14 Jun
2011
14 Jun
'11
11:59 p.m.
On 15 Jun 2011 at 5:37, vintagecoder at aol.com wrote:
IBM started out as a German company. There was a book
put out after
research done by Edwin Black showing IBM was part of the Nazi war
apparatus, since they needed information processing capabilities to
identify "enemies of the state" and round them up for execution.
Excuse me? I'd always been given to believe that CTR was formed from
a merger of various operations, including meat processing, scales,
time clocks and punched card equipment and subsequently renamed IBM.
I recall from first seeing mention in the IEEE Annals of Computing (I
still have the issue) that the Reich Rassenamt made extensive use of
Hollerith card equipment from IBM's German subsidiary, Dehomag
(Deutsche Hollerith-Maschinen GmbH). While correspondence shows that
the chairman of Dehomag was a deplorable sycophant; it's not clear to
me that T.J. Watson Sr. was interested in anything except the
Reich's money.
Indeed that attitude can be seen in the Prescott Bush and his
involvement in Union Banking Corporation, controlled by the Thyssen
family who used their banking connections to move Third Reich money
and gold around secretly in direct violation of U.S. law.
From my reading, it's not entirely clear how much
direct effect IBM's
involvement in the Rassenamt figured in the crimes against
humanity
carried out by the Third Reich.
Here is a (rather bad) reproduction of a poster that was also part of
the Annals article:
http://soup.tomster.org/post/7762021/bersicht-mit-Hollerith-
Lochkarten-The-graphics-artist
Somehow, the poster seems to be in the same vein of some of the of
materials pitched to various Federal agencies today. The
wiretapping, data-mining, profiling, etc. capabilities of today would
have seemed like a fantastic dream to an SS boss.
--Chuck