AUGUST 2004

Indeed why is this word used by the Zionists? It has become part and parcel of the establishment of the Israeli State in Palestine. This word has dedicated memorials and museums all over the world to the victims of Nazi Germany's Concentration Camps, exclusively Jews. What other memorials are there to the dead from British concentration Camps in south Africa; to those in Palestine; to those from WorldWar II - gypsies, and Communists; to those in Soviet Russian Gulags?If any, the word "holocaust" is never used.

To examine this it is necessary to enquire into the earliest days of the Zionist mind-set, debate and propaganda at the beginning of the 20thCentury. A volume of History: Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, A Reappraisal , by Lenni Brenner (1983) gives all the data required.

It has to be emphasised that the Zionist project for an Israeli Nation State was not founded on religious principles. To quote Brenner : Max Nordau gave an interview to Edward Drumont's rabid anti-semite Newspaper, La Libre Parole, on Dec.21,1903, in which he said that Zionism was not a question of religion, but exclusively of race, and "there is no one with whom I am in greater agreement on this point than M.Drumont."

Elswhere Bremmer writes "throughout the First World War the German Zionists passionately supported their own government. For all their grandiose intellectual pretentions, their volkisch Zionism was simply an imitation of German Nationalist ideology....Labour Zionism became a kind of counter-culture sect, denouncing Jewish Marxists for their internationalism, and the Jewish middle-class as parasitic exploiters of the "host" nations....Germany's Jews (0.9% of the population) were generally prosperous: 60% of those were businessmen or professionals; the rest artisans,clerks,students, with only insubstantial numbers of industrial workers.

In addition Bremmer quotes Vladek: "It is my contention that the main purpose of the Transfer (of Jews to Palestine) is not to rescue the Jews from Germany, but to strengthen various institutions in Palestine" and furthermore points out "the Jewish Organisations were not interested in the vast majority of Germany's Jews, since these were not Zionists, did not speak Hebrew, were too old and ofcourse did not have the "right" trades. As Jabotinsky observed: Zionism is a colonising adventure and therefore it stands or falls by the question of armed force. To make quite sure that his readers understand the implications Bremmer quotes a Robert Gessner who stated that "We want a Jewish Empire. Just like there is the Italian or French on the Mediterranean, we want a Jewish Empire."

In considering other European Jews who had already emigrated to Palestine Bremmer writes of the Poles, who " were solving their own problems, but their tiny establishments could never become the basis of a Zionist economy, an absolute essential if they were ever to wrest the country from the Arabs." He goes on to point out that eventually the land boom collapsed, leading to the ruin of many of the little shopkeepers and large unemployment in the building trades;.... although the fall in prices suited the JNF, they now had to cope with the needs of the unemployed.The experience produced drastic policy changes, and it was then determined that they could not afford the social costs of petty-bourgeois immigration."

As early as 1924 Weizmann began to denounce the new settlers, whom he saw as carrying with them “the atmosphere of the ghetto”, and he warned that “we are not building our National Home on the model of Djika and Nalevki (ghettos)... here we have reached home and are building for eternity”.

These statements serve to establish that Zionist Israel is primarily a racial and economically focused nation state. The results of these limits and barriers to the wholesale transfer of Jews to Palestine, with parellel limits set by the English Mandate Forces ensured that thousands of Jews were sent with other undesirables of the German Nazi conquests to forced labour concentration camps where thousands died from typhus and the murderous brutality of the German Military who lost all sense of discipline - a mental condition that drives the core of wars (as we now see in Iraq).The end of the war culminated in a count of millions and the Jewish victims were designated "Holocaust" victims.

History of Ritual Sacrifice

To turn now exclusively to the use of this word 'holocaust' which is an English word derived from the Hebrew, olah, meaning "to go up", a religious a sacrifice which is taken up onto the alter, or, more probably, whose smoke "goes up" to God, as a mediation between God and man, when it is burnt:

The characteristic feature of this sacrifice is that the entire victim, a male animal, is burnt and that nothing is given back to the man, who must be in a state of ritual purity, that offers it - or to the priest.

