
IBM and the Holocaust (2017) - luu
http://blogs.oregonstate.edu/glencora/2017/11/27/ibm-holocaust/
======
motohagiography
There is some prior work on this book that talks about how the 1938 census was
used, the Hollerith punchcard machines (now IBM) tech, and the details of how
the tech worked and why. It's called "the nazi census." Should be required
reading at social media companies.

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convivialdingo
Not mentioned in the article - but I’ve read in the book and heard directly
that the Aushwitz prisoner number tattoo was directly matched to a punchcard.

My mother helped interview Jewish survivors so that their stories were
recorded and archived.

~~~
brighter2morrow
Where are the records? I've done some cursory searches for things like that
before and haven't found anything easily accessible

~~~
tomjen3
The punch card records?

The were in many cases ment to store only for further processing, and were
probably mostly destroyed when the nazies tried to destroy all evidence at the
end of the war.

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dTal
IBM is possibly the most famous, but several other American companies employed
the gambit of supplying both sides - notably Ford[1] and GM. This[2] article
is a wrenching overview. A particularly shocking extract:

"In fact, our government paid Ford Motor Company and GM millions of dollars
for damages done by our bombers to their plants in Germany and France, and
they were permitted to retain the same managers who had operated their
factories under the Nazis."

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Germany#Use_of_forced_lab...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Germany#Use_of_forced_labor_during_World_War_II)

[2][https://www.texasobserver.org/598-lets-talk-treason-how-
corp...](https://www.texasobserver.org/598-lets-talk-treason-how-corporate-
america-cashed-in-on-nazi-connections/)

~~~
LinuxBender
Also Standard Oil (have since changed their name) supplying $20MM oil to nazis
prior to the bombing of England.

~~~
rangibaby
S O -> Esso -> Exxon

~~~
ajcodez
Standard Oil was broken up into lots of pieces. Esso -> Exxon and Standard Oil
of New York -> Mobil were just two pieces.

[https://www.visualcapitalist.com/chart-evolution-standard-
oi...](https://www.visualcapitalist.com/chart-evolution-standard-oil/)

~~~
LinuxBender
Something I was pondering, since companies are treated as "people" as it
pertains to law, free speech, political contributions, etc... then wouldn't
that mean a company is guilty of war crimes? AFAIK there is no statute of
limitations on war crimes. If a Nazi commander changed their name, that would
not exclude them from being put on trial.

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jasonhansel
Good thing tech companies no longer create technologies to help authoritarian
regimes! </sarcasm>

~~~
Shivetya
any technology or manufactured good can be put to improper use, so why not
just be up front.

mankind is the problem.

~~~
cheez
Not just humans: [https://listverse.com/2017/03/19/10-facts-about-
chimpanzees-...](https://listverse.com/2017/03/19/10-facts-about-chimpanzees-
that-hold-a-dark-mirror-to-humanity/)

------
jstewartmobile
" _So money is one of the great threats to democracy. A second threat is what
Roman law called persona ficta, fictitious persons — corporations, labor
unions, and similar organizations which have the legal status of persons in
the sense that they can buy and sell property, they can sue and be sued in the
courts, they are generally anonymous, they are certainly irresponsible, and
they are increasingly powerful. The 15th amendment and various court rulings
have given corporations all the rights of living persons. This is dangerous
because they already have certain rights that real persons don’t have,
principally immortality. That’s the saving grace about even the worst
scoundrel: someday he will die, and maybe we can wait that long. We felt that
way about, Hitler, and Stalin. Maybe Mao is different; we’ll see. But a
corporation never dies. It has the first quality of divinity, as the ancient
Greeks defined it. They called their gods the immortals, because the only
quality they had that set them apart from men was that they never died.

Besides setting limits to corporate immortality, we must put other restraints
upon all fictitious persons, including foundations, universities, and all such
entities. From 1890 there was competition among the States to lower the
restraints on corporations. Originally, when a corporation was set up, its
charter specified what it was entitled to do, sell hamburgers to the public or
whatever. Today there are no restrictions, no restraints, no reporting._"

\- Carrol Quigley, LIFE, LECTURES & COLLECTED WRITINGS, p. 203

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luminati
"History doesn't repeat, but it certainly rhymes"

Soon after supporting Jewish oppression, IBM decided to switch tracks to
supporting black oppression[1]. They were one of the biggest tech providers to
the White Apartheid government in South Africa to enforce their brutality.

