IBM and the Holocaust: Historical Comments on the book

IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation

Author: Edwin Black
Publisher: Crown; 1st edition (February 12, 2001), ISBN: 0609607995

 

I finally finished reading this book that I purchased when it first came out in 2001. As both a computer person who was trained initially on how to program the sorters that use these 80 column punch cards (IBM 557s, 029 punch verifiers, etc.) and a history buff I wanted to see how this book presented - and why - it put IBM as being the cause of the Holocaust while GM, Ford and the other American firms that were in Germany before WW II never had the same book written against them.

 

From the book the impression I got was it was really not IBM the corporation but Thomas J. Watson the President of IBM who micro-managed IBM from the 1920s onwards in pursuit of profits whose IBM machine allowed the level organization required to track rail cars, parts, production lines, and people to a degree never seen before (now common). Selling machines to increase worker productivity in the statistics department to track everyone when combined with the views of National Socialism made it possible to organize, control and use people on a organized grand scale never seen before. Jews had been killed throughout history but always in fits and starts and only when visible in a large community. Germany, through highly detailed census gathering, was able to track everyone all the time from 1933 onwards till April 1945 when communications finally broke down.

 

Unlike the US census that just counted heads, the NAZI German census data when into such detail of everyone household as to age, education, skills, religion, back to as far as their grandparents. Add in that as people moved they were required to report in to the local police whenever they moved which in turn forwarded this onto the central Government statistics office which enabled the Government to find anyone anywhere at any time. And there were always updated censuses being done.

 

IBM had, by the 1930s, effectively become the only seller of punch card technology in the world by outright lies, lawsuits, patent trolling of any firm or person who could possibly compete with them - all through the efforts of Thomas J. Watson who literally controlled everything personally.

 

Punch cards allowed firms to save money by inventory control - rail road cars - doing census work - the U.S. Government and other countries - manufacturing firms for payroll uses and really the same darn things that we do today on a PC / Mainframe but back then it was just done using punch cards.

 

Watson had every subsidiary organized in HIS name with token locals as owners just for Government paperwork requirements.

 

When Adolf Hitler was named Chancellor of Germany (Legally !!) he started to implement his racial policies. Now to do that required massive statistical data being turned into information: which only IBM could provide due to patents on punch card systems - and even the punch cards themselves.  So Germany started  leasing more and more systems - IBM never SOLD any system - only leased and SOLD the punch cards - but cards are used only once so IBM ran the business just like modern consumable marketing systems.

 

Since GERMANS worked in the IBM factories, did the sales, maintenance and so on, GERMANS tokenly ran the firm at the executive level but native GERMANS did all the work. The same was true in each country that IBM had a presence. The locals did the work, IBM NY got 75% of the profits from the leases of equipment IBM  owned - which actually Watson owned / controlled 100% of each firm.

 

Now a person is loyal to their country - and back then also to the corporation (loyalty to a corporation is largely gone, and loyalty to a country is vaporous. Many illegals loyalty to the US is gone - if ever there. (15% to 20% of the US population is here illegally so they don't really care about the US. Illegal immigrants don't care about the country they are working in, they are there to make a buck and go back to their home country - maybe - they are loyal to their home country they left.)

 

The author, Edwin Black, paints the book as one of IBM America making the Holocaust, actually Germans made it possible by using the technology at hand - and inventing some.

 

He goes into great detail showing the financial transactions that IBM did to shield its profits from taxes, creating fictional and creative ways to do so (just like Enron did) but all legal within Germany and the other countries it operated in. Now the IBM finance operational problems really starts once war starts in 1939. How can a corporation making lots of money -  under contract - be willing to break contracts lose money and leave a foreign country when their nation is NOT at war? Also, if they break a contract couldn't Germany just then seize the equipment as a forfeit to breaking a contract? Plus wars end, and you want to be able to go back and earn money rebuilding afterwards - no matters who wins.

 

An international corporation also has International Law rules that it gets to deal with when it comes to war.

 

Now in order to make money it sent punch cards to Europe throughout the war - via neutrals or direct to them before US declared war after Germany declared war on the US on Dec 10. Sending to some of the countries was not illegal since the US was NOT at war with them: Belgium, Norway France etc, but sending them cards was not in the interests of the US since those countries were controlled by Germany. Here is a distinction - unless a law is passed forbidding it you to trade with a country occupied by another - you could. There was no law on the books for that from what I could tell reading the book.

 

Now Watson (IBM) went to great lengths to hide that it was dealing with Germany after the mid- late 1930s, but it was not illegal to do business with them - just not a great public relations press release type of thing to talk about. So Watson looked at it as just another cost of doing business - unable to tout all the benefits of using IBM equipment to solve business problems that it was doing in Germany - nor any of the "business" problems that the German government were trying to "solve" with IBM gear: mobilization lists, Jew lists,  re-armament timelines, troop movements, rail efficiencies etc.

