Quote:
Originally posted by Moses
If you trust ANY government with the most intimate details of your life you are no student of history or the mechanics of power. The lessons you learn will be harsh and lasting.
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Very few students of history left, Moses. That's why it's constantly "deja vu all over again."
People don't stop to think how the Nazis came to know all about their citizens: who to make wear a patch; who to cart off to camp; who to pull out of camp for slave labor/industrial development work. People don't know the numeric tattoos on concentration camp prisoners carried work specialty information coded and stored on punch cards to make it easy to make life or death decisions.
Interesting read:
"IBM and the Holocaust: the strategic alliance between Nazi Germany and America’s most powerful corporation."
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Herman Hollerith, an employee of the U.S. Census Bureau, won a contest to provide the best automated counting device to be used for the 1890 census. His “Hollerith machine”, a punch card information storage and retrieval system, became the foundation of the corporation he founded, International Business Machines (IBM). This book tells the story of how IBM, through its German subsidiary, Dehomag, knowingly and willingly afforded Nazi Germany the statistical power and efficiency to locate Jews and others for persecution and eventual extermination throughout the 1930's and continuing throughout World War II. To Americans at the time, IBM’s president, Thomas J. Watson, seemed “the nation’s chief industrial patriot”, but he was reaping profits from both Nazi Germany and the Allies - apparently without a hint of moral unease.
At first, IBM’s direct business dealings with Germany were not hidden and Watson micromanaged virtually every Dehomag decision. For his assistance in helping the Nazis conduct censuses to identify “racial Jews” down to the 1/16th level (e.g., one Jewish grandparent, as well as people in other disfavored ethnic or political categories, Watson was awarded the Merit Cross of the German Eagle with Star (second in prestige only to Hitler’s German Grand Cross) in 1937, an honor Watson proudly accepted at the International Chamber of Commerce meeting that year. Eventually, Hollerith machines would be used in record-keeping for slave labor and for the railway trains to concentration camps. Hollerith machines were onsite at the Nazi concentration camps: the tattoos burned into the flesh of inmates originally were Hollerith punch card numbers. But after the November 1938 Kristallnacht, Watson relied more on intermediaries to conduct business with Nazi Germany. IBM New York went into “don’t ask, don’t tell” mode, and Watson began to wage a successful public relations campaign to keep his all-American image intact. After all, the Allies also found Hollerith machines invaluable for their war effort. (Unfortunately, I must note that the United State did use the Hollerith machine to locate Japanese American citizens for internment.)
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