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The Holocaust is a pretty bad example for "cruelty without high-tech". Nazis had census data on millions of people reaching back decades, to sort trough that d

The Holocaust is a pretty bad example for "cruelty without high-tech". Nazis had census data on millions of people reaching back decades, to sort trough that data, and search it for "undesirables", they employed computation tech that was cutting edge for its time [0], just like the methods of killing millions of people saw quite some industrialized innovation. As such it's a rather blatant example for the whole new levels of cruelty technology can enable humans to do. The progress also didn't just stop there, what the Gestapo and Stasi did, is child's play compared to the amount and details of data that can nowadays be trivially collected on whole population scales [1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust [1] https://opendatacity.github.io/stasi-vs-nsa/english.html https://opendatacity.github.io/stasi-vs-nsa/english.html

ajuc 5y ago
Majority of Jews during WW2 died outside of death/concentration camps [1]. Army, police or SS rounded up Jews in some majority-Jewish town or village, took them to a nearby forest, forced them to dig their graves and then shot everybody. Rinse and repeat. Sometimes non-Jews helped, or even did it without Germans. Sometimes they helped Jews and were killed with them. Sometimes Germans just killed everybody. Sometimes they had list of people to kill for political reason (for example university professors, priests, politicians, army officers, teachers etc. were targeted no matter their ethnicity). Vast majority of Jews before WW2 lived in small mostly-Jewish towns and villages in eastern Poland and western USSR. It would be inefficient to move them to death camps, also you could steal from them when you murdered them. Win-win. There was no need for technology, nazis weren't checking the papers or bothering with recording anything. There are thousands of mass graves near formerly-Jewish towns. Non-Jewish population was mostly helping to point the Jews because they were competing for food and resources during harsh occupation conditions, and besides Germans were mass-murdering non-Jews too, just as a lower priority. And if you protested you were Jewish too, right? According to Timothy Snyder the main difference between countries where high or low percentage of Jews survived nazi occupation wasn't antisemitism but how much pre-war institutions were preserved. In countries where the nazi occupation was negotiated and the rule of law was preserved - it took months to confirm these people were Jews, move them to camps, sort them, etc. In places like eastern Europe - where Germans just destroyed everything and law was practically non-existant - why would you bother with all of that? It was basically 4 years of the Purge. 1/6th of the population disappeared in Poland between 1939 and 1945. Jews were about 10% of pre-war population. The involvement of IBM was shameful, but it wasn't necessary. The only technology nazis needed was firearms. And they could probably do it with knives and sticks if they really wanted - like in Rwanda. Or like in USSR or Communist China for that matter. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodlands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodlands
- gambiting 5y ago
  >>There was no need for technology, nazis weren't checking the papers or bothering with recording anything. Most of what you said is true, except for this part. Nazis did make actual recordings(as in - videos) of exterminations conducted in eastern Poland, especially in the area that is now Ukraine, conducted both by themselves as well as the local population(threatened with death otherwise of course), all to show back in Third Reich as proof fo barbarism in the countries they were conquering. I really recommend reading Stanislaw Lem's biography on that topic, since he lived in pre and in-war Lwów. >>The involvement of IBM was shameful, but it wasn't necessary. I mean, that's a bit of a weird argument to make. Yes, places like Auschwitz could have exterminated as many people as they did even without IBM's help, but the whole point is that Nazis liked efficiency and the tech allowed them to keep track of what they were doing(in the concentration camps, like you said outside of them Nazis didn't bother to track much of anything)
- freeflight 5y ago
  > There was no need for technology, nazis weren't checking the papers or bothering with recording anything. The Nazis did census data to sort out all kinds of undesirables, one of the more infamous examples being the Pink List; Since the German Kaiserreich police made lists of homosexuals and those suspected of being homosexuals. These lists made it trough the Weimarer Republic, and once the Nazis took over the Gestapo already had most of their work done for them, because these pink lists were only one of many lists Germans liked to keep about the population. It's one of the reasons why Germany to this day tries to be somewhat careful about large collections of personal data because after the Nazis, there then was the GDR with the Stasi, who once again took it to a whole new level. These are relevant and well known historical examples for data collections being abused, making the Nazis out as mere "Dudes with guns" is vastly underplaying the levels of sophistication and effort that were put into "sorting trough people" on population size scales.
  - ajuc 5y ago
    You are talking about 3rd Reich only part of Holocaust. It was bad, but it was a drop in the sea compared to what Germans did in occupied territories during WW2. A few orders of magnitude more victims.
gambiting 5y ago
On the IBM front - IBM helped Nazi Germany run concentration camps, the number tatooed on every prisoner was an IBM-managed inventory number, they had offices and workshops near concentration camps to help run, operate and maintain the machines used by the Nazis, as much as IBM would like to forget that part of history now. So yes, Nazis were definitely using cutting edge tech for its time to help with their extermination efforts. https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ICISEAAAQBAJ&pg=PT298&lpg=PT298&dq=ibm+%22we%27re+not+historians%22&source=bl&ots=duuaqzPcA1&sig=ACfU3U1GYo9bL-rZFOF2c8QIMXe-5eE7fg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjArKmvzrrzAhXIRUEAHWY3D7UQ6AF6BAgqEAI#v=onepage&q=ibm%20%22we're%20not%20historians%22&f=false https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ICISEAAAQBAJ&pg=PT298&lp...
thaufeki 5y ago
Yeah, imagine the holocaust with these drones, or any of the surveillance tech we have these days. If a G7 state were to change in that way again, they would almost certainly achieve their eradication goals
- imtringued 5y ago
  I can already imagine people complain how the military is wasting its budget on drones and should reinstate German extermination camps to save money.

