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----- Original Message -----
From: PVonstrohe@aol.com
To: m.f@zoomtown.com
Sent: Saturday, June 07, 2003 5:36 PM
Subject: To Mr Edwin Black on his new Book IBM & the Holocaust
Dear Mr Black
Permit me to comment on some of the statementsin your book, IBM and the Holocaust.
1.When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, most of the world saw a menace to humanity.
Only those interested in making war with Germany saw Hitler as a menace; many many others, eg. Sir Lloyd George, King Edward, C Lindbergh, etc. saw him as a saviour for a country being shafted by a lying US President - one of a whole line of them I must admit.
2. But IBM saw Nazi Germany as a lucrative trading partner.
So did many other US Firms, including Ford and Coca Cola. etc etc etc
3. Its president, Thomas J. Watson, engineered a strategic business alliance between IBM and the Reich, beginning in the first days of the Hitler regime and continuing right through World War II. This alliance catapulted Nazi Germany to become IBM's most important customer outside the U.S. IBM and the Nazis jointly designed, and IBM exclusively produced, technological solutions that enabled Hitler to accelerate and in many ways automate key aspects of his persecution of Jews, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, and others the Nazis considered enemies. Custom-designed, IBM-produced punch cards, sorted by IBM machines leased to the Nazis, helped organize and manage the initial identification and social expulsion of Jews and others.
So did many Jewish groups such as the IRGUN Zwai LeUMI. Havaraa was a pact between Zionists and Nazis, I shouldn't need to tell you that. As for the ghettoization of Jews...give me a break pleeeeze ...Jews need Ghettos or ERUVs for their religious rituals...they are just completing one in Sydney, Australia, right now. Religious Jews have ALWAYS lived in ghettos this was no nazi idea! Ghettos existed long before there were Nazis.
4. ... the confiscation of their property, their ghettoization, their deportation, and, ultimately, even their extermination.
And that's how the trains to Auschwitz ran on time.
Documents were obtained from IBM files shipped to NYU for processing and from scores of other archival sources here and abroad. Not a single sentence written by IBM personnel has been discovered in any of the documents questioning the morality of automating the Third Reich, even when headlines proclaimed the mass murder of Jews.
The 'HEADLINES' were proclaiming the Holocaust on 6 million Jews in Oct. 1919 already...the mass murder of Jews has been part of their Talmud history since Roman times...US Archives show clearly that on the 18th Nov 1944 John McCloy on behalf of the US War ministry announced the US would NOT bomb the camps and they made this announcement AFTER communicating with the German Govt through their Swiss and Irish Consulates, about alleged atrocities going on in the camps. The US also interviewed people who had been released or escaped from Auschwitz. The US then concluded no mass murders were occuring in Auschwitz.
5. IBM was the sole source of all punch cards and spare parts, and it serviced the machines on-site—whether at Dachau or in the heart of Berlin—either directly or through its authorized dealer network or field trainees. There were no universal punch cards. Each series was custom-designed by IBM engineers not only to capture the information going in, but also to tabulate the information the Nazis wanted to come out.
IBM constantly updated its machinery and applications for the Nazis. For example, one series of punch cards was designed to record religion, national origin, and mother tongue, but by creating special columns and rows for Jew, Polish language, Polish nationality, the fur trade as an occupation, and then Berlin, Nazis could quickly cross-tabulate, at the rate of 25,000 cards per hour, exactly how many Berlin furriers were Jews of Polish extraction. Railroad cars, which could take two weeks to locate and route, could be swiftly dispatched in just 48 hours by means of a vast network of punch-card machines. Indeed, IBM services coursed through the entire German infrastructure in Europe.
Of course OTHER so called Historians try and tell us the Germans were very 'diffuse' only spoke using 'code' words to hide their atrocities and yet you now say they were absolutely accurate in their recording.... AND WHY NOT? I ask. You know as well as I do that 90% of the people in camps were criminals !
Did IBM also sell machines to the US Government for keeping their fingers on Japanese and Germans and Italians in US concentration camps? Of course not, the mighty US wouldn't keep census on foreigners would it? After all, the US is the largest democracy in the universe; just ask your President!
