[genedickson]

There is a very important piece of history left out of this article and comments. The Nazis hired IBM to do the bulk of their computing. They may have used the Z3, but my uderstanding is that they didn't use it, though since it had such a narrowly specified field of use they could have used it and IBM wouldn't have known the difference. But the fact is that IBM supplied, at the very least, the vast majority of computer tech for the Nazis.

I'd be very interested in a detailed comparison between whatever IBM was using at the time, the capabilities of the Z3, and whether it could have been modified to do the types of work IBM did. IBM's primary notoriety about all this is that they helped the Nazis to locate members of groups to be exterminated, but I expect that was a small part of what they did for the Nazis. But no IBM execs faced the Nuremburg Tribunals.

Also, I think Zuse at least somewhat well known in the U.S. The most basic computer books I have seen all have something about him. The information is available and common in the U.S. in elementary computer books like they use to teach schoolkids what computers are. I've read a fair amount of stuff about him in elementary school computer texts that I got in thrift stores and like that. The basic information about who he was and what he did is commonly available. Details are less common, so when I saw the post I immediately checked it out, whereas I more commonly open up pages in new tabs and read them after I've done my shopping through the feed. But the reason I recognized the name of the man and the machine is because of elementary school books that I picked up in a thrift store in 99.

[mwfunk]

I was under the impression that once the war broke out, IBM in Germany was cut off from the rest of the company, and the support provided to the German government that was so controversial was from the severed German appendage of IBM rather than something that IBM proper directed or profited from (sort of like how Coca-Cola's facilities in Germany turned into Fanta, which ironically made its way back to America after the war).

Is this not true? That's not to say that non-German former IBM employees who offered assistance in Nazi Germany shouldn't be considered Nazi collaborators, but I never thought of their actions as reflecting on IBM as a whole or IBM's leadership at the time.

Of course IBM made a decision to do business with the Nazi government prior to the war, but public perceptions of the Nazis in America were very different in the '30s, partially because the Nazis weren't nearly as well-understood then as now. Hitler was Life Magazine's Man of the Year in 1938, and prominent Americans like Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford were known to be admirers.

None of this is to excuse anyone's delusions about Hitler or the Nazis, or to excuse those who helped them. I just never thought it was 100% appropriate to tar IBM with that particular brush. Or am I missing vital information (very possible)?

[genedickson]

The missing vital information is this: IBM Berlin would not have been cut off until the U.S. entered the war. The war broke out years before, and the human rights abuses began years before that. IBM absolutely knew what was up for years by the time the U.S. manipulated Hitler into declaring war on us after Pearl Harbor (That's a whole story in itself involving a Nazi spy who was serving in the U.S. Congress). They were worse than Nazi collaborators; they didn't have to worry about being shot if they didn't do what they were told. The news reports about the holocaust were largely discounted; even Jews didn't believe them, but IBM had access to inside information and would have known why Hitler was so obsessed with census data. They had to know that the news reports were true. Not to say that the plight of the various groups the final solution was applied to would have been significantly different if IBM hadn't been involved.