Press: After Adolf Hitler came to power, the Nazi SA found the scapegoat they needed— the Jews, who claimed that the Jews had conspired against the Great Depression, enslaved the German nation, controlled society, and tarnished Aryan ancestry. Thus, Hitler's followers upheld the so-called justice by taking revenge on the Jews. The Nazis did not hesitate to expel the Jews from German society completely. Once the Nazis had conquered the German Jews, they quickly spread the race war to German-occupied Europe, and eventually to the entire Continent.
The Nazis could only destroy the Jews after they had identified them. So, which of Germany's 60 million people are Jews? And how to define "Jew"?
In fact, among European Jews, German Jews had a very high degree of assimilation. By 1871, nearly 550,000 Jews had been liberated in Germany. In the 20th century, German Jews, like their Christian neighbors, were more receptive to national identity than religious identity. The first idea in the minds of German Jews is that they are "101%" Germans. The Nazis believed that Jews were condemned not by their religious behavior, but by their Jewish ancestry.
Identifying German Jews is a huge technical challenge that will take years to hone calculation procedures and registration techniques. The Nazis understood that previous censuses were trapped in manual classification procedures that took 3-5 years, and that this cumbersome procedure made the results almost useless when issuing social policies that needed to be implemented immediately. This time, how can they clarify the message of all the Jews in Europe, discover the evil blood of the Jews in the vast sea of people, and eliminate them? The government doesn't have the capacity to do the job, but DE Horomeg of IBM's German subsidiary has.
He single-handedly completed the census mission to find Jews, including a series of training, statistics, sorting, tabulation, punching, and classification. The card contains specific information about each German: nationality, community, gender, age, religion, mother tongue, number of children, current occupation, second occupation, etc. After the card is punched, it is sent to another part of the hall. It was a flat, long Hollys counter that averaged 24,000 cards per hour, and the proof department ensured that the information was complete. Once Jews are found in the population data, employees process these Jews count cards separately. They would use a special card called the "Jewish Count Card" to record their place of birth. The new database was cross-indexed and filtered through 35 features into 25 categories, so that the Nazis could identify Jews by occupation, city, and even neighborhood. In response, Frederick Zane, the publisher of the Statistical Archive, wrote with great joy: "With statistics, the government has a road map for translating knowledge into action." ”
Edwin Black, the child of a renowned investigative journalist and Holocaust survivor, uncovered the horrors behind the Holocaust by consulting official IBM documents and nearly 20,000 pages of documents from more than ten countries and languages, including the National Archives of the United States, the German Federal Archives, and the Dutch National Archives.
Without IBM's Hollys machine, the Nazis would not have been able to fully integrate European Jews, or have killed 6 million Jews and destroyed the lives of countless non-Jews. In the 'Final Settlement', the Jews who were deported to concentration camps were uniformly exterminated. Abraham Peck, director of the Research Center for the American Jewish Historical Association, said, "It's already troubling, but Blake reveals an even more troubling truth — he found that the corrupt forces rampant in a multinational corporation have transcended the law." ”
With the permission of the publisher, Interface Culture (ID: Booksandfun) has excerpted some of the content from the preface to IBM and the Nazis, with a view to re-examining the history of the Holocaust with readers from this new perspective.
<h3>How should the era of black and white be remembered? (Excerpt).</h3>
Text | Edwin Black translated | Guo Chuqiang
<h3>1. Automated murder weapon</h3>
When the concept of "massively organized information" crept up and became a means of social control, a weapon of war, a map of collective destruction, humanity was almost unaware. On January 30, 1933, the most important day of the 20th century, the unique trigger that sparked the concept appeared– Adolf Hitler officially came to power. Ironically, Hitler's hatred of the Jews drove technological change, while an American company and its legendary chairman, who acted arbitrarily, greatly contributed to Hitler's goals with his own thirst for profit. The American company is IBM, and the legendary chairman is Thomas W. Bush. Thomas J. Watson.
Hitler was not the first leader obsessed with the holocaust of Jews. Before him, there were dictators and tyrants in Europe. Hitler, however, was fueled by "automation" technology, which was unprecedented. In addition, Hitler did not fight alone, but received great help from others.
The Holocaust created a world of black and white upside down. In this world, distinguished technical talents became Hitler's vanguard. The police ignored their duties to support villains and persecute the innocent; lawyers perverted justice and enacted anti-Semitic laws; doctors desecrated medical ethics, conducted various terrorist experiments, singled out relatively healthy people, forced them to work to death, and then sent unused Jews to gas chambers; scientists and engineers demeaned their mission, inventing tools or clarifying scientific principles to facilitate the Holocaust; statisticians used little-known but very powerful statistical knowledge to identify victims. In order to better plan and rationalize the Holocaust, organize the persecution and even audit the effectiveness of the genocide. Now, let's look at the role that IBM and its overseas subsidiaries played in the holocaust.