6. The war broke out on September 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland. Germany annexed northwestern Poland...
Most of which had been German territory that had been annexed by the Polish Militia leader KORFANTY just after WW1...you conveniently forget to mention that before German troops moved into Poland, more than 58.000 Germans had been driven from their lands, many had been murdered or deported, or that on 5 September 1939 Polish Militia wiped out the village of Bromberg killing 5,700 Germans... you are very one sided in your noting of 'Unrecht' - injustices, are you not?
7.Germany had plans. Polish Jews, during a sequence of sudden relocations, were to be catalogued forfurther action in a massive cascade of repetitive censuses and registrations with up-to-date information being instantly available to various Nazi planning agencies and occupation offices. How much usable forced labor for armament factories could they generate? How many thousands would die of starvation each month?
Did Not Himmler himself send out an executive order to all camps demanding the death tolls be reduced dramatically? Answer: Yes he did ... his letter is in the public domain.
8. including those that sent Jews to their death in Auschwitz.
Including those hundreds of thousands that were not sent to their deaths but survived Auschwitz, I gather?
9. Leon Krzemieniecki is probably the only man still living who worked in that Hollerith department. It must be emphasized that Krzemieniecki did not understand any of the details of the genocidal train destinations. His duties required tabulating information on all trains, from ordinary passenger to freight trains, but only after their arrival.
What? I thought in those days the the whole world, including the US, 'knew' about the Nazi Genocide on Jews but this one guy didn't? Why not? - apart from being deaf was he also unable to read? What a copout!
10. The high-security five-room office, guarded by armed railway police, was equipped with 15 punchers, two sorters, and a tabulator "bigger than a sofa." Fifteen Polish women punched the cards and loaded the sorters. Three German nationals supervised the office, overseeing the final tabulations and summary statistics in great secrecy. Handfuls of printouts were reduced to a small envelope of summary data, which was then delivered to a secret destination. Truckloads of the preliminary printouts were then regularly burned, along with the spent cards, Krzemieniecki told me in an interview.
You want us to believe that more than 15 Poles were working in the office and it was all 'secret' they talked to no-one, not even the Polish underground - who even volunteered and smuggled themselves into the Auschwitz camp? How naive do you think we are?
11. "We can count on the mortality of some subjugated groups," one Arlt article asserted. "These include babies and those over the age of 65, as well as those who are basically weak and ill in all other age groups."
Oh well, there's something new ...wow nowhere else in the world is there anything like infant mortality,or do people over 65 die when there is a world ware going on around them except in Nazi held territory?
12. The expanded Statistics Office assured Berlin in a November 30, 1941, report that its Hollerith operation would employ equipment more modern than the old IBM machinery found in most pre-war Polish data agencies, thus allowing the Nazis to launch a plethora of "large-scale censuses." Also planned was a long list of "continuous statistical surveys," including those for population, domestic migration, and causes of death. Moreover, regular surveys of food and agriculture were "coupled with summary surveys of the population and ethnic groups." Tabulating food supplies against ethnic numbers allowed the Nazis to ration caloric intake as they subjected the Jewish community to starvation.
Not according to the Ration Cards, stamped with a J that I have in front of me, and not according to the official Auschwitz information booklet that says Jews received between 1300-1700 calories per day... In 1945-1946 most Germans were on less than 900 calories a day.
In Australia we say 'So bloody what?' So the Nazis used computers to track citizens or non-citizens. Is that not being done in your country right now? So, why the hypocrisy? Oh, I know. The 'B' in Black is for business, right?
Gee, Mr Black ,this Book has all the hallmarks of being a big seller in the USA because it's been written for people with an IQ no greater than my shoe size.
Paul - an Australian non-historian.
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The Statistics Office's report concluded, "Our work is just beginning to bear fruit."
Edwin Black is the author of IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation (Crown Books, 2001, and Three Rivers Press, 2002), just released in paperback with new information. He can be reached at http://www.edwinblack.com/.
