Profits Over Life — How IBM Aided the Third Reich
By: Nicola Bosch
Tags: Technology, IBM, History, Capitalism, Hitler

Profits Over Life — How IBM Aided the Third Reich

Perhaps Hitler’s Biggest Business Partner

A data card used at the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp (Va Wikimedia Commons)

Origins of IBM

IBM is perhaps one of the largest and most significant companies to ever exist, having invented and patented some of tech’s most important inventions, IBM is a company with a long, and dark history.

To fully comprehend IBM’s vast and fascinating history, we must go back in time, precisely, to the end of the 19th century.

The US Census Bureau (USCB) was tasked with counting the population in each county, as well as the average population density. This task, which would be used to shape American cities and policies, was not an easy one. Every ten years, the USCB was tasked with this job, and it took them on average more than seven years to fully complete one census, as it all had to be done by hand.

One day, a young employee by the name of Herman Hollerith, a relatively new employee, decided he wanted to make a change. He spent ten years developing a system to count the population faster, a way to speed up the process.

Tabulating machine

A 1890 Tabulating Machine by Hollerith (Photo by Adam Shuster via Flickr)

His creation, now known as the tabulating machine, or tabulator, was the first electrical counting machine, used punching cards to store the information, and significantly sped up the process of counting the population. The first tabulating machines used punched cards with round holes, 12 rows and 24 columns to process information.

To operate this machine, clerks would use keypunches to punch holes in the cards, which were then used to enter the age, state, gender and other information from the returns. Then, after the cards were punched, they were run through the machine around 4 times to accurately measure and count everything.

The previous US Census, 1880 one, took eight years to complete by hand. Now armed with tabulating machines, the 1890 census was “finished months ahead of schedule and far under budget” (US Census Bureau) having used around 100 million cards.

After the tabulator was developed, it found a wide variety of uses, both in the USCB and other areas such as accounting.

Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company

Soon thereafter, Hollerith created the Tabulating Machine Company, which produced punch card-based data processing machines (tabulators), and it was founded in 1896 in Washington D.C.

Together with the Bundy Manufacturing Company, the first manufacturer of time clocks, the International Time Recording Company, and the Computing Scale Company of America, the Tabulating Machine Company amalgamated into one big holding company which was named the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR) on the 16th of June, 1911 in Endicott, NY. These four companies would then become the basis of IBM in 1924 when Thomas J. Watson, the general manager and president of CTR thought that the name was too clunky and long. He then decided to change it to something that would better suit the company, and that would be easier to say, and created the International Business Machines Corporation, or IBM.

IBM would not fully form until 1933 when all the amalgamated subsidiaries were merged into one large and individual entity.

Dehomag

Let’s take a small step back to 1910, when a friend of Hollerith, named Willy Heidinger, licensed all of Hollerith’s patents from The Tabulating Machine Company. He then created a company in Germany named Dehomag, an acronym for Deutsche Hollerith-Maschinen Gesellschaft mbH (German Hollerith Machines LLC). Here, he started selling computing and tabulating machines, and soon became a monopoly within the German market.

In 1923, a year before the name change, CTR bought 90% ownership of Dehomag, making them a subsidiary of CTR, and soon after IBM.

After Hitler took power, Dehomag became Nazi Germany’s main provider of computing and tabulating machines, helping them achieve what was achieved in the US censuses. Hitler quickly decided to carry out two full scale censuses in Germany, as a way to identify Jews, Homosexuals, dissidents and all other untermensch (inferior people). These censuses would hold every single bit of information on nearly every single person, including family history, bank statements, sexual orientation and more.

With all this information, the persecution, torture and genocide of the victims of the holocaust was made much easier, and Dehomag made this process swifter and more precise, thus aiding the Third Reich in their wicked and insidious objective.

A 1933 punch card used for the Berlin Census (Via US Holocaust Memorial Museum)

Unfortunately, this story doesn’t end here.