IBM has created a world of technology with infinite possibilities, but it is also dizzy by the vortex of this technological world. IBM adheres to a special "unethical" credo: if you can do it, you should do it. For the blind technocrat, means are always more important than ends. The life and death of Jews became unimportant because technocrats (scientists or engineers by ibmim) were concerned only with making huge profits while victims lined up for food for relief, and the pursuit of profits in turn would motivate IBM to continuously improve its technological achievements.
So, how did IBM do it?
After Hitler came to power, the Nazis' first task was to find and destroy the 600,000 Jews in Germany. In the eyes of the Nazis, Jews included not only Jews, but all those who shed Jewish blood, whether or not they had integrated into other groups, intermarried with other nationalities, participated in other religious activities or had converted to Christianity. Only after identifying the Jews could the Nazis confiscate their property, isolate them, expel them, and destroy them. To do so, the Nazis had to search all communities, churches, and government records in Germany and other European countries. This is a daunting cross-indexing task that requires the assistance of a computer. But in 1933, computers had not yet appeared.
The Third Reich planned to deprive Jews of their economic rights and expel them from their homes and into the Jewish Quarter. The task is equally daunting and requires computers. But in 1933, computers had not yet appeared.
In planning a final solution, the Nazis wanted to use the railroad system to more efficiently transfer Jews to death camps and send victims into gas chambers as soon as they got off the train. This requires precise control of time, and still requires a computer. But in 1933, computers had not yet appeared.
However, there was another invention at the time - the IBM punch card and card classification system, the predecessor of the computer. IBM, through its German subsidiary, de Khomeg, traded with the Nazis to see Hitler's Jewish extermination program as a technological mission. By forming an alliance with the Nazis, IBM tried to make a fortune from the war. De Khomeg used his staff and machines to provide Hitler with indispensable technical support to accomplish a task that no one before him could perform—automating the destruction of the population. IBM dispatched more than 2,000 machines to Germany, and then thousands to German-occupied Europe. Each large concentration camp has a card sorting system installed. Prisoners are moved to different regions and toiled to death, while their death data is recorded in a cold automated system.
De Hormag doesn't just supply machines, it also has the operational capabilities of IBM's New York headquarters, and its formal business is to customize machines and applications for customers. Active and fanatical Nazis formed the company's top brass, and eventually, the group was arrested after the war for their war crimes. Since 1933, IBM's New York headquarters have known that de Khomeg's best deal was for senior Nazi Party officials. Using his links with the Nazi Party, de Khomeg continued to strengthen his business relations with Nazi Germany, not only in Germany, but also in The German-occupied areas of Europe.
IBM subsidiaries such as Dehomerg customize applications for customers. Similar to today's software designers, IBM technicians repeatedly send punched card models into the offices of German officials until they meet requirements. Only IBM could design, print, and sell such punch cards, but IBM did not sell Hollys machines, but rented them. Similarly, only IBM can perform regular repairs and upgrades on these machines. IBM subsidiaries provided specialized training to Nazi officials and agents throughout Europe, and established branches and organized distributors in German-occupied Europe. These subsidiaries also look for paper mills to authorize them to produce punch cards. In Germany alone, these factories produce up to 1.5 billion punch cards a year. In addition, IBM staff traveled almost every other month to repair these delicate machines, even though the latter were housed inside the camps. De Hormag's headquarters in Berlin holds a large number of copies of codebooks, just like the backups of computer data kept by any IBM service today.
<h3>2. Where did the list of Jews come from? </h3>
I am often troubled by a question that even historians cannot answer. Why do Germans always get a list of Jews? With these lists, the livid-faced SS was able to burst into the town square and put up signs asking those on the list to assemble at the train station the next day. After that, the SS would deport the gathered men to eastern Germany. But how did the Nazis get these lists? For decades, no one knew, and few people asked about it.
