11 ms·

IBM and the Holocaust (2017)

219 points by luu 7y ago

milsorgen 7y ago
>why wasn't this on my radar? You must be very new or very young.
- azinman2 7y ago
  The article implied that it be taught in CS education.
ncmncm 7y ago
After the war, they handed all the machines back to IBM.
dTal 7y ago
IBM is possibly the most famous, but several other American companies employed the gambit of supplying both sides - notably Ford[1] and GM. This[2] article is a wrenching overview. A particularly shocking extract: "In fact, our government paid Ford Motor Company and GM millions of dollars for damages done by our bombers to their plants in Germany and France, and they were permitted to retain the same managers who had operated their factories under the Nazis." [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Germany#Use_of_forced_labor_during_World_War_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Germany#Use_of_forced_lab... [2]https://www.texasobserver.org/598-lets-talk-treason-how-corporate-america-cashed-in-on-nazi-connections/ https://www.texasobserver.org/598-lets-talk-treason-how-corp...
- snotrockets 7y ago
  Every company, American and otherwise, that had business in Europe during the war, and didn’t went out of them, profited from the Nazis in some form. This includes a lot of American companies (even Israel’s oldest bank profited by not returning accounts held by people who were killed by the Nazis to their rightful heirs). Few ever apologized, even fewer gave reparations.
- LinuxBender 7y ago
  Also Standard Oil (have since changed their name) supplying $20MM oil to nazis prior to the bombing of England.
  - rangibaby 7y ago
    S O -> Esso -> Exxon
    - ajcodez 7y ago
      Standard Oil was broken up into lots of pieces. Esso -> Exxon and Standard Oil of New York -> Mobil were just two pieces. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/chart-evolution-standard-oil/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/chart-evolution-standard-oi...
      - LinuxBender 7y ago
        Something I was pondering, since companies are treated as "people" as it pertains to law, free speech, political contributions, etc... then wouldn't that mean a company is guilty of war crimes? AFAIK there is no statute of limitations on war crimes. If a Nazi commander changed their name, that would not exclude them from being put on trial.
  - myth_drannon 7y ago
    They also operated from South America during the war and continued to supply them with oil. That's why before UN's 1948 vote on status of Israel, Mossad agents came to president of SO, put a rope on his table and asked him politely to cobtact his extensive connections with the fascist regimes in South America so they vote in favour of creation of state of Israel.
- flomo 7y ago
  Yep, every multinational capitalist corporation split themselves into Axis and Allies subdivisions, and continued business as usual during the war. You can point out American corps like IBM and GM, but European corps like Shell did the exact same thing. That was one of those idealized arguments about how global capitalism is the 'end of history'. Because under ideal circumstances, you are only bombing yourselves...
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- ahartmetz 7y ago
  The early eagerness of Ford to continue business in Germany is especially unsurprising because Henry Ford was a bit of a fan of fascism.
  - anonu 7y ago
    Ford was also a massive anti-Semite
- busymom0 7y ago
  Wasn’t Fanta created by Coca Cola in Germany during those times fall due to the shortage of Coca Cola ingredients?
southern_cross 7y ago
IIRC, the full extent of what was actually going on in Germany didn't become apparent until near the end of the war, as Allied troops started liberating the concentration camps. Even Germans who lived near those camps claimed to not know what was going on there, although nobody was in any particular mood to believe them at the time. Many of them may have been telling the truth, though. Taking a census is a perfectly normal thing, although the questions asked on that census and how the information obtained from it may ultimately be used can be controversial. (Take, for example, the current kerfuffle over the possibility of a "citizenship" question being included on the upcoming 2020 U.S. census.) For the German census, it would be useful to know whether they were asking very pointed questions like "Are you a Jew?", or was it more general questions related to ethnicity and religion and so on.
- mthoms 7y ago
  I feel like you maybe didn't read the post? For example: >tabulating machines were housed at the concentration camps. Each prisoner had a card that detailed their health, skills and location as prisoners of good health were transported according to labor needs. Finally, the card also indicated the way the prisoner died: by natural causes (which would include being worked or tortured to death), execution, suicide, and special treatment (including gas chamber). The first part of the post details how the cards and machines had to be coded or prepared by IBM itself (or its subsidiary). It wasn't possible to just add "fields" to a card. The machines weren't general purpose like the computers of today. Everything had to be setup specifically for the precise problem being solved by the manufacturer. The post also goes into more detail about how the Nazis wanted to know if a person was even partially Jewish by ethnicity. Regardless of whether or not they were practising Judaism.
  - southern_cross 7y ago
    Not only did I read the article, but I'm pretty sure that I actually read the book when it first came out, or at least lots of discussion about it, from several angles. This isn't exactly "new" news, after all. It might behoove you to track down some of the discussions from the time. I don't recall IBM coming out smelling like a rose, though, even if you gave them some benefit of the doubt. But I was referring specifically to the census. IBM was in the census business at the time, after all, and Germany had a legitimate need for their services, which they provided at least until the war broke out. IIRC, some years passed between when Hitler and the Nazis came to power in Germany, and when they came to be considered "evil incarnate". Which was plenty of time for folks to do business with them which they might later come to regret.
