The infamous Later in the summer of 1943, the Polish timber merchant's same five-digit Hollerith number, 44673, was tattooed on his forearm. Eventually, during the summer of 1943, all non-Germans at Sigismund Gajda was another The Extermination by Labour campaign itself depended upon specially designed IBM systems that matched worker skills and locations with labour needs across Nazi-dominated The Polish timber merchant's Hollerith tattoo, Sigismund Gajda's inmate form, and the victimization of millions more at Nearly every Nazi concentration camp operated a Hollerith Department known as the Hollerith Abteilung. The three-part Hollerith system of paper forms, punch cards and processing machines varied from camp to camp and from year to year, depending upon conditions. In some camps, such as IBM did not sell any of its punch card machines to Nazi Germany. The equipment was leased by the month. Each month, often more frequently, authorized repairmen, working directly for or trained by IBM, serviced the machines on-site-whether in the middle of IBM's extensive technological support for Hitler's conquest of Central to the Nazi effort was a massive 500-man Hollerith Gruppe, installed in a looming brown building at 24 Murnerstrasse in The trains running to The exact address and equipment arrays of the key IBM offices and customer sites in Nazi-occupied The newly unearthed IBM customer site was a huge Hollerith Büro. It was situated in the I.G. Farben factory complex, housed in Barracks 18, next to German Civil Worker Camp 7, about two kilometres from Auschwitz III, also known as Monowitz Concentration Camp. By way of background, what most people call " Many of the long-known paper prisoner forms stamped Hollerith Erfasst, or "registered by Hollerith," indicated the prisoners were from Auschwitz III, that is, Monowitz. Now For example, Alexander Kuciel, born The giant Farben facilities, also known as "I.G. Werk Auschwitz," maintained two Hollerith Büro staff contacts, Herr Hirsch and Herr Husch. One key man running the card index systems was Eduard Müller. Müller was a fat, aging, ill-kempt man, with brown hair and brown eyes. Some said, "He stank like a polecat." A rabid Nazi, Müller took special delight in harming inmates from his all-important position in camp administration. Comparison of the new printouts to other typical camp cards shows the Monowitz systems were customized for the specific coding Farben needed to process the thousands of slave workers who labored and died there. The machines were probably also used to manage and develop manufacturing processes and ordinary business applications. The machines almost certainly did not maintain extermination totals, which were calculated as "evacuations" by the Hollerith Gruppe in It is not known how many additional IBM customer sites researchers will discover in the cold ashes of the expansive commercial A Hollerith Büro, such as the one at Auschwitz III, was larger than a typical mechanized concentration camp Hollerith Department. A Büro was generally comprised of more than a dozen punching machines, a sorter and one tabulator. Leon Krzemieniecki was a compulsory worker who operated a tabulator at the IBM customer site at the Polish railways office in The new revelation of IBM technology in the Auschwitz area constitutes the final link in the chain of documentation surrounding Big Blue's vast enterprise in Nazi-occupied Poland, supervised at first directly from its New York headquarters, and later through its Geneva office. Jewish leaders and human rights activists were again outraged. "This latest disclosure removes any pretext of deniability and completes the puzzle that has been put together about IBM in Marek Orski, state historian of the museum at Krzemieniecki is convinced obtaining such documents would be difficult. "It would be great to have access to those documents," he said, "but where are they?" He added, "Please remember, I witnessed in 1944, when the war front came closer to Setkiewicz says, "We still need to find more similar identification cards and printouts, and try to find just how extensive was the usage in the whole I.G. Farben administration and employment of workers. But no one among historians has had success in finding these documents." In the current climate of intense public scrutiny of corporate subsidiaries, IBM's evasive response has aroused a renewed demand for accountability. "In the day of Enron and Tyco," says Robert Urekew, a Even some IBM employees are frustrated by IBM's silence. Michael Zamczyk, for example, is a long-time IBM employee in "Originally," says Zamczyk, "I was just trying to determine if it was IBM equipment that helped select my father to be shipped to Zamczyk started writing letters and emails, but to no avail. He could not get any concrete response about IBM's activities during the Hitler era. "I contacted senior management, all the way up to the president, trying to get an answer,"states Zamczyk. "Since then, I have read the facts about IBM in Zamczyk was met by stony silence from IBM executives. "The only response I got," he relates, "was basically telling me there would be no public or private apology. But I am still waiting for that apology and debating what to do next." Repeated attempts to obtain IBM reaction to the newest disclosure were rebuffed by IBM spokesman Carol Makovich. I phoned her more than a dozen times, but she did not respond, or grant me permission to examine Polish, Brazilian and French subsidiary documents at the company's At one point, Makovich quipped to a Reuters correspondent, "We are a technology company, we are not historians." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Edwin Black is author of IBM and the Holocaust, The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and
IBM and Auschwitz
In August 1943, a timber merchant from
The five-digit Hollerith number was part of a custom punch card system devised by IBM to track prisoners in Nazi concentration camps, including the slave labour at
The Polish timber merchant's punch card number would follow him from labour assignment to labour assignment as Hollerith systems tracked him and his availability for work, and reported the data to the central inmate file eventually kept at Department DII. Department DII of the SS Economics Administration in Oranienburg oversaw all camp slave labour assignments, utilizing elaborate IBM systems.