[1][http://www-cs-
students.stanford.edu/~cale/cs201/apartheid.co...](http://www-cs-
students.stanford.edu/~cale/cs201/apartheid.comp.html)

~~~
mistrial9
A successful bookseller in California chose to sell wholesale books to the
Apartheid Govt of South Africa, even into the height of the media outcry,
Nelson Mandela etc. When almost all the employees complained, the response was
"we sell books to all people" .. which was clever, but probably not sincere.
The objective was to make money, and the willingness of the govt and business
in South Africa to buy went _up_ when the political pressure was increasing,
because trade partners were getting scarcer.. In short, it became easier and
more profitable to sell to the besieged state. This scenario has probably
repeated itself throughout history.

------
soperj
They had their sequel in Apartheid South Africa.

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vgetr
I think it’s instructive to note that they also manufactured rifles:
[http://www.smallarmsreview.com/display.article.cfm?idarticle...](http://www.smallarmsreview.com/display.article.cfm?idarticles=1494)

------
ncmncm
After the war, they handed all the machines back to IBM.

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kevintb
Wow, excellent article.

> We should be talking about cases like IBM and the Holocaust with our
> students and with ourselves. A majority of our students will go on to work
> for companies just like IBM. And if they aren’t taught that tragedies like
> the Holocaust happen because everyone was just doing their job, we are
> liable for the continued abuse of computer science.

------
zerogvt
All these are quite well known but I wonder whether the contradictory
progressive moves of IBM are also as known [https://www.eweek.com/it-
management/ibm-and-black-history-in...](https://www.eweek.com/it-
management/ibm-and-black-history-innovation-through-diversity)

Not sure that there is much ideology behind one or the other side though. I'd
find it easier to believe that some execs then, now and ever, are trying to be
in sync with the general wind direction (today it mostly comes under names
such as "social responsibility" and "ecologic footprint") and not miss a good
business opportunity in parallel. Of course that whole thing is hilarious when
seen from outside and seems like the company is schizoid. In many ways that
might not be a totally wrong outlook. These are huge multifaceted
organizations and seen as a whole they don't make sense. Ideological or not
though they all have to make profit or they'll die. Simple as that. It would
be _very_ hard to any of them to say no to good business even if they knew it
was trading with the devil. Collateral damage -such as negative publicity and
potential future losses- would keep them back but only if the total net was
really negative.

For what is worth though I think that IBM is one of the most inclusive
companies atm (based on what I hear from LGBT/minorities people working
there).

Regardless - the point of the post is valid IMO.

~~~
goto11
How is that contra-evidence? Are you saying the claims about IBM's involvement
in the holocaust is disproved by these slides?

~~~
zerogvt
Would you expect the same organization/person/entity doing both of these
things? They are contradictory. That's what I'm saying.

~~~
goto11
So how is this "contra-evidence"?

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btilly
Related, IBM sought for and received permission to use JSLint for evil. See
[https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/cbcrz/i_give_p...](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/cbcrz/i_give_permission_for_ibm_its_customers_partners/)
for proof.

It turns out that authoritarian regimes still like to buy IBM products
including mainframes, and IBM is happy to sell to them. IBM lawyers are very
aware of this.

~~~
Xylakant
No, they did not. JSlint has a license that says “may not be used for evil.”
which is ill-defined. What’s evil? Is what you consider evil what I consider
evil? So they asked for a well-specified license. In return they were granted
a license to use JSlint for evil purposes, which is obviously a good joke at
their expense, but combined with the original license encompasses all uses,
and, as such, is well-defined.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
You said "no they didn't" then described how they did exactly what the parent
said, just with a gloss describing why they wanted to be allowed to "use it
for evil".

~~~
Xylakant
No. They want clarity on what’s considered evil. Or alternatively
clarification what the license allows and disallows under which circumstances.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Yes, but this was, apparently achieve by getting included the option to do E
AND the previously allowed ~E (according to the thread here).

~~~
Xylakant
No, the JSlint author responded to their request by granting them E in
addition to ~E. It’s not what they initially asked for.

------
milsorgen
>why wasn't this on my radar?

You must be very new or very young.

~~~
azinman2
The article implied that it be taught in CS education.

------
rexpop
This is important context in which to examine Salesforce and Amazon's
complicity in the gross injustices perpetrated by ICE/CBP.

~~~
rexpop
> In the past year, many major tech companies such as Amazon, Palantir,
> Salesforce, and Microsoft have come under scrutiny for selling software to
> US federal immigration agencies. That’s because those agencies have been
> responsible for enforcing some of the controversial immigration policies
> that separate families at the border, detain children, and deport people
> seeking refuge back to dangerous places.

[https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/6/11/18660531/tech-
companies...](https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/6/11/18660531/tech-companies-
enabling-machine-deportation-immigrant-advocates-erika-andiola-trump-jonathan-
ryan)

------
purplezooey
No ethics education? A prof. ethics class is required for a bachelor's in CS
at most schools.

------
WindowsFon4life
The premise given previously that counting machines were culpable seems a
stretch. Given IBM made firearms for the US.

------
southern_cross
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.

~~~
mthoms
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.

~~~
kens
> 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.

If you want to learn more about tabulators, there are lots of manuals on
Bitsavers. This one is a good place to start:
[http://bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/punchedCard/Training/22-6275-0_...](http://bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/punchedCard/Training/22-6275-0_Functional_Wiring_Principles.pdf)

(Obviously I'm not supporting IBM's actions; I just want people to understand
better how tabulators work.)

~~~
mthoms
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

Source [https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ibm-
holocaust_b_1301691](https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ibm-holocaust_b_1301691)

Though it's not clear in this passage whether he is referring to IBM itself or
its German subsidiary.

~~~
snotrockets
The discussed book provides evidence that the German subsidiary was
micromanaged by Watson.

