Week of March 27 - April 2, 2002 

How IBM Helped Automate the Nazi Death Machine in Poland Final Solutions 
by Edwin Black

When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, most of the world saw a menace 
to humanity. But IBM saw Nazi Germany as a lucrative trading partner. Its 
president, Thomas J. Watson, engineered a strategic business alliance 
between IBM and the Reich, beginning in the first days of the Hitler 
regime and continuing right through World War II. This alliance 
catapulted Nazi Germany to become IBM's most important customer outside 
the U.S. IBM and the Nazis jointly designed, and IBM exclusively 
produced, technological solutions that enabled Hitler to accelerate and 
in many ways automate key aspects of his persecution of Jews, 
homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, and others the Nazis considered 
enemies. Custom-designed, IBM-produced punch cards, sorted by IBM 
machines leased to the Nazis, helped organize and manage the initial 
identification and social expulsion of Jews and others, the confiscation 
of their property, their ghettoization, their deportation, and, 
ultimately, even their extermination.

Recently discovered Nazi documents and Polish eyewitness testimony make 
clear that IBM's alliance with the Third Reich went far beyond its German 
subsidiary. A key factor in the Holocaust in Poland was IBM technology 
provided directly through a special wartime Polish subsidiary reporting 
to IBM New York, mainly to its headquarters at 590 Madison Avenue.

And that's how the trains to Auschwitz ran on time.

Thousands of IBM documents reviewed for the first edition of my book 'IBM 
and the Holocaust,' published early last year and focused mainly on IBM's 
German subsidiary, revealed vigorous efforts to preserve IBM's monopoly 
in the Nazi market and increase contracts to meet wartime sales quotas.

Since then, continued research and interviews have uncovered details, 
described here for the first time, of IBM's work for the Nazis in Poland 
through the separate subsidiary and of the Polish subsidiary's direct 
contact with IBM officials on Madison Avenue.

Documents were obtained from IBM files shipped to NYU for processing and 
from scores of other archival sources here and abroad. Not a single 
sentence written by IBM personnel has been discovered in any of the 
documents questioning the morality of automating the Third Reich, even 
when headlines proclaimed the mass murder of Jews.

IBM's German subsidiary was Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen Gesellschaft, 
known by the acronym Dehomag. (Herman Hollerith was the German American 
who first automated U.S. census information in the late 19th century and 
founded the company which became IBM. Hollerith's name became synonymous 
with the machines and the Nazi "departments" that operated them.)

Watson tightly managed the lucrative German operation, traveling to 
Berlin at least twice annually from 1933 until 1939 to personally 
supervise Dehomag. Major German correspondence was translated for review 
by the New York office and often for Watson's personal comment. Before 
big new accounts were accepted, Watson had to assent. For deniability, he 
insisted on making direct verbal instructions to his German managers the 
rule rather than exception—even in place of major contracts. Once, when 
German managers wanted to paint a corridor, they awaited his specific 
permission. Watson's auditors continuously tracked the source and status 
of every reichsmark and pfennig—in one typical case, exchanging numerous 
transatlantic letters over the disposition of just a few dollars. Not 
infrequently, Dehomag managers objected to his "domination." 
Understandably, IBM's lawyers and managers in Berlin personally updated 
Watson constantly, and generally signed their reports, "Awaiting your 
further instructions."

No machines were sold to the Nazis—only leased. IBM was the sole source 
of all punch cards and spare parts, and it serviced the machines on-site—
whether at Dachau or in the heart of Berlin—either directly or through 
its authorized dealer network or field trainees. There were no universal 
punch cards. Each series was custom-designed by IBM engineers not only to 
capture the information going in, but also to tabulate the information 
the Nazis wanted to come out.

IBM constantly updated its machinery and applications for the Nazis. For 
example, one series of punch cards was designed to record religion, 
national origin, and mother tongue, but by creating special columns and 
rows for Jew, Polish language, Polish nationality, the fur trade as an 
occupation, and then Berlin, Nazis could quickly cross-tabulate, at the 
rate of 25,000 cards per hour, exactly how many Berlin furriers were Jews 
of Polish extraction. Railroad cars, which could take two weeks to locate 
and route, could be swiftly dispatched in just 48 hours by means of a 
vast network of punch-card machines. Indeed, IBM services coursed through 
the entire German infrastructure in Europe.