Tattoos, however, quickly evolved at
However, Hollerith numbers remained the chief method
By Paul Festa Staff Writer, CNET Since its publication in February, Edwin Black's book "IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and On the book's release, Holocaust survivors filed suit against IBM for its alleged role in the Holocaust; Gypsies earlier this month threatened their own lawsuit. Though the first suit was withdrawn and the second has yet to be filed, hundreds of critics and historians have weighed in against the company, with others coming to its defense. The range of the controversy can be gleaned from the pages of BusinessWeek alone, which in a March review excoriated the "illogical, overstated, padded, and sloppy" book for fostering "a new myth--the automated Holocaust," and in an April commentary said the "enlightening" book "should be required reading for every first-year MBA student." At the heart of Black's argument is that information technology--in the form of IBM's Hollerith punch-card machines--provided the Nazis with a unique and critical tool in their task of cataloguing and dispatching their millions of victims. As the book's title suggests, Black attempts to establish that IBM didn't merely vend its products to Hitler--as did many American companies--but maintained a strategic alliance with the Third Reich in which it licensed, maintained and custom-designed its products for use in the machinery of the Holocaust. IBM has responded to questions about its relationship with the Nazis largely by characterizing the information as old news. "The fact that Hollerith equipment manufactured by (IBM's German unit) Dehomag was used by the Nazi administration has long been known and is not new information," IBM representative Carol Makovich wrote in an e-mail interview. "This information was published in 1997 in the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing and in 1998 in Washington Jewish Week." IBM also maintains, in a February statement to which it refers most questions on the matter that the Nazis took control of its German unit before and throughout the war, and that the company "does not have much information about this period or the operations of Dehomag." Black vehemently disputes both claims.
"As chairman of a major international company and a strong supporter of international trade, he met and corresponded with senior government officials from many, many countries, Hitler and CNET 's Paul Festa discussed the issues with Black in a recent interview: What first got you interested in this subject?
When I first went to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in I was literally frozen for some time staring at the machine, thinking of IBM and looking back at the map of How did you go about researching IBM's role?
But I finally assembled this dark puzzle that had eluded the 15 million people who have seen this machine in the Holocaust museum. I finally connected the dots. And those dots are that IBM engineered a strategic business alliance and joint planning program with Nazi Germany from the very first moment in 1933 and extending right through the war that endowed the Hitler regime with the technology and the tools it needed to expedite and, in many ways, automate, all six phases of Hitler's war against the Jews. Those six phases are identification, expulsion, confiscation, ghettoization, deportation and ultimately even extermination. Five years ago I started working on this seriously and two years ago went 24/7 with the team of 100. I spent those first years in the project finding out that virtually nothing's been written on IBM's role in the Holocaust. Indeed, many of the documents and facts I discovered seem to be boring, innocuous corporate details. It's only when juxtaposed with other facts from other countries and archives that these shards of glass come together to form this heartbreaking picture window, exposing the tremendous vista of IBM's global relationship with Nazi Germany. IBM claims that its German subsidiary came under Nazi control both before and during World War II
IBM would want to say they lost control of their German subsidiaries. That's clearly false. Thomas Watson and the Remember, IBM custom-designed the machines, custom-designed the applications and custom-printed the punch cards. There were no universal punch cards or machine wiring. Programs to identify Jews, Jewish bank accounts, barrels of oil, Luftwaffe flights, welfare payments, train schedules into camps, and even the concentration camp information--all these had to be tailored for each application. Even after Do you have examples following the start of World War II in 1939?
On September 13, 1939, The New York Times reports on Page 1 that 3 million Jews are going to be "immediately removed" from Poland, and they appear to be candidates for "physical extermination." On September 9, the German managers of IBM Berlin send a letter to Thomas Watson with copy to staff in That month he also approved the opening of a new Europe-wide school for Hollerith technicians in We have a similar example involving What exactly did the Nazis need IBM's equipment for?
