doesn't prove that they did. (There may be IBM documents out there which suggest otherwise, though.)
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. "
I think I did (or maybe just parts of it), but I don't really remember because it came out back in 2001. I do recall reading a lot of discussion about the whole situation back then, and that IBM's response to it seemed rather weak. I haven't really kept up with the matter since then, though.
I hope you can take this as an honest question and not a personal attack, but if you’ve not really researched or paid attention to this issue since 2001 why are you all over the comments here defending IBM? I’m an ex-IBMer, not necessarily against them but you really seem to be going out of your way to defend them, what gives?
I don't believe I've actually "defended" IBM anywhere here. In fact, I stated that their response (their own defense) to the whole thing was quite weak, as I recall. But we're talking here about an article which came out in 2017 (written by someone who was apparently quite clueless about the whole situation), about a book which first came out in 2001, about events which happened back in the 1930s and 1940s. So plenty of time for us to have gotten a good historical view of what actually went on here - good, bad, or indifferent.
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.
>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.
> Interesting admission considering elsewhere in this thread you've twice admonished me for not having read it.
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.
>Whatever I've read (or not) of this stuff myself in the past, apparently it's been far more than you have so far
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.
> IIRC, some years passed between when Hitler and the Nazis came to power in Germany, and when they came to be considered "evil incarnate".
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.
Anti-Semitism was pretty common in a lot of places at the time (it still is in some circles, you may note), and the whole idea of eugenics was kind of an "in" thing in much of the scientific community at the time, too. It wasn't until Hitler came along and started implementing this stuff in a big and brutal way that the tide of opinion turned.
Weird I'd never thought it was about practicing Judaism, but solely about genetics/race.
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?
It was bloody obvious to anyone who didn't choose to actively look away.
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.
Worth noting that Harry Laughlin was not an outlier. Many of the 'great and the good' at that time were supporters of eugenics and included Winston Churchill, GB Shaw, Neville Chamberlain, JM Keynes, Jack London and HL Mencken. Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland all brought in eugenics laws in the 1930s. Those deemed to be unfit to reproduce were sterilized.
https://www.economist.com/europe/1997/08/28/here-of-all-plac...
Oh it wasn't in isolation - a lot of well known names in many nations had an interest, and there was varying degree of popular interest too. It seemed particularly popular in the Nordic nations, and America. The were eugenics societies in most of the major nations. America had popular societies in many states, it was in the media, and the US were among the earliest to bring in eugenic laws - and the last to keep them around.
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.
And the U.S., via its isolationist policy at the time, largely chose to just stay out of a war which was being fought "way over there" and which we had no direct interest in at the time. But then the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in late 1941, which changed everything. This is when IBM's direct involvement with Germany also ended.
Yes Pearl Harbor changed everything, yet nothing changed. Direct dealing would be illegal, so they simply relayed via IBM Geneva. The book made a convincing case that IBM, and Watson himself continued to deal - and profit - throughout the war. "IBM's direct involvement with Germany ended" is pretty academic if they just started funnelling through a subsidiary.
Well, don't forget that the name "Watson" applies to both Watson Sr. (who founded IBM but who had a somewhat less than stellar reputation, at least at first) and his son Watson Jr., who ran IBM himself for a great many years and who had a much better reputation. Apparently father and son didn't really get along too well, though.
I had a professor once who had been one of the earliest soldiers to reach the area near one of the concentration camps (I don't remember which one). Speaking to the local Germans, they said, "we had no idea what was going on." His response was that you could smell the camp from the town.
The locals may have been pretty much oblivious to the actual inner workings of the camps, since I imagine they were kept well away from them by the soldiers. But I personally find it hard to believe that once the crematoria were fired up, that they couldn't smell that for miles around.
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.