IBM and the Holocaust

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

by dontbenebby • 4 years ago

44 4 4 years ago

en.wikipedia.org

markarichards• 4 years ago

This is also an interesting read https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/ibm-and-quot-death-s-ca...

akhmatova• 4 years ago

But unfortunately misleading:

IBM was founded in 1898 by German inventor Herman Hollerith as a census tabulating company.

(1) IBM was created in 1911 (initially as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company) as an amalgamation of four companies, one of which was Hollerith's.

(2) Hollerith himself was not a "German inventor" but rather U.S.-born of German immigrant parents.

But hey, what's bit of sloppy hyperbole if it drives your point across?

dontbenebby• 4 years ago

hey, what's bit of sloppy hyperbole if it drives your point across?

The type of person who stopped their reading on totalitarianism with the fall of the Nazis rather than the fall of the Berlin Wall tend to be unreliable narrators.

motohagiography• 4 years ago

A book I found more detailed than this one was an examination how the systems were both built and administered in the lead up starting well before 1938, and then ultimaltely put to use.

https://www.amazon.com/Nazi-Census-Identification-Control-Po...

The decisions in the process of enumerating people using the Hollerith punch cards, down to which fields on the cards were populated, who was recruited to administer them, the institutions that supported them, and the so-called "blitzkreig" strategy being to facilitate the seizure of church marriage/baptismal, hospital birth, and other municipal records so as to pacify the inhabitants by threatening their families, are all evidence of early intent and design to carry out a genocide. You'd think we would learn. We don't.

IBM and the Holocaust

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