My mom was telling me that IBM had something to do with the Holocaust but the only proof of it is in the IBM archives. Aparently IBM has denied this and will not let anyone search thier archives. Does anyone know about this?
IBM sold early indexing machines to Germany through their German subsidiary Dehomag. In 1939 the Nazis took control of Dehomag and IBM was essentially out of the picture. Dehomag had their punchcard indexing and sorting technology, however, and Dehomag machines were used to keep track of data regarding Jews and concentration camps. One type of tattoo found on concentration camp survivors is a numerical punchard index.
The most vocal criticism of IBM comes from Edwin Black, who wrote a book, IBM and the Holocaust. He makes some claims about alledged connections between IBM and Dehomag continuing during the war, and about T.J. Watson’s indifference regarding the suffering of Jews. The latter claim may have some merit, but the former is quite unlikely, due to the Nazi takeover and American sanctions against Germany. Further, Black makes the dubious claim that the holocaust would have essentially been impossible without the Dehomag machines.
IBM has not made much of a secret about the whole affair; they have donated tens of thousands of pages of historical documents about Dehomag to a university in Germany. I think NYU also has a collection of IBM documents from the era.