[The IBM Response Asked about IBM's Polish subsidiary's involvement with 
the Nazis, IBM spokeswoman Carol Makovich in New York repeated the same 
official statement she issued more than a year ago: "IBM does not have 
much information about this period." Asked a dozen times, Makovich simply 
repeated the phrase.]

The war broke out on September 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland. 
Germany annexed northwestern Poland; the remaining Polish territory in 
Nazi hands was treated as "occupied" and called the "General Government." 
That annexed northwestern quadrant was serviced by IBM's German 
subsidiary, Dehomag, mainly to handle the payrolls of Silesian coal mines 
and heavy industry. At about that time, IBM New York established a 
special subsidiary, Watson Business Machines, to deal with the General 
Government. It remained completely legal for IBM to service the Third 
Reich until just before America entered the war in December 1941.

The savaging of Poland was no secret to IBM executives. From the outset, 
worldwide headlines reported barbarous massacres, rapes, purposeful 
starvation, systematic deportations, and the resulting unchecked 
epidemics. As early as September 13, 1939, The New York Times reported 
the Reich's determination to make Polish Jewry disappear, a headline 
declaring, "Nazis Hint Purge of Jews in Poland." A subhead added, 
"3,000,000 Population Involved." The article quoted the German 
government's plan for the "removal of the Polish Jewish population from 
the European domain." The Times added, "How . . . the 'removal' of Jews 
from Poland [can be achieved] without their extermination . . . is not 
explained."

Germany had plans. Polish Jews, during a sequence of sudden relocations, 
were to be catalogued for further action in a massive cascade of 
repetitive censuses and registrations with up-to-date information being 
instantly available to various Nazi planning agencies and occupation 
offices. How much usable forced labor for armament factories could they 
generate? How many thousands would die of starvation each month? A 
spectrum of Nazi census, registration, and statistical tabulation was 
performed on custom-designed IBM punch-card programs and machinery.

On September 9, 1939, Dehomag general manager Hermann Rottke wrote 
directly to Watson in New York, asking for advanced equipment. Rottke 
reminded Watson, "During your last visit in Berlin at the beginning of 
July, you made the kind offer to me that you might be willing to furnish 
the German company machines from Endicott [an IBM factory near 
Binghamton] in order to shorten our long delivery terms. . . . You have 
complied with this request, for which I thank you very much, and have 
added that in cases of urgent need, I may make use of other American 
machines. . . . You will understand that under today's conditions, a 
certain need has arisen for such machines, which we do not build as yet 
in Germany. Therefore, I should like to make use of your kind offer and 
ask you to leave with the German company . . . the alphabetic tabulating 
machines. . . . "

Eighteen days later, a vanquished Warsaw formally capitulated. The next 
day, September 28, IBM's general manager in Geneva, J.W. Schotte, 
telephoned Berlin to confirm Watson's permission for the new equipment.

Meanwhile, Reinhard Heydrich, chief of Heinrich Himmler's Security 
Service, the SD, had already circulated a top-secret letter to the chiefs 
of his Einsatzgruppen, which evolved into mobile killing units. 
Heydrich's September 21 memo, titled "The Jewish Question in the Occupied 
Territory," laid out a plan of population control through a sequence of 
strategic censuses and registrations. It began, "I would like to point 
out once more that the total measures planned (i.e., the final aim) are 
to be kept strictly secret." First, Jews were to be relocated to so-
called concentration towns at "either railroad junctions or at least on a 
railway." Addressing the zone from east of Kraków to the former 
Czechoslovakian-Polish border, Heydrich directed, "Within this territory, 
only a temporary census of Jews need be taken." Heydrich demanded that 
"the chiefs of the Einsatzgruppen report to me continually regarding . . 
. the census of Jews in their districts. . . . "

Shortly thereafter, Heydrich sent a follow-up cable to his occupying 
forces in Poland, Upper Silesia, and Czechoslovakia, outlining how a new 
December 17 census would escalate the process from mere identification 
and cataloguing to deportation and execution. Heydrich's memo entitled 
"Evacuation of the New Eastern Provinces" decreed, "The evacuation of 
Poles and Jews in the new Eastern Provinces will be conducted by the 
Security Police. . . . The census documents provide the basis for the 
evacuation. All persons in the new provinces possess a copy. The census 
form is the temporary identification card giving permission to stay. 
Therefore, all persons have to hand over the card before deportation. . . 
. Anyone caught without this card is subject to possible execution. . . . 
"

Quantifying and organizing the deportation of millions of people from 
various regions across Eastern Europe could take years using pencils and 
paper. Relying upon the lightning speed of Hollerith machines, it took 
just days. Heydrich assured, "That means the large-scale evacuation can 
begin no sooner than around January 1, 1940." Nazi Germany employed only 
one method for conducting a census: IBM punch-card processes, each one 
designed for the specific census.