At the beginning of this endeavor, all equipment, training and manpower were initially provided and managed by the IBM headquarters in New York. The need for tabulators and more employees meant that this was no longer viable, so Thomas J. Watson, still the president of IBM, met with Hitler in Germany, and invested one million dollars in Dehomag to expand its operation, forming a closer bond with Hitler himself. This allowed for Dehomag to meet the ever-increasing demand of tabulators and other equipment to carry out their plans.

Tabulators in Extermination Camps

When the Nazi regime started creating concentration camps, they started using tabulators and other machinery from IBM for the sorting and counting of prisoners. Every single camp had a Hollerith-Abteilung (Hollareth Department), where IBM personally oversaw the process, keeping tabs on every single inmate arriving using the punch card technology. Edwin Black, the author of IBM and the Holocaust said that “without IBM machinery, continuing upkeep and service, as well as the supply of punch cards, whether located on-site or off-site, Hitler’s camps could have never managed the numbers they did”

They sorted and processed inmates in a very ghastly and disheartening way, using the numerical designation for the different camps and different inmates. It went as follows:

For camps:

001 – Auschwitz

002 – Buchenwald

003 – Dachau

And so on.

For prisoners:

3 — Homosexual

8 — Jew

9 — Anti-social

12 — Gypsy

Causes of death:

3 — Natural causes

4 — Execution

5 — Suicide

6 — Gas chambers

This meant that both IBM employees and Nazi guards alike were able to differentiate between cause of death, reason for imprisonment and also the location, all of which facilitated and streamlined the German killing machine.

IBM engineers had to create these codes, so that they would be used to differentiate the prisoners, print the cards, configure the machines, train the staff and maintain this system each 2 weeks for each concentration camp.

This, to IBM, was nothing more than business, with Dehomag becoming IBM’s second most profitable company. This effort by IBM was also not forgotten by the Germans, and Hitler revered IBM and its leadership, that they decided to award Thomas J. Watson (the CEO and chairperson of IBM now) the Star of the Grand Cross of the Order of the German Eagle, with this award being the highest and most important award that could be awarded to a foreigner.

Conclusion

Much of this story has been forgotten and erased in history, as after all, American companies have a history of choosing profit over lives. IBM did all it could to cover this up, and to this day says that many of the records and files were destroyed or lost.

IBM also criticised Edwin Black, the man who is responsible for bringing this part of history in the spotlight, saying his research methods were weak and that he had accusatory conclusions, and further by saying that there was no proof that IBM ever enabled the holocaust, but has never directly denied their involvement or proof.

For over 80 years, IBM managed to walk away from this scandal. No real justice has been done, and today, we must remember the victims of the holocaust, and remember the involvement of IBM in this tragic and horrific event of our past. We must work towards a future where corporations, governments and individuals can actually be held accountable, and realise that it is not okay that anyone is able to walk away without real consequences from such actions. We must hold everyone accountable for their actions, so that one day, we can hope that justice shall be done, in the name of all those who have died.

References

Beatty, J., 2001. Hitler’s Willing Business Partners. [online] The Atlantic. Available at: <https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/04/hitlers-willing-business-partners/303146/> [Accessed 22 December 2020].

Black, E., 2012. IBM And The Holocaust. Washington, DC: Dialog Press.

Black, E., 2012. IBM’S Role In The Holocaust — What The New Documents Reveal. [online] Huffpost.com. Available at: <https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ibm-holocaust_b_1301691?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAGFngjlQnojTHchelO6EeUmFOR57F6rdDoXR4LVpcKqtxr70SYyVGhdinzO4pZRnsgnQ_4XdfJQp6Ox8NlRBmV35vrKOjxFGdl3Eroxp8eDAC0EQxU-WPb1VsE1h0zNzyyZByzZI4dX5BTLLVXLhb71SPifsYSPU66gM-EwGewin> [Accessed 22 December 2020].

Burkeman, O., 2002. IBM ‘Dealt Directly With Holocaust Organisers’. [online] The Guardian. Available at: <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/mar/29/humanities.highereducation> [Accessed 22 December 2020].

Hirsh, M., 2001. Dark Questions For Ibm. [online] Newsweek. Available at: <https://www.newsweek.com/dark-questions-ibm-155537> [Accessed 22 December 2020].