Politech mailing list archives
FC: New book implicates IBM in Nazi extermination of Jews
From: Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>
Date: Sun, 11 Feb 2001 15:57:45 -0500
*********** More: http://www0.mercurycenter.com/svtech/news/indepth/docs/ibm021101.htm http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54557-2001Feb10.html http://www.cluebot.com/article.pl?sid=01/02/11/2029206 *********** From: "Thomas C. Greene" <tcgreene () bellatlantic net> To: "Declan () Well Com" <declan () well com> Subject: IBM implicated in Nazi extermination of Jews Date: Sun, 11 Feb 2001 01:51:48 -0500 Declan, this might interest your politechnocrats: chrz, t. <http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/16810.html>http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/16810.html IBM implicated in Nazi extermination of Jews By: <mailto:thomas.greene () theregister co uk>Thomas C Greene in Washington Posted: 11/02/2001 at 06:22 GMTWriter Edwin Black claims to have roughly 20,000 pages of documentation proving that American-as-apple-pie tech behemoth IBM embraced and advanced the twisted dreams of der Führer by supplying crucial technology to the Nazis in a book entitled IBM and the Holocaust.
"Hundreds of thousands of human beings were being identified, sorted, assigned and transported by means of [IBM's] card system," Black says.
Hitler's perverse ambitions were "greatly enhanced and energised by the ingenuity of IBM and Thomas J. Watson, its autocratic chairman."
Virtually all the logistics of the Nazi rat-bastard programme -- certainly the most celebrated if not the most extensive of mankind's frequent genocidal enterprises -- can be credited to IBM technology, we are told.
"IBM did not invent Germany's anti-Semitism, but when Germany wanted to identify Jews by name, IBM showed it how. When the Reich wanted to use that information to launch programmes of social expulsion and expropriation, IBM provided the means. When the trains had to run on time between concentration camps, IBM offered the solution."
Even as late as 1945, Black says, IBM execs in the US were in constant touch with their Nazi partners, smoothing over the odds and ends of a business alliance which had by that time been illegal for years.
Ghastly stuff, and savagely damming if it should withstand examination.Which is not to say that Black is entirely objective here. "My parents are Holocaust survivors, uprooted from their homes in Poland. My mother escaped from a cattle truck en route to Treblinka concentration camp, was shot and buried alive in a shallow mass grave. My father, who had run away from a guarded line of Jews, discovered her leg protruding from the snow and dug her out. They lived in the forests for two years," he reveals.
But he reveals it in the first paragraphs of his book, suggesting that he doesn't feel it's anything worth hiding, and so implying that readers ought not to consider it anything worth questioning.
A good deal more questionable, however, is a purported photo of IBM's Watson taking tea with Hitler, offered in evidence, but which looks uncannily like some "Batboy" collage from the Weekly World News.
An excerpt from the book may be found at<http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/2001/02/11/stirevnws02017.html>http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/2001/02/11/stirevnws02017.html. ®
============== Thomas C. Greene Washington Bureau Chief "The Register" thomas.greene () theregister co uk http://www.theregister.co.uk *********** Date: Sun, 11 Feb 2001 15:33:43 GMT From: Brendan Kehoe <brendan () zen org> To: Declan McCullagh <declan () well com> Subject: more info on the Enquiry article Declan, A story in today's Sunday Times from England offers some more bits related to the controversial ``Enquiry: The Killing Years in Ireland'' article, and its naming of the intelligence officer there. The initial bits appear below. http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/2001/02/11/stinwenws01005.html THE Ministry of Defence has banned newspapers from identifying an undercover British soldier who is being investigated for alleged collusion with loyalist paramilitaries in Ulster. The army has decided to relocate the officer, a female Intelligence Corps captain, after her name appeared on Cryptome, an American-based website. The MoD has overruled advice given to the press by an official advisory body and threatened the media with injunctions if they publish the information available on Cryptome. Officials say they will have the information removed from the internet. ... -- Brendan Kehoe CTO, nobie.com (http://www.nobie.com/) -- Finally true Net marketing in .ie *********** ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if it remains intact. To subscribe, visit http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------
Current thread:
- FC: New book implicates IBM in Nazi extermination of Jews Declan McCullagh (Feb 11)