The offering is presented by the man who lays his hands on the head of the victim which signifies that the sacrifice comes from this particular individual only.

The history of this sacrifice originated as the earliest known fundamental Hebrew sacrifice, alongside the 'communion sacrifice "zebah".The "zebah", which in the Israeli practice, presents it as a sacrifice of thanksgiving to God which also brings about union with him. But this second ritual is shared, in that the animal victim is eaten by the person offering the sacrifice, the priest, and God, whose share is laid on the altar.

The origin or myth or tradition of these two types of sacrifice is written in Judges 6;26,28 when Gideon prepares a meal for the visitation of the Angel of Yaweh, that is then transformed into a holocaust by flames that shoot out of rock. Thus "zebah" becomes "olah" because of Gideon's misunderstanding of the moment of vision. This and other similar stories created the basic rituals of the first religious sacrifices undertaken by the Israelis in Palestine, largely regarded as laws handed down by Moses.

The holocaust and the communion sacrifice did not exist among the people of Mesopotamia. Some scholars have thought that the Jewish ritual which was composed during the Exile had been influenced by Babylonian ritual which appears to have been the scented burning of certain herbs, a ritual that enabled the communion of God and man through the smoke that rose up in the air. .Among the Bedouin, in ancient times, offerings of flour and libations of milk were known. Indeed they used no altar in the sense that the Hebrew does. However in Southern Arabia the religious rituals practised resembled the Hebrew in many respects but there seems to have been no holocaust. Herbs and incense only were burnt at the altars. However the people of Canaan's sacrificial rituals resembled the Hebrew in every respect though given up to a variety of Gods. The ritual of holocaust at the altar is also a Greek ritual.There is ofcourse a great deal of material in reference to anciet rituals of human sacrifice, that I will not go into. Roland De Vaux's, Ancient Israel, Its life and Institutions gave me all this information.And further he outlines as follows:

Sacrifice is the essential act of external worship. It is a prayer which is acted, a symbolic action which expresses both the interior feelings of the person offering it, and God's response to this prayer. It is rather like the symbolic action of the prophets. By sacrificial rites the gift made to God is accepted, union with God is achieved, and the guilt of man is taken away. But these effects are not achieved by magic; it is essential that the external action should express the true inward feelings of man, and that it should be favourably received by God. Failing this, sacrifice is no longer a religious act..............................................Sacrifice is something more than tribute... The victims are domesticated animals which man needs to support his life - he deprives hmself of them - by doing so he loses the gift, but he also gains something, for (it is supposed) the acceptance of the gift involves God in an obligation.... Holocaust: transfers the gift into the realm of the invisible...The rites themselves make this even clearer; sacrifice is essentially connected with the altar, for the altar is the symbol, or the reminder, of God's presence, a mediation between God and man....From this point of view the holocaust may be considered the most perfect sacrifice, for man receives nothing of it, and all is burnt........... The sacrificial code in Leviticus ascribes an expiatory (effacing sin) value to the holocaust. Blood played an important part in all animal sacrifices and according to Lv 17; 11, the blood was given to men ' to perform the rite of expiation on the altar.'....... the expiatory sacrifice was of ancient origin in Israel, but this kind of sacrifice was developed and became much more important when great national calamities brought home to the people the sense of its own guilt, and when the nation developed a more acute sense of sin and of Yaweh's demands.

HOLOCAUST

'Holocaust' is thus primarily a word specifying burnt "sacrifice to Yaweh". Could the modern use of this word to define the Jewish victims, who died of German military brutality and murder, starvation, and typhus, symbolize a confession of guilt by the Zionists? ....such as that of Chaim Weizman and others, who refused entry to Israel of thousands of impoverished Jews in the 1920&30's

Chaim Weizmann: 1934 On 26 April he specifically excluded several important groupings from serious consideration as immigrants: “former businessmen, commercial travellers, artists, and musicians will this time hardly be eligible for certificates”. Newspaper report: “we know that we are not able to transfer all of German Jewry and will have to choose on the basis of the cruel criteria of Zionism”. In 1935 Moshe Sharett (Shertok) again declared that circumstances obliged them to treat Diaspora Jewry with “a degree of cruelty.”

