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Edwin Black book "IBM and the Holocaust": Nazis used IBM punchcards to track Jews

Ladewig

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Ladewig
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Edwin Black book "IBM and the Holocaust": Nazis used IBM punchcards to track Jews

Here is a Wikipedia article on a 2001 book claiming that IBM collaborated with the Nazis. I could not find a JREF thread on the topic.

Does anyone have any information debunking or supporting the claim?
 
Punchcards were probably used in every country at that time.

what about Bayer Asprin?
 
Well, I read the book. It's more of a business ethics than conspiracy theory story, but it is something that pops up regarding CTs. Here's a paragraph I included in an old essay:
And a key technology that helped Nazi Germany be so ruthlessly efficient was provided by International Business Machines (IBM). As Edwin Black illustrated in his 2001 IBM and the Holocaust, IBM’s German subsidiary Dehomag manufactured thousands of punch-card machines, proto-computers that greatly sped-up the Reich’s data processing. With full support from and handsome (if complicated) profits to IBM headquarters, Dehomag’s machines were used in everything from a race-based census to tracking materiel for warfare, to the movement of people to concentration camps and gas chambers. The 5-digit prisoner coding system for these machines was in fact the origin of the famous tattoos at Auschwitz. 42 IBM continues to base its own holocaust denials on the argument that Dehomag was no longer connected to IBM at the time, but the factual record Black presented indicates otherwise.
Click to expand...
I cited page 352. ETA: I remember a bit where anything sent to Berlin from the home office should say IBM, not the full name, as the Nazis didn't like seeing the world "International."

The controversial part is how they continued doing this business right to the end. Other companies stopped helping the Nazis one we went to war. Some, like Prescott Bush's company (Union Banking Co. IIRC) didn't, and had to be forced closed in late 1942. But that's another story. (Another good book, Charles Higham Trading With the Enemy)

Edwin Black is interesting - Jewish himself, he also wrote The Transfer Agreement, about deals between Nazis and Zionists to get rid of Jews by sending them to Palestine. It sounds crazy, but as you read it it makes sense - neither as conspiratorial and masterplanny as sometimes painted, nor as innocent and comfy as the usual glossing-over implies.

Hope that helps.
 
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