jasonhansel 7y ago
Good thing tech companies no longer create technologies to help authoritarian regimes! </sarcasm>
- devoply 7y ago
  What Google should do is just join the military industrial complex by forming a joint-venture with companies like Boeing, Raytheon, etc. Then everyone would just leave Brittany alone. It's easy to point your finger at China while turning a blind eye to Gitmo, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, etc. Going after Iran next. The price of "freedom" was maybe a few million Arabs or Afghans.
  - frequentnapper 7y ago
    Why can't we point our finger at both China and US industrial military complex?
    - DonHopkins 7y ago
      He's not ruling that out. He's just ruling out pointing at China while turning a blind eye to anyone else doing the same thing.
      - TomMarius 7y ago
        Is it necessary to point out every single case in a discussion/article about a specific case? We all know the current state of the world, IMHO this requirement just makes the discussion harder.
        kekebo 7y ago
        It might not be, but there may be value in pointing out that it's a systemic problem rather than one limited to one party. Besides, "we all know the current state of affairs" is an assumption I would be quite careful about.
WindowsFon4life 7y ago
The premise given previously that counting machines were culpable seems a stretch. Given IBM made firearms for the US.
motohagiography 7y ago
There is some prior work on this book that talks about how the 1938 census was used, the Hollerith punchcard machines (now IBM) tech, and the details of how the tech worked and why. It's called "the nazi census." Should be required reading at social media companies.
rexpop 7y ago
This is important context in which to examine Salesforce and Amazon's complicity in the gross injustices perpetrated by ICE/CBP.
- rexpop 7y ago
  > In the past year, many major tech companies such as Amazon, Palantir, Salesforce, and Microsoft have come under scrutiny for selling software to US federal immigration agencies. That’s because those agencies have been responsible for enforcing some of the controversial immigration policies that separate families at the border, detain children, and deport people seeking refuge back to dangerous places. https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/6/11/18660531/tech-companies-enabling-machine-deportation-immigrant-advocates-erika-andiola-trump-jonathan-ryan https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/6/11/18660531/tech-companies...
- jesssse 7y ago
  To what do you refer? Deporting illegals is just, defending borders is just.
  - DonHopkins 7y ago
    Go on... Next rationalization, please: What about separating children from their parents and putting them in cages? Is that just "hurting the people he needs to be hurting"? https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/8/18173678/trump-shutdown-voter-florida https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/8/18173678/tr...
    - kortilla 7y ago
      What about human trafficking? Do you know why that policy was written long before the current administration? Also, “cages” is just a word used to evoke an emotional rather than a rational response. “Why do we send our children to prisons every day? They can’t even leave of their own free will!” If you want to point out poor conditions, then do it.
      - 7y ago
soperj 7y ago
They had their sequel in Apartheid South Africa.
jstewartmobile 7y ago
"So money is one of the great threats to democracy. A second threat is what Roman law called persona ficta, fictitious persons — corporations, labor unions, and similar organizations which have the legal status of persons in the sense that they can buy and sell property, they can sue and be sued in the courts, they are generally anonymous, they are certainly irresponsible, and they are increasingly powerful. The 15th amendment and various court rulings have given corporations all the rights of living persons. This is dangerous because they already have certain rights that real persons don’t have, principally immortality. That’s the saving grace about even the worst scoundrel: someday he will die, and maybe we can wait that long. We felt that way about, Hitler, and Stalin. Maybe Mao is different; we’ll see. But a corporation never dies. It has the first quality of divinity, as the ancient Greeks defined it. They called their gods the immortals, because the only quality they had that set them apart from men was that they never died. Besides setting limits to corporate immortality, we must put other restraints upon all fictitious persons, including foundations, universities, and all such entities. From 1890 there was competition among the States to lower the restraints on corporations. Originally, when a corporation was set up, its charter specified what it was entitled to do, sell hamburgers to the public or whatever. Today there are no restrictions, no restraints, no reporting." - Carrol Quigley, LIFE, LECTURES & COLLECTED WRITINGS, p. 203
convivialdingo 7y ago
Not mentioned in the article - but I’ve read in the book and heard directly that the Aushwitz prisoner number tattoo was directly matched to a punchcard. My mother helped interview Jewish survivors so that their stories were recorded and archived.
- brighter2morrow 7y ago
  Where are the records? I've done some cursory searches for things like that before and haven't found anything easily accessible
  - convivialdingo 7y ago
    My mother’s interviews are stored in DC at the holocaust museum. I would bet they have samples of the Holereth cards as well. Most of the records are still stored in Germany though, and there are also records stored in Moscow.
  - tomjen3 7y ago
    The punch card records? The were in many cases ment to store only for further processing, and were probably mostly destroyed when the nazies tried to destroy all evidence at the end of the war.
- zxcvbn4038 7y ago