..At the time, only rich jews from the industrial and mercantile areas of Europe, were welcome, and were part of the contract made with the Germans, in regard to freeing up the sanctions against German goods, in Israel..I quote Lennie Bremmer again here::The financial deal with Germany re. goods bought by jews, exported and sold again...... .Such were the minds of the leading figures of the Zionist movement in 1935 as they trooped into their summer Congress at Lucerne. Publicly on record as denying that the Ha’avara had anything to do with them, secretly they were doing all they could to extend it. In every respect their thinking and their policies were at odds with the immense majority of the Jews of the world.

It would look as though the Zionists, by placing holocaust memorials in so many places all over the world, are trapping all living and Religious Jews into a system of religious guilt for the real establishment of the modern Israeli State as we know it.The exceptional revenge in treatment of Vannunu(18 years of unrelieved solitary confinement),also points to this. Vanunu has again been told that he may not leave Israel, although released from his harsh and cruel imprisonment .

,This extensive memorialising and the "anti-semitic" threat propaganda that is parellell, and taken up into various international Laws has become a historic mission. Guilt manifestation is often supported by lies that hide unfortunate gaps in time or truth.

Is the victimistation of Vannunu yet another example that the Zionists are unable to let any manifestation of truth interrupt their ceaseless attempt to expand in the Middle East at the expense of Arab lives, and the lives of soldiers of any ally they can sufficiently corrupt to comply with their crazed plan of "imperial" democracy. This ofcourse includes the ambitions of American Zionists who would like to see both Jewish Prime Minister and President in the puppet regimes of England and USA. The Zionists from their earliest days have always thought that money can buy anything, and it is worthless printed paper money, dollars, that pays overlords of every description in this sad little animal world of plutocrats and business men and women.

The Zionists publically deride the religious Jew by commemorating the 'Holocaust' of their national pretentions.There are other implications involved with the World Trade Centre Memorial that was to be designed by Daniel Liberskind who now requires enromous sums of money for his design of the eternal glass flame, no longer considered acceptable as it would take up space on which buildings for financial speculation must be constructed.

.Zionism in the Age of the Dictators,A Reappraisal, (1983)Lenni Brenner
Ancient Israel, Its Life and Institutions,(1961) Roland De Vaux

IBM WORKED FOR NAZI GERMANY

by Edwin Black
March 27 - April 2, 2002

When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, most of the world saw a menace to humanity. But IBM saw Nazi Germany as a lucrative trading partner. 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, the confiscation of their property, their ghettoization, their deportation, and, ultimately, even their extermination.

Recently discovered Nazi documents and Polish eyewitness testimony make clear that IBM's alliance with the Third Reich went far beyond its German subsidiary. A key factor in the Holocaust in Poland was IBM technology provided directly through a special wartime Polish subsidiary reporting to IBM New York, mainly to its headquarters at 590 Madison Avenue.

And that's how the trains to Auschwitz ran on time.

Thousands of IBM documents reviewed for the first edition of my book 'IBM and the Holocaust,' published early last year and focused mainly on IBM's German subsidiary, revealed vigorous efforts to preserve IBM's monopoly in the Nazi market and increase contracts to meet wartime sales quotas.

Since then, continued research and interviews have uncovered details, described here for the first time, of IBM's work for the Nazis in Poland through the separate subsidiary and of the Polish subsidiary's direct contact with IBM officials on Madison Avenue.

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.

IBM's German subsidiary was Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen Gesellschaft, known by the acronym Dehomag. (Herman Hollerith was the German American who first automated U.S. census information in the late 19th century and founded the company which became IBM. Hollerith's name became synonymous with the machines and the Nazi "departments" that operated them.)