 

Here is the crux of a business problem: If IBM had pulled out in 1935 and shut down, BULL and Powers would have moved in to take over the market - they had machines like IBM and had been marginalized by IBM. Now they could have - and been ordered to do in many cases - the same things that IBM equipment did. There would have been delays for sure, maybe a year or two, but then maybe the war would have started a year or two later and Germany would have been even FUTHER ahead than they were when the war started vis a vis US and Russia.

 

Not until early 1943 did the Reich go to a full war economy: Britain had been on it since fall of 1940 and the US went immediately to it after Pearl Harbor.  A delay in the start of the 2nd World War would mean the US peacetime build up would have gone slower, no need to build when no war is going on, England would not have rushed either to a war footing whereby she got lots of new aircraft and ships from 1943 onwards, and Russia would have been better prepared at war which might have even deterred Hitler from attacking them after seizing Poland - until he had the wonder weapons and an atom bomb.

 

What it comes down to is that the Third Reich would have found a way to kill the Jews if IBM left so it did not matter if IBM was there or not.

 

Thomas J Watson however, would have felt right at home at the Enron finance department.

DOS Lives!

DOS Lives!

 

"The more things change the more they stay the same." is an oft-used quote: because it's true.
The Microsoft .NET® offering from the initial version to the 2005 version (lousy name BTW, causes typesetters and typers all sort of grammar checking problems) is going back to the roots of DOS® - Disk Operating System - that was the mainstay of the 1980s and early 1990s.
How can I say that?
Well, the concept of the "new" .NET world is that everything is self contained application where the configuration, code, working environment all stays together using web.config and ini files - wait! That's what DOS had: config.sys, autoexec.bat and ini files to control the setup environment that an application ran in - each app customized them so they would run correctly.
The only difference between DOS and .NET is that now the applications run in their own separate managed memory spaces - no QEMM 386 manager to shim on top of DOS and config.sys conflicts to worry about. The OS is just better now at ensuring no memory conflicts.
Thus, .NET is really not inventing anything new - they are just recycling the DOS way of doing system configuration using new file names of the old DOS system configuration files doing the same darn thing.

 

In a related note: Humans are the first task switching operating system. Humans cannot multi-task - they really task switch from one item to another just like a computer does. All computers task switch - the computer just does it so fast that it appears to be doing multiple things at the same time.

A Definition of an Expert

During a discussion on whether it is better to be an expert or a generalist I came up with a definition. Likely 90% of the population will not get it due to where they live now-a-days.

 

"An expert is a person who builds a silo of knowledge then asks people where they store the corn."

Adobe Reader Download- if you can find it

Adobe has gone Microsoft! Instead of allowing a person to download the latest Adobe Reader® http://www.adobe.com/ complete in one file so you can install it on another system or put it onto a CD, it ONLY allows you to install ONLINE - you cannot just download the latest Reader 7.0.7 complete one time and then take it to other systems and install it - it must be done online!

 

Now if you want to include the reader on any CD that you send out that has PDFs on it so that people can actually read it - you cannot. There is NO WAY to download just the reader without using their interactive online only download system. This is just like MS XP and Office Update systems - you must be online and download to update (On MS you can get around this if you go to each and every update page one at a time and download the update file - but that takes a LONG time to do and you must be good at knowing their internal corporate structure since they put that that site since it is located based on some weird internal corporate structure projected onto a web site and not how people think.)

 

Adobe is pretty stupid in making it impossible to download the reader which they push as being UNIVERSAL. It just it not universal to download.

 

Just because you CAN download and force installation of items online does not mean you SHOULD.

 

Using the latest technology just because you can when there is no reason to use it is stupid. It is inventing problems where none existed before - and especially when they remove ALL other options of getting it.

 

The latest download methods of forcing people to only allow installs online is one such stupidity. What if you already have the latest and want a standalone backup of it? You cannot get it. And that means wasting LOTS more time going though every single update ONLINE to get back to where you were before when you reload any system. And no matter what, you WILL reload a system every 5 to 7 years due to hardware failure of drives if anything. Sooner if you upgrade hardware.

 

 

AC Grayling book: Among the Dead Cities

A new book published on March 7, 2006 and written by A C Grayling is called "Among the Dead Cities: The History and Moral Legacy of the WWII Bombing of Civilians in Germany and Japan." A.C. Grayling is a philosophy professor at Birbeck College, University of London, United Kingdom.