  I liked the part of the story where the Frenchman hired by the Nazis to create a list of Jews in France (Rene Carmille was the name I believe) instead used the same IBM technology to help organize the resistance. He strung the Nazis along for years. He and his family were executed in the street a few months before France was liberated, too late for Nazis to get anyone else produce the list.
  - anonu 7y ago
    Fascinating aspect of the story. FYI: The article says he died from exhaustion at Dachau. Just points to the fact that there is still so much to understand and uncover about this time period.
btilly 7y ago
Related, IBM sought for and received permission to use JSLint for evil. See https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/cbcrz/i_give_permission_for_ibm_its_customers_partners/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/cbcrz/i_give_p... for proof. It turns out that authoritarian regimes still like to buy IBM products including mainframes, and IBM is happy to sell to them. IBM lawyers are very aware of this.
- Xylakant 7y ago
  No, they did not. JSlint has a license that says “may not be used for evil.” which is ill-defined. What’s evil? Is what you consider evil what I consider evil? So they asked for a well-specified license. In return they were granted a license to use JSlint for evil purposes, which is obviously a good joke at their expense, but combined with the original license encompasses all uses, and, as such, is well-defined.
  - candiodari 7y ago
    I love it.
    - Xylakant 7y ago
      I love the joke, but I hate the license. It makes using JSlint a pain in any corporate environment. Strictly speaking it’s also incompatible with the GPL.
      - dragonwriter 7y ago
        Strictly speaking, it's neither an Open Source nor Free Software license, because of th usage restriction which is incompatible with both the Open Source Definition and the Free Software Definition.
        Xylakant 7y ago
        Correct. It would still be compatible with many of them, though. There’s no provision forbidding additional restrictions placed on the software in MIT, BSD, APL, MPL for example.
pawjs 7y ago
It's of utmost importance that we remember the Holocaust for a few hours a day every single day until the end of time.
vgetr 7y ago
I think it’s instructive to note that they also manufactured rifles: http://www.smallarmsreview.com/display.article.cfm?idarticles=1494 http://www.smallarmsreview.com/display.article.cfm?idarticle...
luminati 7y ago
"History doesn't repeat, but it certainly rhymes" Soon after supporting Jewish oppression, IBM decided to switch tracks to supporting black oppression[1]. They were one of the biggest tech providers to the White Apartheid government in South Africa to enforce their brutality. [1]http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~cale/cs201/apartheid.comp.html http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~cale/cs201/apartheid.co...
- mistrial9 7y ago
  A successful bookseller in California chose to sell wholesale books to the Apartheid Govt of South Africa, even into the height of the media outcry, Nelson Mandela etc. When almost all the employees complained, the response was "we sell books to all people" .. which was clever, but probably not sincere. The objective was to make money, and the willingness of the govt and business in South Africa to buy went up when the political pressure was increasing, because trade partners were getting scarcer.. In short, it became easier and more profitable to sell to the besieged state. This scenario has probably repeated itself throughout history.
zerogvt 7y ago
All these are quite well known but I wonder whether the contradictory progressive moves of IBM are also as known https://www.eweek.com/it-management/ibm-and-black-history-innovation-through-diversity https://www.eweek.com/it-management/ibm-and-black-history-in... Not sure that there is much ideology behind one or the other side though. I'd find it easier to believe that some execs then, now and ever, are trying to be in sync with the general wind direction (today it mostly comes under names such as "social responsibility" and "ecologic footprint") and not miss a good business opportunity in parallel. Of course that whole thing is hilarious when seen from outside and seems like the company is schizoid. In many ways that might not be a totally wrong outlook. These are huge multifaceted organizations and seen as a whole they don't make sense. Ideological or not though they all have to make profit or they'll die. Simple as that. It would be _very_ hard to any of them to say no to good business even if they knew it was trading with the devil. Collateral damage -such as negative publicity and potential future losses- would keep them back but only if the total net was really negative. For what is worth though I think that IBM is one of the most inclusive companies atm (based on what I hear from LGBT/minorities people working there). Regardless - the point of the post is valid IMO.
- drewbug01 7y ago
  > All these are quite well known but I wonder whether the contra-evidence is also as known https://www.eweek.com/it-management/ibm-and-black-history-in.. https://www.eweek.com/it-management/ibm-and-black-history-in.... Did you intentionally link to a slideshow about IBM and Black history? If so... respectfully, you may have misunderstood what “IBM and the Holocaust” is about (or perhaps what the Holocaust was). Implying that IBM’s good deeds in your link are “the other side” of the magnitude of IBM’s support of Nazi Germany is a very unbalanced comparison.
- goto11 7y ago
  How is that contra-evidence? Are you saying the claims about IBM's involvement in the holocaust is disproved by these slides?
  - zerogvt 7y ago
kevintb 7y ago
Wow, excellent article. > We should be talking about cases like IBM and the Holocaust with our students and with ourselves. A majority of our students will go on to work for companies just like IBM. And if they aren’t taught that tragedies like the Holocaust happen because everyone was just doing their job, we are liable for the continued abuse of computer science.
purplezooey 7y ago
No ethics education? A prof. ethics class is required for a bachelor's in CS at most schools.

