World War Two was full of very terrible atrocities, foremost among them being the murder of six million Jews during the Holocaust. In this article, Felix Debieux looks at how the sheer number of people murdered during the Holocaust was possible, with a particular focus on the role of the company IBM.

Edwin Black, author of the book *IBM and the Holocaust*. Source: Juda Engelmayer, available here.

The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, better known as the Genocide Convention, represents a landmark in the field of international law. It was the first human rights treaty adopted by the UN General Assembly, and the first legal apparatus used to codify genocide as a crime. Since 1948, it has signified the international community’s commitment to ‘never again’ after the atrocities committed during the Second World War.

Ensuring that genocide is never repeated means providing the crime with a tight, verifiable definition. The treaty has this covered. “Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”:

Killing members of a group.
Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of a group.
Deliberately inflicting on a group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.
Imposing measures intended to prevent births within a group.
Forcibly transferring children of a group to another group.

A legal framework for genocide, however, has not prevented the murder of countless innocents since the end of the Second World War. From Rwanda to Cambodia, history is littered with appalling episodes of human-inflicted suffering which meet the technical threshold for genocide. Each episode is unique in its origins and execution. Also unique are the experiences of those who have survived genocide, each group having fought for justice with varying degrees of success.

Anyone who has read even a little into the subject of genocide is very likely to have stumbled into the, at times, vociferous debate surrounding the uniqueness of one genocide in particular: the murder of six million Jews during the Holocaust. This article isn’t about to intervene in the debate; a morbid contest of ‘who-suffered-the-most' is neither enlightening nor sensitive to the victims of genocide. It will, however, agree with those who attest to the uniqueness of the Holocaust on one thing: that the sheer number of people murdered would not have been possible were it not for the unprecedented application by the Nazis of advanced industrial, scientific and technological capabilities.

Where did the Nazis obtain these capabilities, the logistical capacity to manage the identification, transportation, ghettoization and extermination of so many? A full answer to this question means looking beyond the Nazi government itself, and considering the partnerships the regime forged with private companies. Indeed, companies implicated in the Holocaust range from Audi and BMW - who maximised the opportunities afforded by slave labour - to Deutsche Bank, who provided loans for the construction of Auschwitz. One company which perhaps contributed more than any other was the US multinational company IBM (International Business Machines Corporation), whose tabulation technology was used to track individuals, monitor their movements, and ultimately facilitate their transportation across a network of prison, labour and extermination camps. IBM technology, quite literally, ensured that the trains to Auschwitz ran on time. How did the company become involved in the Holocaust, how much deniability can it claim, and what does this tell us about corporate complicity in human rights abuses?

IBM’s origins

To understand IBM’s part in the Holocaust, we first need to take a look at the company’s roots in early data processing and the US census. This is not as dull is it might sound. Back in the 1880s, the US Census Bureau employed a young German-American statistician named Herman Hollerith. Hollerith would go on to make a name for himself as a seminal figure in the development of data processing, eventually founding a company that in 1911 was amalgamated to form the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR) - renamed in 1924 as IBM. The young statistician’s role in this story is critical.

While working for the US Census Bureau, Hollerith conceived the idea that would make his company rich: readable cards with standardised perforations, each representing individual traits such as nationality, sex, and occupation. When produced in their millions, these punch cards could be counted in the national census and tabulated based on the specific information they contained about each citizen. This innovation promised the US government a quantified snapshot of its population, filterable using demographic characteristics such as sex or occupation. One of CTR’s first customers was the US Census Bureau, which contracted the company to tabulate the 1890 census.

Fast forward to the 1930s, and IBM had established itself as a major player in the global computing industry with a number of offices across Europe. Chief among them was Dehomag, IBM’s German subsidiary, headed by Chief Executive and enthusiastic Hitler supporter Willy Heidinger. The ability to quantify and analyse entire populations like never before would, naturally, greatly interest a regime hellbent on purifying its citizenry of undesirables. But how did the latest tools and techniques in data processing fall into Nazi hands? For a second time, we find that a national census provided the opportunity for IBM to showcase its technology.

A lucrative partnership

Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 was met with a spectrum of reactions. Where some saw a threat to peace, others quickly grasped at the business opportunities presented by regime change. Among those who sought to capitalise was IBM president Thomas J. Watson, who from the very first days of the Nazi government manoeuvred to form a partnership. Despite widespread international calls to boycott the new regime, Watson inserted himself extremely closely into the management of IBM’s German operation. Indeed, between 1933 and 1939, Watson travelled to Berlin at least twice annually to personally supervise Dehomag’s work. In this period, the Nazi government would become one of IBM’s most important overseas clients.

On April 12, 1933, Dehomag was presented with a huge opportunity to cement the partnership. This was the date on which the Nazis announced plans to conduct a long-delayed national census, a project which would enable identification of Jews, Roma and other minority groups deemed subhuman by the new order. First in line to offer their services was Dehomag, backed at every step by IBM’s US headquarters. Indeed, Watson personally travelled to Germany in October that year, and drastically expanded investment in Dehomag from 400,000 Reichsmarks to a staggering 7,000,000. This injection of capital gave Dehomag the means to purchase land in Berlin, and to start construction of IBM’s first German factory. The scaling up of operations in Germany would prepare IBM to take on a bigger role in Nazi atrocities. Indeed, it was tabulated census data that enabled the Nazis to expand their estimate of 400,000 to 600,000 Jews living in Germany to 2,000,000.

