IBM: the 'Final Solutions' company
In the Holocaust museum in Washington sits a gleaming black, beige and silver machine. The label said it was an IBM Hollerith D-11 card-sorting machine. What did IBM, one of America's most powerful corporations, have to do with Hitler's attempt to exterminate European Jewry?
Nazi Germany was IBM's biggest overseas customer
Herman Hollerith invented the system of punch-cards and high-speed sorting in the 1880s for the census needs of the US government. His company, which was renamed International Business Machines in 1924, cornered 90pc of the global market in punch-card technology.
IBM provided “field engineers” to work with Nazi clients to custom-design the punch-cards. For concentration camp prisoners, column 3, hole 3 was for homosexual, hole 1 was for “political”, hole 8 was for Jew. Code 6 in column 34 was for “special handling” (gas oven/crematoria) prisoners.
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