In Nazi Poland, railroads constituted about 95 percent of the IBM 
subsidiary's business, using as many as 21 million punch cards annually. 
Watson Business Machines was headquartered at Kreuz 23 in Warsaw. And one 
of its important customer sites, newly discovered since the first edition 
of my book was published a year ago, was the Hollerith department of 
Polish Railways, at 22 Pawia Street in Kraków. This office kept tabs on 
all trains in the General Government, including those that sent Jews to 
their death in Auschwitz.

Leon Krzemieniecki is probably the only man still living who worked in 
that Hollerith department. It must be emphasized that Krzemieniecki did 
not understand any of the details of the genocidal train destinations. 
His duties required tabulating information on all trains, from ordinary 
passenger to freight trains, but only after their arrival.

The high-security five-room office, guarded by armed railway police, was 
equipped with 15 punchers, two sorters, and a tabulator "bigger than a 
sofa." Fifteen Polish women punched the cards and loaded the sorters. 
Three German nationals supervised the office, overseeing the final 
tabulations and summary statistics in great secrecy. Handfuls of 
printouts were reduced to a small envelope of summary data, which was 
then delivered to a secret destination. Truckloads of the preliminary 
printouts were then regularly burned, along with the spent cards, 
Krzemieniecki told me in an interview.

As a forced laborer, Krzemieniecki was compelled to work as a "sorter and 
tabulator" 10 hours per day for two years. He never realized that his 
work involved the transportation of Jews to gas chambers.

"I only know that this very modern equipment made possible the control of 
all the railway traffic in the General Government," he said.

Krzemieniecki recalled that an "outside technician," who spoke German and 
Polish and "did not work for the railroad," was almost constantly on-site 
to keep the machines running, performing major maintenance monthly.

IBM's tailored railroad-management programs, several million custom-
designed punch cards printed at IBM's print shop at 6 Rymarska Street, 
across from the Warsaw Ghetto, and the railway's leased machines were 
under the New York-controlled subsidiary in Warsaw, not the German 
subsidiary, Dehomag. The distinction is important. Since the disclosures 
about IBM's involvement in the Holocaust first surfaced in February 2001, 
the company has continually pointed to supposed lack of control of its 
German subsidiary. But Watson Business Machines was established in Poland 
by IBM New York itself, at the time of Germany's invasion.

"I knew they were not German machines," recalled Krzemieniecki. "The 
labels were in English. . . . The person maintaining and repairing the 
machines spread the diagrams out sometimes. The language of the diagrams 
of those machines was only in English."

I asked Krzemieniecki if the machine logo plates were in German, Polish, 
or English. He answered, "English. It said, 'Business Machines.' " I 
asked, "Do you mean 'International Business Machines'?" Krzemieniecki 
replied, "No, 'Watson Business Machines.' "

Dwarfing the railroad operation in Poland described by Krzemieniecki was 
a massive Hollerith statistical center at 24 Murner Street in Kraków, 
staffed by more than 500 punching and tabulating employees and equipped 
with dozens of machines. New research has uncovered the existence of a 
previously unknown Berlin agency, the Central Office for Foreign 
Statistics and Foreign Country Research, which continuously received 
detailed data from the Kraków statistical center.

By late 1939, the Reich's Jewish-population statistics wizard, Fritz 
Arlt, had been appointed head of the Population and Welfare 
Administration of the General Government. A Hollerith expert and 
colleague of Adolf Eichmann, Arlt edited his own statistical publication, 
Political Information Service of the General Government, which featured 
such data as Jews per square meter, with projections of decrease from 
forced labor and starvation.

"We can count on the mortality of some subjugated groups," one Arlt 
article asserted. "These include babies and those over the age of 65, as 
well as those who are basically weak and ill in all other age groups."

The data-hungry Nazis created an expanded Statistics Office in Kraków in 
1940. The expansion was dependent on more leased machines, spare parts, 
company technicians, and a guaranteed continued supply of millions of 
additional IBM cards. IBM's European general manager, Werner Lier, 
visited Berlin in early October 1941 to oversee IBM New York's deployment 
of machines in Poland and other countries. In two detailed reports, 
written from Berlin and sent to Watson, as well as to other senior staff 
in New York, Lier reported moving a small group of Polish machines into 
Romania for the Jewish census there. The Polish machines would soon be 
replaced by others.