ajuc 5y ago

Majority of Jews during WW2 died outside of death/concentration camps [1]. Army, police or SS rounded up Jews in some majority-Jewish town or village, took them to a nearby forest, forced them to dig their graves and then shot everybody. Rinse and repeat. Sometimes non-Jews helped, or even did it without Germans. Sometimes they helped Jews and were killed with them. Sometimes Germans just killed everybody. Sometimes they had list of people to kill for political reason (for example university professors, priests, politicians, army officers, teachers etc. were targeted no matter their ethnicity). Vast majority of Jews before WW2 lived in small mostly-Jewish towns and villages in eastern Poland and western USSR. It would be inefficient to move them to death camps, also you could steal from them when you murdered them. Win-win. There was no need for technology, nazis weren't checking the papers or bothering with recording anything. There are thousands of mass graves near formerly-Jewish towns. Non-Jewish population was mostly helping to point the Jews because they were competing for food and resources during harsh occupation conditions, and besides Germans were mass-murdering non-Jews too, just as a lower priority. And if you protested you were Jewish too, right? According to Timothy Snyder the main difference between countries where high or low percentage of Jews survived nazi occupation wasn't antisemitism but how much pre-war institutions were preserved. In countries where the nazi occupation was negotiated and the rule of law was preserved - it took months to confirm these people were Jews, move them to camps, sort them, etc. In places like eastern Europe - where Germans just destroyed everything and law was practically non-existant - why would you bother with all of that? It was basically 4 years of the Purge. 1/6th of the population disappeared in Poland between 1939 and 1945. Jews were about 10% of pre-war population. The involvement of IBM was shameful, but it wasn't necessary. The only technology nazis needed was firearms. And they could probably do it with knives and sticks if they really wanted - like in Rwanda. Or like in USSR or Communist China for that matter. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodlands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodlands

gambiting 5y ago
>>There was no need for technology, nazis weren't checking the papers or bothering with recording anything. Most of what you said is true, except for this part. Nazis did make actual recordings(as in - videos) of exterminations conducted in eastern Poland, especially in the area that is now Ukraine, conducted both by themselves as well as the local population(threatened with death otherwise of course), all to show back in Third Reich as proof fo barbarism in the countries they were conquering. I really recommend reading Stanislaw Lem's biography on that topic, since he lived in pre and in-war Lwów. >>The involvement of IBM was shameful, but it wasn't necessary. I mean, that's a bit of a weird argument to make. Yes, places like Auschwitz could have exterminated as many people as they did even without IBM's help, but the whole point is that Nazis liked efficiency and the tech allowed them to keep track of what they were doing(in the concentration camps, like you said outside of them Nazis didn't bother to track much of anything)
freeflight 5y ago
> There was no need for technology, nazis weren't checking the papers or bothering with recording anything. The Nazis did census data to sort out all kinds of undesirables, one of the more infamous examples being the Pink List; Since the German Kaiserreich police made lists of homosexuals and those suspected of being homosexuals. These lists made it trough the Weimarer Republic, and once the Nazis took over the Gestapo already had most of their work done for them, because these pink lists were only one of many lists Germans liked to keep about the population. It's one of the reasons why Germany to this day tries to be somewhat careful about large collections of personal data because after the Nazis, there then was the GDR with the Stasi, who once again took it to a whole new level. These are relevant and well known historical examples for data collections being abused, making the Nazis out as mere "Dudes with guns" is vastly underplaying the levels of sophistication and effort that were put into "sorting trough people" on population size scales.
- ajuc 5y ago
  You are talking about 3rd Reich only part of Holocaust. It was bad, but it was a drop in the sea compared to what Germans did in occupied territories during WW2. A few orders of magnitude more victims.

gambiting 5y ago

On the IBM front - IBM helped Nazi Germany run concentration camps, the number tatooed on every prisoner was an IBM-managed inventory number, they had offices and workshops near concentration camps to help run, operate and maintain the machines used by the Nazis, as much as IBM would like to forget that part of history now. So yes, Nazis were definitely using cutting edge tech for its time to help with their extermination efforts. https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ICISEAAAQBAJ&pg=PT298&lpg=PT298&dq=ibm+%22we%27re+not+historians%22&source=bl&ots=duuaqzPcA1&sig=ACfU3U1GYo9bL-rZFOF2c8QIMXe-5eE7fg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjArKmvzrrzAhXIRUEAHWY3D7UQ6AF6BAgqEAI#v=onepage&q=ibm%20%22we're%20not%20historians%22&f=false https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ICISEAAAQBAJ&pg=PT298&lp...

thaufeki 5y ago

Yeah, imagine the holocaust with these drones, or any of the surveillance tech we have these days. If a G7 state were to change in that way again, they would almost certainly achieve their eradication goals

imtringued 5y ago
I can already imagine people complain how the military is wasting its budget on drones and should reinstate German extermination camps to save money.