Watson tightly managed the lucrative German operation, traveling to Berlin at least twice annually from 1933 until 1939 to personally supervise Dehomag. Major German correspondence was translated for review by the New York office and often for Watson's personal comment. Before big new accounts were accepted, Watson had to assent. For deniability, he insisted on making direct verbal instructions to his German managers the rule rather than exception—even in place of major contracts. Once, when German managers wanted to paint a corridor, they awaited his specific permission. Watson's auditors continuously tracked the source and status of every reichsmark and pfennig—in one typical case, exchanging numerous transatlantic letters over the disposition of just a few dollars. Not infrequently, Dehomag managers objected to his "domination." Understandably, IBM's lawyers and managers in Berlin personally updated Watson constantly, and generally signed their reports, "Awaiting your further instructions."

No machines were sold to the Nazis—only leased. 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.

The war broke out on September 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland. Germany annexed northwestern Poland; the remaining Polish territory in Nazi hands was treated as "occupied" and called the "General Government." That annexed northwestern quadrant was serviced by IBM's German subsidiary, Dehomag, mainly to handle the payrolls of Silesian coal mines and heavy industry. At about that time, IBM New York established a special subsidiary, Watson Business Machines, to deal with the General Government. It remained completely legal for IBM to service the Third Reich until just before America entered the war in December 1941.

The savaging of Poland was no secret to IBM executives. From the outset, worldwide headlines reported barbarous massacres, rapes, purposeful starvation, systematic deportations, and the resulting unchecked epidemics. As early as September 13, 1939, The New York Times reported the Reich's determination to make Polish Jewry disappear, a headline declaring, "Nazis Hint Purge of Jews in Poland." A subhead added, "3,000,000 Population Involved." The article quoted the German government's plan for the "removal of the Polish Jewish population from the European domain." The Times added, "How . . . the 'removal' of Jews from Poland [can be achieved] without their extermination . . . is not explained."

Germany had plans. Polish Jews, during a sequence of sudden relocations, were to be catalogued for further 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? A spectrum of Nazi census, registration, and statistical tabulation was performed on custom-designed IBM punch-card programs and machinery.

On September 9, 1939, Dehomag general manager Hermann Rottke wrote directly to Watson in New York, asking for advanced equipment. Rottke reminded Watson, "During your last visit in Berlin at the beginning of July, you made the kind offer to me that you might be willing to furnish the German company machines from Endicott [an IBM factory near Binghamton] in order to shorten our long delivery terms. . . . You have complied with this request, for which I thank you very much, and have added that in cases of urgent need, I may make use of other American machines. . . . You will understand that under today's conditions, a certain need has arisen for such machines, which we do not build as yet in Germany. Therefore, I should like to make use of your kind offer and ask you to leave with the German company . . . the alphabetic tabulating machines. . . . "

Eighteen days later, a vanquished Warsaw formally capitulated. The next day, September 28, IBM's general manager in Geneva, J.W. Schotte, telephoned Berlin to confirm Watson's permission for the new equipment.

Meanwhile, Reinhard Heydrich, chief of Heinrich Himmler's Security Service, the SD, had already circulated a top-secret letter to the chiefs of his Einsatzgruppen, which evolved into mobile killing units. Heydrich's September 21 memo, titled "The Jewish Question in the Occupied Territory," laid out a plan of population control through a sequence of strategic censuses and registrations. It began, "I would like to point out once more that the total measures planned (i.e., the final aim) are to be kept strictly secret." First, Jews were to be relocated to so-called concentration towns at "either railroad junctions or at least on a railway." Addressing the zone from east of Kraków to the former Czechoslovakian-Polish border, Heydrich directed, "Within this territory, only a temporary census of Jews need be taken." Heydrich demanded that "the chiefs of the Einsatzgruppen report to me continually regarding . . . the census of Jews in their districts. . . . "

Shortly thereafter, Heydrich sent a follow-up cable to his occupying forces in Poland, Upper Silesia, and Czechoslovakia, outlining how a new December 17 census would escalate the process from mere identification and cataloguing to deportation and execution. Heydrich's memo entitled "Evacuation of the New Eastern Provinces" decreed, "The evacuation of Poles and Jews in the new Eastern Provinces will be conducted by the Security Police. . . . The census documents provide the basis for the evacuation. All persons in the new provinces possess a copy. The census form is the temporary identification card giving permission to stay. Therefore, all persons have to hand over the card before deportation. . . . Anyone caught without this card is subject to possible execution. . . . "

Quantifying and organizing the deportation of millions of people from various regions across Eastern Europe could take years using pencils and paper. Relying upon the lightning speed of Hollerith machines, it took just days. Heydrich assured, "That means the large-scale evacuation can begin no sooner than around January 1, 1940." Nazi Germany employed only one method for conducting a census: IBM punch-card processes, each one designed for the specific census.