 

I purchased this book because of many reasons. One reason what that it would be interesting to see how an English person viewed the war since England bore the brunt of German aerial bombing till mid 1941. The book  deals with the air war against Germany and Japan and being a member of the 8th Air Force Historical Society here in Oregon so I have a ready interest. What got me the most was that the front cover is that of a photograph that Bill Washburn of the 446th BG (H) took when he was flying combat missions in his B-24 Liberator. What swung me to really purchase it was that the dust jacket photo is also on the inside the photo caption has the planes labeled as Avro Lancasters!

 

Now, here is an Englishman writing about recent history and has this glaring error of one of the most famous photos taken during WW II, and it made me wonder what other mistakes he has made in the book - so I had to buy it just to hunt down mistakes.

 

You can see this photo that Bill took, and others that he took during his 35 mission tour at:
http://www.taphilo.com/history/8thaf/crosseyedcharlie.shtml

Industrializing Software - a 1920s Way of Efficiency

The Industrial Revolution of the early 20th Century key achievement was the invention of the modern production line. Ford Motor Company® was one of the commercial pioneers in this. This method lowered the costs to produce them which enabled them to be sold at a lower cost which then allowed more people to buy them while still making more money than before for the company.

The only drawback to this method was on the workers were now regimented and did only a few tasks - efficiently true - but without any creative input into the process.

Modern software development is going down the same path of industrialization:each person is only allowed to do a particular item as part of the whole.

Vertical Integration systems enforce this rule, "desktop management" is locking down a system to ensure uniform look and block personal changes are signs of "production line" mentality of gaining efficiency from people.

This enforcement however is re-creating a fallacy of efficiency going back to the 1920s. If is forcing people to adapt their thinking and work to a pre-designed system and not design a system to allow people on how they mentally and physically function. The time and motion studies of the 1920s cemented this fallacy.

Microsoft® research, as well as other universities and companies, all look into improving the efficiency of the input and operation of software interfaces in order to lessen the counter-intuitive way that software has traditionally been presented to the user -  which was forcing the user to adapt to it. This has been going on since the C:\> prompt days of DOS®. (Which still lives on in .NET® - a web.config file is for every app - its own customized space - which is what every DOS app had before by using a config.sys and an autoexec.bat file to define its space. Thus, after 20 years, we are back using a DOS style environment construct in a multi-task switching system. DOS LIVES!)

Management and software vendors are all moving to have discrete software components do a single task - web services - but do it well. Have interchangeable parts - XML - that can be used everywhere. The people using the software have to take what they are given from central databases and are only allowed to read it and not allowed to alter how it is presented - a production line worker - to turn out the product - in this case information - to management.

The worker has no say about the data, how it is analyzed, how it is formatted, or even if the work being done is useful - it is just ordered to be done and you are to do it.

The modern computer user is just a 1920s factory worker doing the same thing over and over again while sitting instead of standing along a production line. 

 

Portland Could Tax the Air That You Breath to Fix Budget Problems

Portland Oregon had three years to fix prepare and come up with a funding solution the Portland Public Schools System (PPSS) that they run. Of course they did not, and so at the "last minute" everyone in the administration are panicking over how to make up $50 million dollars a year shortfall to fund it at the under funded level that it was before.

The solution is simple: Tax the air that people breath.

The people in Portland do not want to pay more tax, they consider themselves overtaxed and the money they do pay badly spent. Example: Portland's sewage solution just HIDES the problem of sewage overflow but does nothing to prevent it. It is how Portland has been run for the past 50 years. Hide problems instead of solving them.

Taxing the local community if not an option so what you always do is tax people who have NO legal option to complain: tax those that do not live IN Portland but WORK in Portland.

The state already does this: It taxes people living in Washington through income tax. Portland can pass a vehicle tax - which uses the air people breath - and make anyone who works within Portland, delivers to Portland, or just drives into and stops within the city pay a $120 a year in an "air quality" fee - can't call it a tax but you can charge fees and raise them without any problem. 

The state does it to truckers - they must get permits to travel on Oregon roads - so there is already a precedent to tax people who do not live in your state to travel through.

Like in other states that apply stickers to show that you paid vehicle tax, Portland would do the same for any vehicle that parks within the city.

The ever present parking patrols would just see if there is a sticker on a vehicle, if not a $10 "air quality enforcement citation" is placed on the car.

The best part is that since so many people live outside Portland but work in the city, they can complain to their elected officials all they want and nothing could be done about it - their elected officials have no authority over Portland!

It is the "golden glow" that comes over any taxing authority: Tax people who have no elected official to speak on their behalf to the taxing authority and the money collected does not have to be spent on the people who paid it.

And finally, they will have a way to tax the air that you breath - all for the public good.

 

 

Modern Government Uses Golden Hammers

Golden Hammer:

 

 "A familiar technology or concept is applied obsessively to many problems"