This is the same technology we saw in What was IBM's involvement with the Nazis once
He then bifurcated the management of IBM Europe--one manager in Watson stopped all communications with Nazi Germany directly. And in point of fact, he danced on the head of a pin to obey Do you contend that IBM played a role beyond the concentration camps--that it was part of the German war effort against the
IBM was in charge of the draft. IBM was one of the few outside the Pentagon who knew the exact date of the Describe your relationship with IBM as you were researching this book
Rather than destroy the documents, IBM said it was giving them to "an academic institution" for study. But where did these documents end up? Not the I also arranged to view documents in IBM still refuses to open archives concerning France, Is your research ongoing, or is this case closed as far as you're concerned?
My book is not about census. The machines also ran the railroads. They organized the "extermination by labor" campaign, where people were worked to death based on their job skills and location. Slaves were shuttled from place to place based on Hollerith cross-tabulations. Millions and millions of people went through Nazi concentration camps during the 12-year Reich. But at the height of the Hitler regime, the entire camp capacity was three to five hundred thousand. That's extraordinary traffic management.
How has IBM responded to your book?
IBM PR also said the company lost control of their German subsidiary when the Nazis came to power. That's completely false. The book quotes the incidents chapter and verse. The architect of IBM's denial of Holocaust involvement is PR manager Carol Makovich. She has developed a carefully crafted, confidential, 12-page memo that she faxes or e-mails to reviewers and writers. CNET received a copy. There are a few elderly historians who are skeptical about the book. They don't understand the power of relational databases, and information technology confuses them. IBM quotes this handful, hoping that message will influence reporters on deadline. We have indeed received about six negative reviews in newspapers, but also about 380 positive ones through the world. At least 100 of these laudatory reviews are up on my Web site. IBM won't even deny a single fact in my book. They just hope the subject will go away. It won't. On Holocaust Day, in April of this year, an article ran in about 20 papers across the What do you think accounts for IBM's association with the Nazis? What was their motivation?
Why single out IBM out of all the other companies, American and otherwise, that did business with the Nazis?
IBM is circulating a review by The New York Times that argues you failed to "demonstrate that IBM bears some unique or decisive responsibility for the evil that was done." What's your response to that statement?
IBM only had a unique and decisive role for what they were involved in. There was a distinct difference between trading with the enemy, which many companies engaged in, and the strategic alliance and joint planning campaign that IBM engaged in. For example, Standard Oil planned and built a complete petroleum supply line for Nazi Germany and supplied it well into the war--throughout the war. But Hitler knew about the combustion engine and about fuel before Standard Oil ever sold him gasoline. A British company was selling uniforms to the Third Reich. Hitler knew how to sew a uniform. IBM did more than just sell equipment. Watson and IBM controlled the unique technical magic of Hollerith machines. They controlled the monopoly on the cards and the technology. And they were the ones that had to custom-design even the paper forms and punch cards--they were custom-designed for each specific purpose. That included everything form counting Jews to confiscating bank accounts, to coordinating trains going into death camps, to the extermination by labor campaign. That's why even the paper forms in the prisoner camps had Hollerith notations and numbered fields checked. They were all punched in. For example, IBM had to agree with their Nazi counterparts that Code 6 in the concentration camps was extermination. Code 1 was released, Code 2 was transferred, Code 3 was natural death, Code 4 was formal execution, Code 5 was suicide. Code 7 was escape. Code 6 was extermination. All of the money and all the machines from all these operations was claimed by IBM as legitimate business after the war. The company used its connections with the State Department and the Pentagon to recover all the machines and all the bank accounts. They never said, "We do not want this blood money." They wanted it all. What's your opinion of the various lawsuits that have been brought against IBM on behalf of Holocaust survivors?