219 points by luu 7y ago

milsorgen 7y ago

>why wasn't this on my radar? You must be very new or very young.

azinman2 7y ago
The article implied that it be taught in CS education.

ncmncm 7y ago

After the war, they handed all the machines back to IBM.

dTal 7y ago

IBM is possibly the most famous, but several other American companies employed the gambit of supplying both sides - notably Ford[1] and GM. This[2] article is a wrenching overview. A particularly shocking extract: "In fact, our government paid Ford Motor Company and GM millions of dollars for damages done by our bombers to their plants in Germany and France, and they were permitted to retain the same managers who had operated their factories under the Nazis." [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Germany#Use_of_forced_labor_during_World_War_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Germany#Use_of_forced_lab... [2]https://www.texasobserver.org/598-lets-talk-treason-how-corporate-america-cashed-in-on-nazi-connections/ https://www.texasobserver.org/598-lets-talk-treason-how-corp...

snotrockets 7y ago
Every company, American and otherwise, that had business in Europe during the war, and didn’t went out of them, profited from the Nazis in some form. This includes a lot of American companies (even Israel’s oldest bank profited by not returning accounts held by people who were killed by the Nazis to their rightful heirs). Few ever apologized, even fewer gave reparations.
LinuxBender 7y ago
Also Standard Oil (have since changed their name) supplying $20MM oil to nazis prior to the bombing of England.
- rangibaby 7y ago
  S O -> Esso -> Exxon
  - ajcodez 7y ago
    Standard Oil was broken up into lots of pieces. Esso -> Exxon and Standard Oil of New York -> Mobil were just two pieces. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/chart-evolution-standard-oil/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/chart-evolution-standard-oi...
    - LinuxBender 7y ago
      Something I was pondering, since companies are treated as "people" as it pertains to law, free speech, political contributions, etc... then wouldn't that mean a company is guilty of war crimes? AFAIK there is no statute of limitations on war crimes. If a Nazi commander changed their name, that would not exclude them from being put on trial.
- myth_drannon 7y ago
  They also operated from South America during the war and continued to supply them with oil. That's why before UN's 1948 vote on status of Israel, Mossad agents came to president of SO, put a rope on his table and asked him politely to cobtact his extensive connections with the fascist regimes in South America so they vote in favour of creation of state of Israel.
flomo 7y ago
Yep, every multinational capitalist corporation split themselves into Axis and Allies subdivisions, and continued business as usual during the war. You can point out American corps like IBM and GM, but European corps like Shell did the exact same thing. That was one of those idealized arguments about how global capitalism is the 'end of history'. Because under ideal circumstances, you are only bombing yourselves...
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
ahartmetz 7y ago
The early eagerness of Ford to continue business in Germany is especially unsurprising because Henry Ford was a bit of a fan of fascism.
- anonu 7y ago
  Ford was also a massive anti-Semite
busymom0 7y ago
Wasn’t Fanta created by Coca Cola in Germany during those times fall due to the shortage of Coca Cola ingredients?

