The IBM/Nazi connection

Is there a valid point to the suit, or is this just another attempt to shakedown someone with deep pockets:

http://www.wired.com/news/infostructure/0,1377,41753,00.html

Sorry about the link. Don’t know what happened.

Fixed link.

I don’t think there’s enough detail in the article to make a good determination. Any evaluation of IBM’s contribution to the German war effort (and specifically to Nazi atrocities) would have to take into account not only IBM’s defiance of the international boycott of the Nazi economy before the war but also the fact that operation of the IBM subsidiary in Germany (Dehomag) was taken over by the Reich “shortly before” and during the war (according to the article).

On the whole, I agree with the history professor quoted in the article (Melvin Silver, Massey college):

The horrors were done by “dark souls” and not technology?

I can see the spin now:

We weren’t slaughtering millions of Jews, poles, gypsies, homosexuals, etc. we were only filling orders.

Electronic tabulating machines don’t kill people, they only help kill them more efficiently.

Sorry, I can’t aqgree with Silver. For evil to succeed it only requres good people to do nothing to stop it.

Er Padeye? so . . . what? Hitler had killer robots doing his killing for him? All the Reich’s IBM Death Ray Mark VI typewriters decided to run amuck and kill people?

Atrocities are not committed by technology.

Atrocities are committed by people.

I can’t tell if you’re agreeing with that or disputing it.

I was attempting sarcasm. Punchard sorters never killed anyone but providing machines and support to those that do kill isn’t a good thing in my book.

Nope, it isn’t. But it isn’t nearly as horrible a thing as the actual act of killing someone. You punish someone for what THEY did, not for what someone associated with them did.

It’s basically true.

Why, according to a recent Boston Globe article, George W. Bush’s grandfather, Prescott, served on the board of a US bank that socked away millions in Nazi treasure.

But you don’t see anybody making a big deal about the Bush family having ties to Nazi financiers, do you?

Sorry, I don’t see it as the same thing. Perhaps Prescott Bush was complicitous with the nazis. Even if his family gained benifit from the dirty money he made they are not guilty of his crimes by accident of birth. IBM still stands as a corporate entity though the individuals involved in the crime may be gone.

There are shades of gray here. Whatever IBM did may not have been as evil as delivering the Zyklon-B or opening the valves to the gas chambers but it wasn’t good! Perhaps I’m being reactionary but I still hold that supplying enemies during wartime is a bad thing.

Oskar Schindler made shells for the Germans and I made shells for the Germans I but mine worked!
C. Montgomery Burns

“Punchard sorters never killed anyone but providing machines and support to those that do kill isn’t a good thing in my book.”

But according to the “Wired” article cited above, the tabulating machines were sold to the German census, not the Gestapo, army, or the like. The U.S. does censuses, most countries do censuses of one kind or another. It just happens that the Nazis perverted the German censuses of 1933 and '39 (per the “Wired” article) to their own cruel ends.

That doesn’t mean that a company in the business of selling tabulating machines to censuses [the original Hollerith machines were invented in the 1880s for use by the U.S. Census] is responsible for said perversion of the census without some evidence they (1) knew how census data was being (mis)used by the Nazis and (2) proceeded to sell them more equipment anyway (3) at a time when they could still refuse to sell the equipment (that is, before they were taken over by the Nazi government “shortly before the war”). Maybe that IS the case, but merely selling tabulating machines to a government conducting a census isn’t by itself enough to find IBM complicit in the Holocaust.

I agree that IBM probably has no guilt-by-association going on there. If they did then there would also be no such thing as innocent civilians…after all, they provide the backbone on which the country rests by providing the structure for the war machine back home.

Following the “guilt-by-association” notion… one could make the argument that the Jews who were taken into the war factories (a la “Schindler’s List”) bear just as much responsibility for the war as German officers.

Which, as any intelligent person will see, is not the case.