De Khomeg used censuses and advanced statistical and registration techniques to facilitate the expulsion of Nazi Germany. In 1896, the German inventor Herman Hollerith founded IBM. IBM started out as a watchmaker company, and censuses were its entire business. But after De Khomeg formed an alliance with Nazi Germany, IBM was given a new mission. De Khomeg invented the racial census, which required not only the religious beliefs of the respondents, but also the origin of the subjects' pedigree. This was the message dreamed of by the Nazis, who were desperate to identify the Jews. Registering people and assets was just one of the many uses that Nazi Germany found when using the data classification system. The Nazis also used databases to distribute food in order to choose to starve certain Jews to death. The identification, tracing and management of labour is also carried out to a large extent using punch cards. In addition, the Nazis were able to manage the movement of the train with perforated cards: both to ensure that the train arrived or departed on time, and to classify the goods (people) on the train. De Hormeg's primary client is the German Ministry of Railways, which negotiates directly with IBM senior executives in Berlin. De Hormag regularly maintains the perforated card equipment in the railway station, initially restricting its services to Germany and eventually to all of Europe.
During the 12 years that the Third Reich survived, IBM had been close to it and must have learned a lot of information.
For those rather bad information, IBM turned a deaf ear. But KEY IBM officials, such as Watson's personal representative Harrison M. K. Harrison K. Chauncey and W.C. C. Lier), almost always in Berlin or Geneva, was keeping an eye on the Third Reich's moves to ensure that IBM's New York headquarters did not miss out on any profits or business opportunities. Although the United States strictly prohibited adversarial trade and did not allow companies to have direct contact with the Nazis, IBM key personnel continued to provide important information to IBM's headquarters in New York through IBM's Swiss office. As a result, IBM's headquarters in New York can boldly claim that it is not engaged in illegal activities.
Of course, during the 12 years that Hitler came to power, IBM's alliance with the Nazis in Germany and the background were constantly changing. I want you to understand the whole story, and if you just jump to read it, you can only draw one-sided or incorrect conclusions. So, if you're going to go through the book in a hurry, or just read part of it, just don't read it. Be clear: Even without IBM's assistance, the Holocaust would still happen. If you don't think so, you're dead wrong. Without IBM's help, the Nazis would have borrowed pen and paper to slowly count the Jews, and then gradually slaughtered the Jews with bullets and death troops. Still, there is reason to examine why Hitler was able to massacre millions of lives at an astonishing rate in a short period of time, and to confirm the crucial role that automation technology played, because it was necessary to find out who was responsible for the slaughter.
What prompted me to look for the unspentified questions of "IBM and the Holocaust"? One day in 1993, I saw evidence of IBM's involvement in the Holocaust at the United States Holocaust Museum. At that time, the first exhibit I saw was a D-11 Hollys card sorter, which was very conspicuously full of circuit boards, slots and wires. A shiny IBM sign is attached to the machine panel. Later, the museum replaced the card sorter with another smaller IBM machine, which was so crowded that it prevented other visitors from moving around. The exhibition only mentions that IBM executed the Census project in 1933 and identified Jews for the first time.
While the evidence is conclusive, IBM remains tight-lipped about its relationship with Nazi Germany. Thus, although the exhibition was visited by 15 million people, including some prominent experts on the Holocaust, and despite the great efforts of prominent museum historians, little is known about this history, limited to the curator's brief commentary at the time of the exhibition and a few pages of research.
I still remember staring at the machine for an hour, after which I turned to my parents and promised them that I would dig up more clues.
My parents were Holocaust survivors who fled their homeland from Poland to the United States. At that time, on a train bound for Treblinka concentration camp, my mother managed to escape the carriage, but was shot and buried in a mass grave. After escaping from a heavily guarded line of Jews, my father accidentally found his mother's legs exposed outside the pit, so he rescued her dying mother. Under the cover of the moonlight, the two lucky escapees together to resist the cold and hunger, they went through all kinds of dangers, and finally escaped the pursuit and survived. 50 years later, they stood beside me, their figures reflected on the glass of the exhibition stand, remembering how the bullet fragments were permanently embedded in the body, and their faces showed a very confused expression.
But I was thinking of another question at this point: How did the Nazis get information about my parents?
In Europe, millions of Jews and non-Jews were brutally murdered, most of them not in the chaos of war, but after 12 years of highly organized abuse, humiliated and dehumanized before they were finally eliminated. So how does this polished machine, nestled in a dimly lit museum with a mixture of black, beige and silver, relate to this tragedy?
<h3>3. Evidence: a past that cannot be forgotten</h3>
After that stumbling block, the idea that IBM was involved in the Holocaust in some way through some technology. But I don't know how these technologies work. Clues are scattered all over the world, and all I have to do is string them together.
Ibm advertised itself as a solutions company, and then I learned that IBM wasn't waiting for customers to visit. It has built a lot of wealth and reputation because it often anticipates the needs of governments and businesses before reaching an agreement, and is able to design and deliver tailor-made solutions for customers in a timely manner, even if it means deploying in-house staff and machines. It is in this way that IBM serves countless government agencies, business giants and industry associations.