In Nazi Poland, railroads constituted about 95 percent of the IBM subsidiary's business, using as many as 21 million punch cards annually. Watson Business Machines was headquartered at Kreuz 23 in Warsaw. And one of its important customer sites, newly discovered since the first edition of my book was published a year ago, was the Hollerith department of Polish Railways, at 22 Pawia Street in Kraków. This office kept tabs on all trains in the General Government, including those that sent Jews to their death in Auschwitz.

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.

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.

As a forced laborer, Krzemieniecki was compelled to work as a "sorter and tabulator" 10 hours per day for two years. He never realized that his work involved the transportation of Jews to gas chambers.

"I only know that this very modern equipment made possible the control of all the railway traffic in the General Government," he said.

Krzemieniecki recalled that an "outside technician," who spoke German and Polish and "did not work for the railroad," was almost constantly on-site to keep the machines running, performing major maintenance monthly.

IBM's tailored railroad-management programs, several million custom-designed punch cards printed at IBM's print shop at 6 Rymarska Street, across from the Warsaw Ghetto, and the railway's leased machines were under the New York-controlled subsidiary in Warsaw, not the German subsidiary, Dehomag. The distinction is important. Since the disclosures about IBM's involvement in the Holocaust first surfaced in February 2001, the company has continually pointed to supposed lack of control of its German subsidiary. But Watson Business Machines was established in Poland by IBM New York itself, at the time of Germany's invasion.

"I knew they were not German machines," recalled Krzemieniecki. "The labels were in English. . . . The person maintaining and repairing the machines spread the diagrams out sometimes. The language of the diagrams of those machines was only in English."

I asked Krzemieniecki if the machine logo plates were in German, Polish, or English. He answered, "English. It said, 'Business Machines.' " I asked, "Do you mean 'International Business Machines'?" Krzemieniecki replied, "No, 'Watson Business Machines.' "

Dwarfing the railroad operation in Poland described by Krzemieniecki was a massive Hollerith statistical center at 24 Murner Street in Kraków, staffed by more than 500 punching and tabulating employees and equipped with dozens of machines. New research has uncovered the existence of a previously unknown Berlin agency, the Central Office for Foreign Statistics and Foreign Country Research, which continuously received detailed data from the Kraków statistical center.

By late 1939, the Reich's Jewish-population statistics wizard, Fritz Arlt, had been appointed head of the Population and Welfare Administration of the General Government. A Hollerith expert and colleague of Adolf Eichmann, Arlt edited his own statistical publication, Political Information Service of the General Government, which featured such data as Jews per square meter, with projections of decrease from forced labor and starvation.

"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."

The data-hungry Nazis created an expanded Statistics Office in Kraków in 1940. The expansion was dependent on more leased machines, spare parts, company technicians, and a guaranteed continued supply of millions of additional IBM cards. IBM's European general manager, Werner Lier, visited Berlin in early October 1941 to oversee IBM New York's deployment of machines in Poland and other countries. In two detailed reports, written from Berlin and sent to Watson, as well as to other senior staff in New York, Lier reported moving a small group of Polish machines into Romania for the Jewish census there. The Polish machines would soon be replaced by others.

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.

The Statistics Office's report concluded, "Our work is just beginning to bear fruit."