Some part of Watson must have known that his company's partnership with the Third Reich was immoral, if not embarrassing. Tellingly, he took great pains to ensure deniability through his continued insistence on direct verbal instructions to his German staff. Nothing was written down, even in the case of high-value contracts. And yet there was no denying the tight leash with which Watson directed business. For instance, correspondence written in German was translated by the IBM New York office for Watson’s personal comment. In one anecdote, German staff recalled having to wait for Watson’s express permission before they were allowed to paint a corridor. Watson’s tenure as CEO would see IBM’s partnership with the Nazis grow more intimate still.

Business gets intimate

Writing at a time in which multinational corporations are heavily scrutinised in the public eye for any role – no matter how small – in human rights abuses, we might be forgiven for assuming that IBM maintained at least some semblance of distance from the atrocities taking place across Nazi-occupied Europe. The reality, however, is much more disturbing. As the regime’s sole supplier of punch cards and spare parts, IBM trainees (or sometimes authorised dealers) were required to be physically present when servicing their tabulation machines – even those located at infamous sites like Dachau. More chilling still, each IBM machine was tailor-made to not only tabulate inputted information, but also to produce data which the Nazis were interested in analysing. There were no universal punch cards, and so IBM’s role in servicing the machines ensured that they continued to operate at maximum efficiency.

To give a sense of how it worked, it might be helpful to describe an application of IBM tabulation technology in action. One set of punch cards, for example, recorded religion, nationality and mother tongue. By creating additional columns and rows for ‘Jew’, ‘Polish language’, ‘Polish nationality’, ‘Berlin’, and ‘fur trade’, the Nazis were able to cross-tabulate at a rate of 25,000 cards per hour to identify precisely how many Berlin furriers were Jews of Polish origin. Train cars, which previously would have taken two weeks to mobilise, could be quickly dispatched in just two days by means of an immense network of IBM punch card machines. This same technology was also put to use in concentration camps. Each camp maintained its own Hollerith-Abteilung (Hollerith Department), assigned with keeping tabs on inmates through the use of IBM's punch cards. The machines were so sophisticated that they were even capable of matching the skills of prisoners with projects that needed slave labour. Chillingly, IBM’s code for a Jewish inmate was “6” and the code it used for gas chamber was “8”.

While Nazi Germany extended its domination across Europe, there is no evidence to suggest that IBM paused at any point to reflect on its role in facilitating industrial-scale murder. On the contrary, each nation that fell to the Nazi war machine was subjected to a census, which relied on the machinery and punch cards supplied by IBM. At the same time as Europe’s Jews were murdered in their millions, IBM decision-makers in New York were gleefully carving up sales territories. Edwin Black, who's 2001 book first bought to light the company’s instrumental role in the Holocaust, warns us not to think of IBM’s partnership with the Nazis as some rogue corporate element operating out of a basement. Far from it. This was a carefully micro-managed alliance spanning twelve years, which generated profit up until the last gasp of Hitler’s monstrous regime.

Legacy: IBM’s reaction and the role of big tech in genocide today

Revisiting his book twenty years later, Edwin Black makes the point that – with or without IBM – there would always have been a Holocaust. ‘Einsatzgruppen murder squads and their militia cohorts would still have heinously murdered East European Jews bullet by bullet in pits, ravines, and isolated clearings in the woods’. The question, however, is would the Nazis have been able to annihilate as many victims as they did without the data processing power offered by IBM technology? For Edwin, the answer to that question is never in doubt. IBM is responsible for facilitating the ‘industrial, high-speed, six-million-person Holocaust, metering ghetto residents out to trains, then carefully scheduling those trains to concentration camps for murder and cremation within hours, thus clearing the way for the next shipment of victims—day and night’. Put it another way: without IBM, the death toll of the Holocaust would be measured in the hundreds of thousands, not in the millions.

To date, IBM has never directly denied any of the evidence of its role in the Holocaust. The company has previously insisted that most of its records from Europe were lost or destroyed during the war, and that it has no other information it can share about its operations during that time. It would seem IBM sees little benefit in attempting to refute or downplay its part in the Holocaust. Indeed, in the twenty years since Black published his book, he reminds us that ‘IBM has never requested a correction or denied any facts’. Since 2001, each edition of the book has provided further evidence of the company’s guilt.

Are there any lessons that we can draw from IBM’s role in the Holocaust? Importantly, the company’s facilitation of mass murder is a stark reminder of the power of data in the wrong hands. Indeed, we do not have to look too hard to find examples of authoritarian regimes using data to perpetuate genocide even today. From China's use of facial recognition technology to monitor and persecute its Uighur population, to Myanmar's use of social media to incite violence against Rohingya Muslims, we are bearing witness to new and alarming ways in which data is weaponised to inflict human rights abuses. While we do of course need to be vigilant about the ways in which governments – our own or further afield – might use data, we also need to remain extremely wary of non-governmental actors. Indeed, if IBM’s story shows us anything, it is that large multinational corporations are adept at evading accountability and continuing to function with impunity. Despite the millions that such organisations spend on PR management and glossy marketing campaigns, it is critical that we remain suspicious of what big tech can do to surveil, censor and unduly influence our lives.

What do you think of the role IBM in the Holocaust? Let us know below.

Now read Felix’s article on Henry Ford’s calamitous utopia in Brazil: Fordlandia Here.