southern_cross 7y ago

IIRC, the full extent of what was actually going on in Germany didn't become apparent until near the end of the war, as Allied troops started liberating the concentration camps. Even Germans who lived near those camps claimed to not know what was going on there, although nobody was in any particular mood to believe them at the time. Many of them may have been telling the truth, though. Taking a census is a perfectly normal thing, although the questions asked on that census and how the information obtained from it may ultimately be used can be controversial. (Take, for example, the current kerfuffle over the possibility of a "citizenship" question being included on the upcoming 2020 U.S. census.) For the German census, it would be useful to know whether they were asking very pointed questions like "Are you a Jew?", or was it more general questions related to ethnicity and religion and so on.

mthoms 7y ago
I feel like you maybe didn't read the post? For example: >tabulating machines were housed at the concentration camps. Each prisoner had a card that detailed their health, skills and location as prisoners of good health were transported according to labor needs. Finally, the card also indicated the way the prisoner died: by natural causes (which would include being worked or tortured to death), execution, suicide, and special treatment (including gas chamber). The first part of the post details how the cards and machines had to be coded or prepared by IBM itself (or its subsidiary). It wasn't possible to just add "fields" to a card. The machines weren't general purpose like the computers of today. Everything had to be setup specifically for the precise problem being solved by the manufacturer. The post also goes into more detail about how the Nazis wanted to know if a person was even partially Jewish by ethnicity. Regardless of whether or not they were practising Judaism.
- southern_cross 7y ago
  Not only did I read the article, but I'm pretty sure that I actually read the book when it first came out, or at least lots of discussion about it, from several angles. This isn't exactly "new" news, after all. It might behoove you to track down some of the discussions from the time. I don't recall IBM coming out smelling like a rose, though, even if you gave them some benefit of the doubt. But I was referring specifically to the census. IBM was in the census business at the time, after all, and Germany had a legitimate need for their services, which they provided at least until the war broke out. IIRC, some years passed between when Hitler and the Nazis came to power in Germany, and when they came to be considered "evil incarnate". Which was plenty of time for folks to do business with them which they might later come to regret.

jasonhansel 7y ago

Good thing tech companies no longer create technologies to help authoritarian regimes! </sarcasm>

devoply 7y ago
What Google should do is just join the military industrial complex by forming a joint-venture with companies like Boeing, Raytheon, etc. Then everyone would just leave Brittany alone. It's easy to point your finger at China while turning a blind eye to Gitmo, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, etc. Going after Iran next. The price of "freedom" was maybe a few million Arabs or Afghans.
- frequentnapper 7y ago
  Why can't we point our finger at both China and US industrial military complex?
  - DonHopkins 7y ago
    He's not ruling that out. He's just ruling out pointing at China while turning a blind eye to anyone else doing the same thing.
    - TomMarius 7y ago
      Is it necessary to point out every single case in a discussion/article about a specific case? We all know the current state of the world, IMHO this requirement just makes the discussion harder.
      - kekebo 7y ago
        It might not be, but there may be value in pointing out that it's a systemic problem rather than one limited to one party. Besides, "we all know the current state of affairs" is an assumption I would be quite careful about.