The expanded Statistics Office assured Berlin in a November 30, 1941, 
report that its Hollerith operation would employ equipment more modern 
than the old IBM machinery found in most pre-war Polish data agencies, 
thus allowing the Nazis to launch a plethora of "large-scale censuses." 
Also planned was a long list of "continuous statistical surveys," 
including those for population, domestic migration, and causes of death. 
Moreover, regular surveys of food and agriculture were "coupled with 
summary surveys of the population and ethnic groups." Tabulating food 
supplies against ethnic numbers allowed the Nazis to ration caloric 
intake as they subjected the Jewish community to starvation.

The Statistics Office's report concluded, "Our work is just beginning to 
bear fruit."

Once the U.S. Entered the war in December 1941, Germany appointed a Nazi 
devoted to IBM, Hermann Fellinger, as enemy-property custodian. He 
maintained the original staff and managers of Watson Business Machines, 
keeping it productive for the Reich and profitable for IBM. The 
subsidiary now reported to IBM's Geneva office, and from there to New 
York. The company was not looted, its leased machines were not seized. 
"Royalties" were remitted to IBM through Geneva. Lease payments and 
profits were preserved in special accounts. After the war, IBM recovered 
all its Polish profits and machines.

Since the war, IBM, having left Madison Avenue for new headquarters in 
suburban Armonk, has obstructed, or refused to cooperate with, virtually 
every major independent author writing about its history, according to 
numerous published introductions, prefaces, and acknowledgments.

But silence cannot alter the historical documentation. A tangle of 
subsidiaries throughout Europe helped IBM reap the benefits of its 
partnership with Nazi Germany. After all, "business" was IBM's middle 
name.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Edwin Black is the author of IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic 
Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation 
(Crown Books, 2001, and Three Rivers Press, 2002), just released in 
paperback with new information. He can be reached at www.edwinblack.com.

67 responses total.

This article is by http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0213/black.php

Wow, Long post.  How 'bouts next time, just post the URL.  Hmm?

Apologies.

This response has been erased.

No Probs.

Oh, wow!  A major American corporation is happy to make money at the expense
of socially marginal human lives in weak and uncaring countries.  What's the
next big revelation - that some teenage boys are willing to have sex outside
of wedlock?

<snort>

        Big Business isn't your friend.  News at 11.

Now I won't have to buy the book.

http://www.businessweek.com:/print/magazine/content/01_12/b3724036.htm

"The subject of U.S. corporate operations in Nazi Germany, and the
contributions they made to the regime's aggressive and murderous power,
is intriguing, intricate, and important. It deserves a well-researched
and -reasoned book. Edwin Black's IBM and the Holocaust does not come
close to meeting the challenge.

Illogical, overstated, padded, and sloppy, the work will give readers
who recognize the author's name a sad sense of deja vu. In 1984, Black
wrote The Transfer Agreement, about an oft-described 1933 deal between
the Zionist Organization and Nazi Germany. Historians and
most other reviewers savaged that work. Some wondered aloud how a
distinguished publisher (in that case, Macmillan) could exercise so
little quality control. Black's new offering duplicates the structure
and argumentation of his earlier one almost to the letter. Already, it
has begun to provoke a similar reaction."

http://www-916.ibm.com/press/prnews.nsf/jan/E761868F46444B06852569F20064F55
5


" It has been known for decades that the Nazis used Hollerith
 equipment and that IBM's German subsidiary during the 1930s 

-- Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen GmbH (Dehomag) -- supplied 
Hollerith equipment. As with hundreds of foreign-owned companies 
that did business in Germany at that time, Dehomag came under 
the control of Nazi authorities prior to and during World War II. 
It is also widely known that Thomas J. Watson, Sr., received 
and subsequently repudiated and returned a medal presented to 
him by the German government for his role in global economic 
relations. These well-known facts appear to be the primary 
underpinning for these recent allegations. "

I seem to recall that the USA turned away shiploads of Jews trying
to get out of Germany.  It's not like our hands are clean either.
Even Henry Ford thought that the Nazis had a great thing going.
Lots of people saw the recovery of Germany from depression and
hyper-inflation to be a GOOD thing.  It took a while for that
goodwill to be exhausted, and by then the war was on and there was
little or nothing that anyone in IBM (or the USA) could have done.

