IBM and the Holocaust is the stunning story of IBM's strategic alliance with
Nazi Germany - beginning in 1933 in the first weeks that Hitler came to power
and continuing well into World War II. As the Third Reich embarked upon its
plan of conquest and genocide, IBM and its subsidiaries helped create enabling
technologies, step-by-step, from the identification and cataloging programs of
the 1930s to the selections of the 1940s. Only after Jews were identified - a
massive and complex task that Hitler wanted done immediately - could they be
targeted for efficient asset confiscation, ghettoization, deportation, enslaved
Iabor, and, ultimately, annihilation. It was a cross-tabulation and organizational
challenge so monumental, it called for a computer. Of course, in the 1930s no
computer existed.
But IBM's Hollerith punch card technology did exist. Aided by the company's
custom-designed and constantly updated Hollerith systems, Hitler was able to
automate his persecution of the Jews. Historians have always been amazed at
the speed and accuracy with which the Nazis were able to identify and locate
European Jewry. Until now, the pieces of this puzzle have never been fully
assem-bled. The fact is, IBM technology was used to organize nearly everything
in Germany and then Nazi Europe, from the identification of the Jews in
censuses, registrations, and ancestral tracing programs to the running of
railroads and organiz-ing of concentration camp slave labor.

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