WindowsFon4life 7y ago

The premise given previously that counting machines were culpable seems a stretch. Given IBM made firearms for the US.

motohagiography 7y ago

There is some prior work on this book that talks about how the 1938 census was used, the Hollerith punchcard machines (now IBM) tech, and the details of how the tech worked and why. It's called "the nazi census." Should be required reading at social media companies.

rexpop 7y ago

This is important context in which to examine Salesforce and Amazon's complicity in the gross injustices perpetrated by ICE/CBP.

rexpop 7y ago
> In the past year, many major tech companies such as Amazon, Palantir, Salesforce, and Microsoft have come under scrutiny for selling software to US federal immigration agencies. That’s because those agencies have been responsible for enforcing some of the controversial immigration policies that separate families at the border, detain children, and deport people seeking refuge back to dangerous places. https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/6/11/18660531/tech-companies-enabling-machine-deportation-immigrant-advocates-erika-andiola-trump-jonathan-ryan https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/6/11/18660531/tech-companies...
jesssse 7y ago
To what do you refer? Deporting illegals is just, defending borders is just.
- DonHopkins 7y ago
  Go on... Next rationalization, please: What about separating children from their parents and putting them in cages? Is that just "hurting the people he needs to be hurting"? https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/8/18173678/trump-shutdown-voter-florida https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/8/18173678/tr...
  - kortilla 7y ago
    What about human trafficking? Do you know why that policy was written long before the current administration? Also, “cages” is just a word used to evoke an emotional rather than a rational response. “Why do we send our children to prisons every day? They can’t even leave of their own free will!” If you want to point out poor conditions, then do it.
    - 7y ago

soperj 7y ago

They had their sequel in Apartheid South Africa.

jstewartmobile 7y ago

"So money is one of the great threats to democracy. A second threat is what Roman law called persona ficta, fictitious persons — corporations, labor unions, and similar organizations which have the legal status of persons in the sense that they can buy and sell property, they can sue and be sued in the courts, they are generally anonymous, they are certainly irresponsible, and they are increasingly powerful. The 15th amendment and various court rulings have given corporations all the rights of living persons. This is dangerous because they already have certain rights that real persons don’t have, principally immortality. That’s the saving grace about even the worst scoundrel: someday he will die, and maybe we can wait that long. We felt that way about, Hitler, and Stalin. Maybe Mao is different; we’ll see. But a corporation never dies. It has the first quality of divinity, as the ancient Greeks defined it. They called their gods the immortals, because the only quality they had that set them apart from men was that they never died. Besides setting limits to corporate immortality, we must put other restraints upon all fictitious persons, including foundations, universities, and all such entities. From 1890 there was competition among the States to lower the restraints on corporations. Originally, when a corporation was set up, its charter specified what it was entitled to do, sell hamburgers to the public or whatever. Today there are no restrictions, no restraints, no reporting." - Carrol Quigley, LIFE, LECTURES & COLLECTED WRITINGS, p. 203

convivialdingo 7y ago

Not mentioned in the article - but I’ve read in the book and heard directly that the Aushwitz prisoner number tattoo was directly matched to a punchcard. My mother helped interview Jewish survivors so that their stories were recorded and archived.

brighter2morrow 7y ago
Where are the records? I've done some cursory searches for things like that before and haven't found anything easily accessible
- convivialdingo 7y ago
  My mother’s interviews are stored in DC at the holocaust museum. I would bet they have samples of the Holereth cards as well. Most of the records are still stored in Germany though, and there are also records stored in Moscow.
- tomjen3 7y ago
  The punch card records? The were in many cases ment to store only for further processing, and were probably mostly destroyed when the nazies tried to destroy all evidence at the end of the war.
zxcvbn4038 7y ago
I liked the part of the story where the Frenchman hired by the Nazis to create a list of Jews in France (Rene Carmille was the name I believe) instead used the same IBM technology to help organize the resistance. He strung the Nazis along for years. He and his family were executed in the street a few months before France was liberated, too late for Nazis to get anyone else produce the list.
- anonu 7y ago
  Fascinating aspect of the story. FYI: The article says he died from exhaustion at Dachau. Just points to the fact that there is still so much to understand and uncover about this time period.

btilly 7y ago

Related, IBM sought for and received permission to use JSLint for evil. See https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/cbcrz/i_give_permission_for_ibm_its_customers_partners/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/cbcrz/i_give_p... for proof. It turns out that authoritarian regimes still like to buy IBM products including mainframes, and IBM is happy to sell to them. IBM lawyers are very aware of this.