Everyone approaches the Holocaust in their way. Some prefer memorials, others ignore what happened and wish it would go away, and some prefer lawsuits. I'm an investigative reporter and believe the best reparation is illumination. Interestingly, the reason the Gypsies said they sued was that IBM has continuously ignored their requests for information. IBM has never apologized and never opened up their archives. The company is arrogant with all who demand answers, and then these people turn to the courts. Once again, someone is giving IBM terrible advice. |
Final Solutions by Edwin Black March 27 -
And that's how the trains to Thousands of IBM documents reviewed for the first edition of my book 'IBM and the Holocaust,' published early last year and focused mainly on IBM's German subsidiary, revealed vigorous efforts to preserve IBM's monopoly in the Nazi market and increase contracts to meet wartime sales quotas. Since then, continued research and interviews have uncovered details, described here for the first time, of IBM's work for the Nazis in Documents were obtained from IBM files shipped to NYU for processing and from scores of other archival sources here and abroad. Not a single sentence written by IBM personnel has been discovered in any of the documents questioning the morality of automating the Third Reich, even when headlines proclaimed the mass murder of Jews. IBM's German subsidiary was Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen Gesellschaft, known by the acronym Dehomag. (Herman Hollerith was the German American who first automated Watson tightly managed the lucrative German operation, traveling to No machines were sold to the Nazis—only leased. IBM was the sole source of all punch cards and spare parts, and it serviced the machines on-site—whether at Dachau or in the heart of Berlin—either directly or through its authorized dealer network or field trainees. There were no universal punch cards. Each series was custom-designed by IBM engineers not only to capture the information going in, but also to tabulate the information the Nazis wanted to come out. IBM constantly updated its machinery and applications for the Nazis. For example, one series of punch cards was designed to record religion, national origin, and mother tongue, but by creating special columns and rows for Jew, Polish language, Polish nationality, the fur trade as an occupation, and then Berlin, Nazis could quickly cross-tabulate, at the rate of 25,000 cards per hour, exactly how many Berlin furriers were Jews of Polish extraction. Railroad cars, which could take two weeks to locate and route, could be swiftly dispatched in just 48 hours by means of a vast network of punch-card machines. Indeed, IBM services coursed through the entire German infrastructure in The IBM Response
The war broke out on The savaging of On Eighteen days later, a vanquished Meanwhile, Reinhard Heydrich, chief of Heinrich Himmler's Security Service, the SD, had already circulated a top-secret letter to the chiefs of his Einsatzgruppen, which evolved into mobile killing units. Heydrich's September 21 memo, titled "The Jewish Question in the Shortly thereafter, Heydrich sent a follow-up cable to his occupying forces in Quantifying and organizing the deportation of millions of people from various regions across In Nazi Poland, railroads constituted about 95 percent of the IBM subsidiary's business, using as many as 21 million punch cards annually. Watson Business Machines was headquartered at Kreuz 23 in Leon Krzemieniecki is probably the only man still living who worked in that Hollerith department. It must be emphasized that Krzemieniecki did not understand any of the details of the genocidal train destinations. His duties required tabulating information on all trains, from ordinary passenger to freight trains, but only after their arrival. The high-security five-room office, guarded by armed railway police, was equipped with 15 punchers, two sorters, and a tabulator "bigger than a sofa." Fifteen Polish women punched the cards and loaded the sorters. Three German nationals supervised the office, overseeing the final tabulations and summary statistics in great secrecy. Handfuls of printouts were reduced to a small envelope of summary data, which was then delivered to a secret destination. Truckloads of the preliminary printouts were then regularly burned, along with the spent cards, Krzemieniecki told me in an interview. As a forced laborer, Krzemieniecki was compelled to work as a "sorter and tabulator" 10 hours per day for two years. He never realized that his work involved the transportation of Jews to gas chambers. "I only know that this very modern equipment made possible the control of all the railway traffic in the General Government," he said. Krzemieniecki recalled that an "outside technician," who spoke German and Polish and "did not work for the railroad," was almost constantly on-site to keep the machines running, performing major maintenance monthly. IBM's tailored railroad-management programs, several million custom-designed punch cards printed at IBM's print shop at "I knew they were not German machines," recalled Krzemieniecki. "The labels were in English. . . . The person maintaining and repairing the machines spread the diagrams out sometimes. The language of the diagrams of those machines was only in English." I asked Krzemieniecki if the machine logo plates were in German, Polish, or English. He answered, "English. It said, 'Business Machines.' " I asked, "Do you mean 'International Business Machines'?" Krzemieniecki replied, "No, 'Watson Business Machines.' " Dwarfing the railroad operation in By late 1939, the Reich's Jewish-population statistics wizard, Fritz Arlt, had been appointed head of the Population and Welfare Administration of the General Government. A Hollerith expert and colleague of Adolf Eichmann, Arlt edited his own statistical publication, Political Information Service of the General Government, which featured such data as Jews per square meter, with projections of decrease from forced labor and starvation. "We can count on the mortality of some subjugated groups," one Arlt article asserted. "These include babies and those over the age of 65, as well as those who are basically weak and ill in all other age groups." The data-hungry Nazis created an expanded Statistics Office in Kraków in 1940. The expansion was dependent on more leased machines, spare parts, company technicians, and a guaranteed continued supply of millions of additional IBM cards. IBM's European general manager, Werner Lier, visited The expanded Statistics Office assured The Statistics Office's report concluded, "Our work is just beginning to bear fruit." Once the U.S. Entered the war in December 1941, Since the war, IBM, having left Madison Avenue for new headquarters in suburban Armonk, has obstructed, or refused to cooperate with, virtually every major independent author writing about its history, according to numerous published introductions, prefaces, and acknowledgments. But silence cannot alter the historical documentation. A tangle of subsidiaries throughout |