Over the years, I told myself that one day I would find out how many solutions IBM offered to Nazi Germany. I know its original solution was a census, but what were the other solutions?
In 1998, I started frantically searching for answers. At that time, I did not receive any sponsorship from foundations, organizations or publishing houses, so I had to recruit researchers, interns, translators and assistants out of my own pocket to start investigations.
Soon, a network grew across the United States and subsequently spread to Germany, Israel, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Poland, and France. Over time, this network has continued to expand. Holocaust survivors, survivors' children, retirees, and some students, professionals, archivists, historians, and even censors at the former Nuremberg trials began to assist me in my search for archives. In the end, more than 100 people participated in the investigation. In fact, they don't know how the story happened, they simply look for key words such as censuses, statistics, lists, registrations, railways, punch cards, etc. Whenever they found these keywords, they would copy and send them to me. For weeks in a row, I received nearly 100 documents a day.
Most of the team members volunteered to participate in the event, and all vowed to keep it a secret. Each of them was shocked to learn the motivation behind the event, but also gained a strong motivation from it. Some admit to being sleepless for several nights when they learned of the link between IBM and the Holocaust. Their words often encouraged me and allowed me to go on with determination.
In the end, I collected more than 20,000 pages of documents from 50 case files, manuscripts in the library, museum archives, and other repositories. In the process, I also visited government departments such as the U.S. Department of State and the U.S. Strategic Intelligence Agency, and obtained a large number of original classified documents. We did not translate other documents of unclear significance from Europe or link them to this investigation. All documents are stored in my archives center for centralized processing and faithfully reflect the information provided by the original archives.
We examined and translated books (more than 50 copies), memoirs, and scientific and technical periodicals, Nazi publications, and news newspapers dealing with punch cards and statistics during World War II. Original literature, journal articles, news clippings, and book excerpts are interactively indexed on a monthly basis. We also created the Manila folder, which sorts data by month from 1933 to 1950. If a document involves multiple dates, it is placed in a cross-file. Each piece of information is further searched according to a specific topic, such as the Warsaw Ghetto, the German Census, the Bulgarian Railroads, Watson in Germany and Auschwitz.
Files categorized by theme are stacked in my basement. At any time, the busy staff here is always no less than 6 people. From morning until midnight, they are always busy copying files from one file heap to another. A document is sometimes photocopied into five or six copies, placed in piles of documents on different topics. To do this, I installed a high-speed photocopier in the basement with 20 sorting equipment. The basement was full of documents, and if the staff wanted to move around, they had to jump around in the pile.
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In its truest sense, the story of IBM and the Holocaust has been shattered into thousands of pieces of information. Only by piecing together all these pieces can I see the stories that really happened in the past. These verified stories will be uncovered in this book.
In the process of searching for information, I have been of great help to private institutions, public institutions and government agencies in various countries. But sadly, the only agency that rejected me was IBM. IBM flatly declined my request, not allowing me to consult the documents or conduct interviews. However, I was not the only one who was rejected. Since the end of World War II, IBM has refused to work with outside writers. Nearly every book on IBM, whether written by a respected business historian or a former IBM employee, has mentioned IBM's refusal to cooperate in any way. However, I eventually got hundreds of copies of IBM-related materials in the right way and reviewed them.
While writing this book, I also assembled a team of people who were critical of the text, people who paid attention to detail, as well as researchers and archivists who reviewed every sentence of the book to make sure that every fact was backed up in black and white.
The changing perspective is perhaps a major factor in IBM's relationship to the Holocaust that has never been explored. When I started writing the Transfer Agreement in 1984, no one really cared about how the assets worked. But now, everyone is talking about assets. Academic research on the Holocaust often preceded the computer age, when the information age was far from coming. Today, everyone understands how technology can be used in war or peace affairs. So we can step back in time and look at history from a whole new perspective.
Many have been ecstatic about the advent of the computer age and the information age. I am one of them. But now, as the son of a Holocaust survivor, I was swallowed up by a strong consciousness that brought me a whole new understanding. In this "Age of Realization," we will revisit the awakening of technology. Unless we understand how the Nazis obtained the lists, many more people will be encoded by those lists.
The story of IBM and the Holocaust is just the beginning. According to the information of European countries, I can write 20 more copies. It is estimated that more than 100,000 documents are still scattered in basements or corporate archives in Europe and the United States. Corporate archivists should note that these files are related to a crime and cannot be removed, tampered with, or destroyed, but must be transferred to the appropriate archival institution so that academics and war crimes prosecutors can review them in the first place, so that accountability can be continued.
It is only by exposing and examining the events that have actually happened that the world of technology will embrace the clichéd maxim: Never Again.
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