Once the U.S. Entered the war in December 1941, Germany appointed a Nazi devoted to IBM, Hermann Fellinger, as enemy-property custodian. He maintained the original staff and managers of Watson Business Machines, keeping it productive for the Reich and profitable for IBM. The subsidiary now reported to IBM's Geneva office, and from there to New York. The company was not looted, its leased machines were not seized. "Royalties" were remitted to IBM through Geneva. Lease payments and profits were preserved in special accounts. After the war, IBM recovered all its Polish profits and machines.

Since the war, IBM, having left Madison Avenue for new headquarters in suburban Armonk, has obstructed, or refused to cooperate with, virtually every major independent author writing about its history, according to numerous published introductions, prefaces, and acknowledgments.

But silence cannot alter the historical documentation. A tangle of subsidiaries throughout Europe helped IBM reap the benefits of its partnership with Nazi Germany. After all, "business" was IBM's middle name.

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/. (illustration: Mirko Ilic)

Commentary: IBM Technology Helped Facilitate the Holocaust

By: Michael D. Hausfeld, printed in the Los Angeles Times 2/19/01

IBM is a company that prides itself on solutions. Recently disclosed materials, however, reveal a chilling portrait of the company's complicity in the evil of the Nazis' search for the "Final Solution."

Soon after the Nazis came to power in 1933, they established the first concentration camp, the Dachau camp near Munich, Germany. From 1933 to 1944, Hollerith machines were installed at the main concentration camps of Mauthausen, Ravensbrock, Flossenberg and Buchenwald, and were probably present at Auschwitz. Various people were brought into the concentration camps: Jews, Jehovah's Witnesses, political prisoners and homosexuals. It was imperative that the Nazis be able to identify, classify, categorize and sort these persons for their own purposes.

Upon arrival, a "selection" process separated those who could be used as slave laborers from those destined for immediate extermination. Victims with some potential for labor were often worked to death. The total number of people who perished in concentration camps, not including those sent to extermination camps, is estimated to be between 700,000 to 1.2 million.

IBM USA knew that its Hollerith machines were needed and used in the camps. IBM USA kept careful records of where its leased property was located and played an active role in servicing these machines, training its clients how to use them, and providing punch cards and other supplies. IBM USA's inventories of 1940 and 1941 indicate that the company knew which Hollerith machines were located in camps, along with their serial numbers and the amount they were being paid for the lease of each machine. At Dachau alone there were approximately 24 IBM sorters, tabulators and printers. Nazi personnel had to be trained by IBM staff in how to use the tabulators, sorters and other Hollerith machines. Salespersons and officials from IBM Germany and IBM subsidiaries in Europe, in turn, would come to New York for training, sometimes at significant expense to IBM USA.

Nazi personnel collected information on punch cards such as whether someone was Jewish or gay, what skills could be exploited for slave labor, and whether a prisoner had been exterminated or escaped.

Once the United States entered the war on Dec. 10, 1941, IBM USA camouflaged its business transactions with the Nazi regime by using its European subsidiaries as a facade. As late as Nov. 13, 1944, a German prisoner of war, formerly the branch manager of the Saarbrocken Hollerith office, noted in an intelligence bulletin that the Hollerith company did not conceal or sever its connection with IBM.

At all relevant times, IBM USA controlled its operations in Germany. It provided the technology, machinery and material solely because that was its business.

The IBM experience with Nazi Germany teaches three lessons: All that is benign (the compiling, sorting and classifying of information through technology) is not necessarily harmless. The pursuit of profit, indifferent to its consequences or effects, can be an evil unto itself. And crimes against humanity are not limited to the perpetrators who define or sign the orders of extermination, pull the triggers, drop the pellets or crack the whips. Those who aid, abet or consciously participate in the furtherance of those crimes have their own legal responsibility for which they must be held legally accountable.

There are certain principles that are inviolate, universal and eternal. Breaches of fundamental internationally recognized individual rights are crimes against humanity. As the judgments at Nuremberg expressed:

"Any person without regard to nationality or the capacity in which he acted, is deemed to have committed a crime of humanity if he was (a) the principal or (b) was an accessory to the commission of any such crime or ordered or abetted the same or (c) took a consenting part therein or (d) was connected with plans or enterprises involving its commission . . ."

It's time for IBM to answer for its culpability.