[taltman1]

For those who might want a fuller description of IBM's active facilitation of these kinds of crimes, you should read Edwin Black's book, "IBM and the Holocaust".

Those tattoo's on Holocaust victim's arms? They were serial numbers directly tied to IBM punchcards designed by IBM for the Third Reich.

It gives context to former NSA chief Michael Hayden's comment, "We kill people with metadata".

[ddod]

To clarify, the scenario isn't that the Nazis just picked up existing technology-- They had to have direct dealings with IBM for the scope and implementation of the process, which was largely involved with sorting census data to figure out who the Jews and other targeted ethnicities were, shipping them to various concentration camps, and determining where and how to "exhaust" these resources. Just imagine being one of the programmers tasked with that.

The book details how Thomas Watson was directly involved in all this, and when the US made Nazi dealings illegal, he handed over direct control of his Nazi business to local branches instead of halting the relationship. After the war, those local branches all rejoined greater IBM.

It's kind of crazy to see how IBM has avoided scrutiny and continues to celebrate Watson through their naming conventions.

[Aloha]

I've read the Edwin Black book - he makes a reasonably compelling but nearly completely circumstantial case.

The case against IBM could be made against any multinational of the era, like Ford and General Motors. The fact that IBM's business was information processing does not add or subtract to their level of supposed conspiracy.

From the time of declaration of war (against the US), all american companies were hands off - even before that the relationship between Dehomag and IBM NY became more and more distant from 1933 on.

Beyond that, the technology was not held by IBM alone, Powers/Remington-Rand and Siemens and Halkse also had similar equipment and technology - so while IBM may have been the market leader, they were by no means alone - and choosing IBM over Powers in my mind is different than buying a Ford-werke truck over an Opel one.

[shawnhermans]

I haven't read the book, but I did read the EFF's brief (https://www.eff.org/document/eff-amicus-brief-ibm-ats-claim) which seems to rely a lot on the alleged Nazi connections. Based upon what I have read so far, there is no "smoking gun" that indicates IBM did anything to knowingly aid the Holocaust or Apartheid.

In the case of South Africa, it seems IBM aided in the creation of South Africa's national ID system. What I can't tell from the evidence presented is if this aid was illegal or unethical at the time it took place. As a reminder, the United States didn't officially outlaw segregation until the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

I really haven't made up my mind one way or another about this, but I do think people have a tendency to interpret historical events using the knowledge and ideology of the present day.

[otakucode]

Anyone who is tempted to believe that "we were just doing our jobs" should be a reasonable moral dodge should keep in mind that "I was just doing my job" is EXACTLY IDENTICAL to saying "I just did it for money."

[yellowapple]

Which really isn't that despicable of a stance; money is a dependency of survival (or at least survival with decent physical and psychological health) in all but the most anarchic environments (where money is trumped by "I have a gun and will kill you if you don't give me what I want, and only someone with a bigger gun can stop me").

There are many cases where people have done something they knew was wrong, but were afraid to stop doing them (or refuse to do them in the first place) because the risk of not being able to eat (or - worse - their children not being able to eat) was far greater than the risk of being punished for committing such a moral atrocity.

This is probably not a reasonable context for IBM's actions, but to paint all people who "were just doing [their] jobs" or "were just doing it for money" with the same brush of indignation and scorn is incredibly unfair to those who actually needed the money.

[Zaheer]

Quite ironic that now IBM has a role in the occupation of Palestine [1]. IBM is sometimes mentioned in the BDS movement (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions).

http://www.cjpmo.org/DisplayDocument.aspx?DocumentID=1081

[yellowapple]

I don't think it's ironic at all, at least when looking at the bigger picture. The trend in IBM's dealings is not a propensity to go after customers with poor human rights track records, but to go after customers that will make them a lot of money. Governments - like those of Germany and South Africa - are a big target of IBM's sales, whether they're literally genocidal maniacs or poster-children of world peace.

[thangalin]

http://homepage.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/cards/history.html

"The use of punched cards in the Jacquard loom influenced Charles Babbage, who decided to use punched cards to control the sequence of computations in his proposed analytical engine. Unlike Hollerith's cards of 50 years later, which were handled in decks like playing cards, Babbage's punched cards were to be strung together like Jaquard's. Despite this and the fact that he never actually built an analytical engine, Babbage's proposed use of cards played a crucial role in later years, providing a precident that prevented Hollerith's company (and its successors) from claiming patent rights on the very idea of storing data on punched cards."

http://www.adbranch.com/how-ibm-helped-automate-the-nazi-dea...

http://www.scrapbookpages.com/AuschwitzScrapbook/History/Art...

"Auschwitz historians were originally convinced that there were no machines at Auschwitz, that all the prisoner documents were processed at a remote location, primarily because they could find no trace of the equipment in the area. They even speculated that the stamped forms from Auschwitz III were actually punched at the massive Hollerith service at Mauthausen concentration camp. Indeed, even the Farben Hollerith documents had been identified some time ago at Auschwitz, but were not understood as IBM printouts. That is, not until the Hollerith Büro itself was discovered. Archivists only found the Büro because it was listed in the I.G. Werk Auschwitz phone book on page 50. The phone extension was 4496. "I was looking for something else," recalls Auschwitz' Setkiewicz, "and there it was." Once the printouts were reexamined in the light of IBM punch card revelations, the connection became clear."

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/census-tabulator...

"And in this day and age of high resolution bitmapped displays with millions of colors, driven by the supercomputer-crushing performance of modern graphics hardware, your xterm window emulates an 80 column VT100 in order to provide some semblance of compatibility with 80 column Hollerith punched cards that date to the 1920s and were common on the IBM 1604."

http://www.quadibloc.com/comp/cardint.htm

Windows command prompts and xterm windows have a default width whose lineage traces back to 1801 (or earlier if the loom's history is considered).

It is painful to learn how our industry (software and computational hardware) can and have been abused for such unfathomably despicable, misguided purposes.