Xylakant 7y ago
No, they did not. JSlint has a license that says “may not be used for evil.” which is ill-defined. What’s evil? Is what you consider evil what I consider evil? So they asked for a well-specified license. In return they were granted a license to use JSlint for evil purposes, which is obviously a good joke at their expense, but combined with the original license encompasses all uses, and, as such, is well-defined.
- candiodari 7y ago
  I love it.
  - Xylakant 7y ago
    I love the joke, but I hate the license. It makes using JSlint a pain in any corporate environment. Strictly speaking it’s also incompatible with the GPL.
    - dragonwriter 7y ago
      Strictly speaking, it's neither an Open Source nor Free Software license, because of th usage restriction which is incompatible with both the Open Source Definition and the Free Software Definition.
      - Xylakant 7y ago
        Correct. It would still be compatible with many of them, though. There’s no provision forbidding additional restrictions placed on the software in MIT, BSD, APL, MPL for example.

pawjs 7y ago

It's of utmost importance that we remember the Holocaust for a few hours a day every single day until the end of time.

vgetr 7y ago

I think it’s instructive to note that they also manufactured rifles: http://www.smallarmsreview.com/display.article.cfm?idarticles=1494 http://www.smallarmsreview.com/display.article.cfm?idarticle...

luminati 7y ago

"History doesn't repeat, but it certainly rhymes" Soon after supporting Jewish oppression, IBM decided to switch tracks to supporting black oppression[1]. They were one of the biggest tech providers to the White Apartheid government in South Africa to enforce their brutality. [1]http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~cale/cs201/apartheid.comp.html http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~cale/cs201/apartheid.co...

mistrial9 7y ago
A successful bookseller in California chose to sell wholesale books to the Apartheid Govt of South Africa, even into the height of the media outcry, Nelson Mandela etc. When almost all the employees complained, the response was "we sell books to all people" .. which was clever, but probably not sincere. The objective was to make money, and the willingness of the govt and business in South Africa to buy went up when the political pressure was increasing, because trade partners were getting scarcer.. In short, it became easier and more profitable to sell to the besieged state. This scenario has probably repeated itself throughout history.

zerogvt 7y ago

All these are quite well known but I wonder whether the contradictory progressive moves of IBM are also as known https://www.eweek.com/it-management/ibm-and-black-history-innovation-through-diversity https://www.eweek.com/it-management/ibm-and-black-history-in... Not sure that there is much ideology behind one or the other side though. I'd find it easier to believe that some execs then, now and ever, are trying to be in sync with the general wind direction (today it mostly comes under names such as "social responsibility" and "ecologic footprint") and not miss a good business opportunity in parallel. Of course that whole thing is hilarious when seen from outside and seems like the company is schizoid. In many ways that might not be a totally wrong outlook. These are huge multifaceted organizations and seen as a whole they don't make sense. Ideological or not though they all have to make profit or they'll die. Simple as that. It would be _very_ hard to any of them to say no to good business even if they knew it was trading with the devil. Collateral damage -such as negative publicity and potential future losses- would keep them back but only if the total net was really negative. For what is worth though I think that IBM is one of the most inclusive companies atm (based on what I hear from LGBT/minorities people working there). Regardless - the point of the post is valid IMO.

drewbug01 7y ago
> All these are quite well known but I wonder whether the contra-evidence is also as known https://www.eweek.com/it-management/ibm-and-black-history-in.. https://www.eweek.com/it-management/ibm-and-black-history-in.... Did you intentionally link to a slideshow about IBM and Black history? If so... respectfully, you may have misunderstood what “IBM and the Holocaust” is about (or perhaps what the Holocaust was). Implying that IBM’s good deeds in your link are “the other side” of the magnitude of IBM’s support of Nazi Germany is a very unbalanced comparison.
goto11 7y ago
How is that contra-evidence? Are you saying the claims about IBM's involvement in the holocaust is disproved by these slides?
- zerogvt 7y ago

kevintb 7y ago

Wow, excellent article. > We should be talking about cases like IBM and the Holocaust with our students and with ourselves. A majority of our students will go on to work for companies just like IBM. And if they aren’t taught that tragedies like the Holocaust happen because everyone was just doing their job, we are liable for the continued abuse of computer science.

purplezooey 7y ago

No ethics education? A prof. ethics class is required for a bachelor's in CS at most schools.