Can IBM be blamed for the Holocaust?

Answer 1

Prior answer was factually incorrect and suggested IBM's subsidiary was taken over before the War. That was false. The War began in 1939 in Europe and Dec1941 in US. The subsidiary was placed into technical enemy receivership in 1942. But the company under the micromanagement of its president Thomas J Watson began to organize the Holocaust from the first moments of the Hitler regime in January 1933. IBM organized and made efficient all six phases of the Holocaust: 1) Identification, 2) Exclusion from Society, 3) Confiscation, 4) Ghettoization, 5) Deportation and 6) Extermination. Now anyone can pretend these are not the facts, but no one at IBM anywhere in the world will not deny these well-established facts. Extensive quotations from the actual IBM documents can be read in IBM and the Holocaust in any country in the world.

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That's like saying Westinghouse caused Thanksgiving because a turkey was roasted in an oven that company made. IBM did not have anything to do with the holocaust. The company's German subsidiary was taken over by the Nazis just before the war and the punch-card data processing provided by the machines was used to keep records of all types. This may have made the holocaust more efficient, but it certainly didn't cause it.

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Agreed. Someone obviously has a grudge against IBM.

Guilt presupposes responsibility. When there's a murder, does one also prosecute the person who sold the murderer ammunition for his firearm, and does one prosecute the person who gave the murderer's windscreen a wipe as he was driving to the scene of the planned crime? Obviously NOT, because they can't be considered responsible and they are far, far too remote from the crime.

IBM's "participation" in the Holocaust can in no way be equated to something like I.G. Farben or even Krupp Industries. As mentioned above, the German IBM subsidiary was indeed taken over by the Nazi regime shortly after the beginning of the war, and thus removed the US parent from any decision-making around sales in Germany. IBM (the parent company in the USA) did continue to sell parts and items to the German sub-unit, but this ceased by about late 1940.

The fact that IBM machinery was used to help organize the Holocaust can be in no way blamed on IBM (America). IBM machinery was used for a whole host of projects, and knowing that they would used to tabulate Holocaust victims is a fairy tale (requiring the use of a magical crystal ball in 1939). Remember - the Holocaust didn't really begin until about 1942. There were mass murders before that, but the organized extermination effort really came into being around the time of the Wannsee Conference. It is this effort that used the IBM machinery.

So, how can IBM be responsible for something that hadn't yet begun yet when they stopped selling Germany parts, and for which there was no realistic idea that their equipment could be used to aid? Even if you could somehow blame IBM for those two impossible predictions, assigning them blame for the Holocaust is no less fanciful than stating that pencil makers who sold pencils to the Nazi regime in 1944 were responsible for aiding the Holocaust. The connection is just far too removed and tenuous to be rationally made.