I think #0 contradicts itself.  The person in charge of analyzing
the data, one Leon Krzemieniecki, didn't know what it meant.  How
was IBM, who had only built the machines and could not have known
what data was going through them, to have known what was up?

This effort to tar IBM with the Final Solution and the Bush
administration with the funky bookkeeping of Enron is wrong.
It's just as bad as trying to pin the murder of hundreds of
people in Guyana upon anyone who'd once supported Jim Jones.

You mean you think there should be moral constraints on free trade like
not selling to Nazis? Why gasp how dare you put the big hand of government
on the wonderful flow of free trade that always works perfectly. Such mear
moralism such as human rights are just non-tarif barriers to trade as per
WTO rules, right?
 <set sarcasm="off">

I can refuse to do business with someone or a company
that I consider smarmy.  But that is my personal choice.
I can voice my opinion as an individual stockholder in
how a company does business and that is free-market in action.

I as a consumer and a business person do have moral constraints
personally.  As a liberal kinda guy I don't even think to 
suggest my own views should be imposed on others.

No of course you would never impose your views on others Beady, but it's
fine for the IMF to impose "structural adjustment," on whole countries as
long as it turns a buck, right?

If that country wants the loan, then yes.

So IBM is right up there with Ford, Volkswagen, Porsche, Siemens, et.
al.?  Extry!  Extry!  Read all about it!  Corporation of the 1930's did
business with the Third Reich!

>i love when people talk about themselves as if they are part of the big
picture - as if they themselves are a corporation that really makes decisions
that affect the world. 'i can choose to do business with, or choose not to'
kind of mentally that's oh-so-empowering isnt it?! 

i think the point is here is that they DID know what those machines were being
used for -- and somehow it doesn't surprise me that "buisnessweek" would
publish an article bashing it. 

Re: #34  Don't forget about the Vatican.  

I can't wait to see what you're responding to.

i assumed she meant #0?

I love it when radical lefties dissolve in their own gobbledygook.

i'm not a leftie, but i'd like to think im rad.

12 more responses to go.

huh?

        The same technique works for individuals not doing business with
corporations that works for corporations themselves;  organize.  Even if it's
only a temporary arrangement, a group of consumers acting in concert posesses
considerable power, and more dedication than like-minded individuals striving
towards shared goals.

I'd venture that a true capitalist would say #0 is how businesses are 
supposed to function.  They're supposed to produce maximum profit for 
their shareholders, period.  I think it's been successfully argued that 
they even have a legal *duty* to do so.

This is why corporations need to be regulated.  They can generally be 
counted on *not* to act in the best interests of the society in general.

"WHats good for GM is good for the country."

The legal duty is NOT to maximise profit.  The legal duty is to function 
in compliance with the law.  The profit is the incentive to begin the 
undertaking in the first place.

re #26: If only that were true...

only 5 more!

This response has been erased.

And just about anybody could tell you that YOUR head is up your ass, and 
would.  What's your point?

There difference is, you are still wrong.  I swear, how do you surive the day
never getting anything right?

how do you survive the day at all?

There are lots of places one goes when they need to escape reality and the
rules that real people must abide.  Places dripping in gold with hardly
any litter.

Like Oz or Shangri-La.

 .. or m-net

The legal term for a corporate director's duty to maximize profits is
called "fiduciary duty".  While courts do recognize this duty, they also
recognize that there are many more than one way to fulfill this duty, so
much so that they are unlikely to intervene except in the case that
there's evidence of criminal mischief.  This is as it should be; in most
cases, the voting members of the corporation have sufficient means to
replace the director if he does not pan out.

Exactly.  If Watson of IBM had decided to refuse to do business with
the Germans in 1933 and write off the entire german portion of IBM
the shareholders would have been up in arms (and rightfully so) and
you'uns would be reading this post on your UNIVAC PCs or compatibles.

"Fiduciary duty" is not to maximize profits, but to NOT do anything 
that would create a loss. Companies can choose, within reason, what
profit they wish to make, and a company that chooses to make little
or no profit (out of altrustic motives) is its business, and not
an error in "fiduciary duty". 

re #37 Do you actually read what you type Beady, you are saying that selling
tabulating machines to the Nazis so they could round up Jews more efficently
was a good thing?  Who needs leftist propaganda when the right themselves
show how totally amoral the policies they advoocate are.

re#14 The same world bank that causes suffering for millions throught the
world every day.  But then I forget you advocate trading with Nazis.

http://gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=7&row=1

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