Letter from Lhasa, number 160. (Black 2001): IBM and the Holocaust
by Roberto Abraham Scaruffi
Black, E., IBM and the Holocaust. The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation, Three Rivers Press, New York, NY, U.S.A., 2001.
(Black 2001).
Edwin Black
An historical research. Nothing astonishing. Companies are created for doing businesses and profits. In peace and in war. If one sells machines, one does not worry about their ethical or unethical use. It is the same if one produces or sells food. A body is fed. That body may be used for ethical or unethical purposes.
You sell food. One buys and eats it, and later commits crimes. You sell machines. One buys and uses them, and later commits crimes.
One sells on a certain market, one sells to the “x regime”. One sells merchandises, one is accomplice of a certain “regime” crimes, according to this book.
It is true, but it is false. If you sell shoes, should you enquire whether the customer will use those shoes for or while committing a crime or an unethical action?
Historical research mixes with ideology, here. One sells merchandises, one become allies with a “regime”, here.
IBM just sold machines and technology to whoever wanted to be its customer as whatever other enterprises did and does. If one wanted discuss about ethics by this odd methodology, others would be accomplices of genocides too.
IBM sold machines. One of its customers was Germany. IBM machines were used also in the persecution and genocide, or partial genocide, of Jews. Other companies did the same. The bombers, and the “governments”/States managed them, which carefully avoided the extermination machine, while devastating the whole Europe (but not the extermination machine) were decidedly more active accomplices of the Jews’ extermination. Allied governments were informed of what was happening. They did nothing. Zionist military cooperated with such governments. They fought against Germany while letting German freely exterminating, in many areas irreversibly, the European Jewry. Somebody in charge evidently thought, and many others agreed, that the irreversible extermination of the Jews’ settlements was the precondition for the creation of Israel as centre of the world Jewry. Diaspora Judaism and their language, Yiddish, were destroyed and let to be destroyed.
IBM, as whoever else, simply sold merchandises to whoever bought them.
IBM was created from personages currently using typical Anglophone mafia methods. However, this was absolutely common in American businesses.
IBM technology and machines were so deeply involved in various aspects of the German military and civilian life, included the racial classification of the German population, and even inside concentration-extermination camps, that it is evident that the U.S. government was carefully and timely informed on all the aspects of racial persecutions and extermination in Germany. Consequently, the U.S. government was fully responsible not only for the cover-up of the racial exterminations but even for the same “Nazi” [German and Austrian] racial exterminations.
The U.S. government, as well as the U.K. government, was fully informed and fully accomplice. It may have even been a co-promoter. Without the destruction of Central- and East-European Jewry, it would have been more complicate to create Israel. Actually, no justification was necessary for reaching Palestine and creating Jewish settlements. However, States and entities wanting to be States have generally paranoid visions of reality. Perhaps, somebody thought that a “Nazi” mega-massacre, with connected demolition of the Jewish settlements in Central- and East-Europe, would have been indispensable for creating Israel. Even with the “Nazi” mega-massacre and the demolition of the Jewish settlements in Europe, the large majority of European Jews preferred NOT to emigrate to Israel. Human beings are adaptive. It was easier and more comfortable to reach the already developed world, also because the British fought any illegal immigration in Palestine.
First step was the 16 June 1933 census, with U.S. technology for rapidly collecting and processing the collected information.
“Boycott and protest movements were ardently trying to crush Hitlerism by stopping Germany’s exports. Although a network of Jewish and non-sectarian anti-Nazi leagues and bodies struggled to organize comprehensive lists of companies doing business with Germany, from importers of German toys and shoes to sellers of German porcelain and pharmaceuticals, yet IBM and Watson were not identified. Neither the company nor its president even appeared in any of thousand of hectic phone book entries or handwritten index card files of the leading national and regional boycott bodies. Anti-Nazi agitators just did not understand the dynamic of corporate multi-nationalism.
“Moreover, IBM was not importing German merchandises, it was exporting machinery. In fact, even exports dwindled as soon as the new plant in Berlin was erected, leaving less of a paper trail. So a measure of invisibility was assured in 1933.”
(Black 2001, p. 69)
The justifications and the apparent naïveté of the authors are risible. The U.S. Secret Police bureaux, and its “Zionist” allies, which had the control of such “boycott” movements, did not want to disrupt the persecution and liquidation of European Jewry. They were helping Nazism also in that. Boycott movements were a classical warmongers’ operation. They had the function to hysterize the U.S. population for militarist purposes, not to stop Nazi crimes. So they had had to protect and save real businesses with Germany. Since IBM was cooperating with German crimes, it would have been sufficient a U.S. government intervention for stopping it, what did not happen, although the U.S. government was perfectly informed of everything.
IBM was in full harmony with the U.S. government: “Watson donated large sums to the Roosevelt campaign. Roosevelt’s election over Hoover was a landslide. Watson now had entrée to the White House itself.” (Black 2001, p. 71). IBM policies were not in harmony with the US government, even with its supposed progressive side? They were.
“Soon, Roosevelt came to rely on Watson for advice. White House staffers would occasionally ask for Watson’s schedule in case the President needed to contact him quickly. Watson visited Hyde Park for tea several times and even stayed overnight at the White House. Eventually, Roosevelt offered to appoint Watson Secretary of Commerce or Ambassador to England. But Watson declined to leave IBM.”
(Black 2001, p. 71)
“When Germany wanted to identify the Jews by name, IBM showed them how. When Germany wanted to use that information to launch programs of social expulsion and expropriation, IBM provided the technologic wherewithal. When the trains needed to run on time, from city to city or between concentration camps, IBM offered that solution as well. Ultimately, there was no solution IBM would not devise for a Reich willing to pay for service rendered. One solution led to another. No solution was out of the question.”
(Black 2001, p. 73-74)
Anyway, classification techniques are practiced everywhere and their outcomes may be of whatever kind. The author seem to have suddenly discovered classification techniques, that they are the foundation of whatever mass and organized discrimination, and that they me be used also for whatever crime.
Punch cards were only precursors of contemporary files or database entries in computers, or, perhaps more properly, of barcodes. They permitted to store information is a limited space, in a standardized way and so processable from machines.
This is, again, the same Watson, IBM’s boss, and supporter of Roosevelt and supported from him: “Speaking at both IBM and ICC events, Watson regularly pleaded for “an equitable redistribution of natural resources,” and expressed his support for a rearmed Germany. He voiced his oft-quoted opinions at a time when the Reich was daily violating the Versailles Treaty by rebuilding its war machine, and threatening to invade neighboring regions to acquire the very natural resources it felt it deserved.” (Black 2001, p. 128-129)
Obviously, this Roosevelt friend was not only in good relation with Germany: “IBM had been cultivating a thriving business in Japan, helping that nation develop its air force and aircraft carriers.” (Black 2001, p. 132)
“(...) In 1937, the Reich ordered another nationwide census that would prepare the country for military mobilization, and for the Jews would be finally and decisive identification step. Dehomag eagerly agree to organize the project.
“The racial portion of the census was designed to pinpoint ancestral Jews as defined by the Nuremberg Laws, ensuring no escape from the Reich’s anti-Semitic campaign. In addition to the usual census questions, a special card asked whether any of the individual’s grandparents was Jewish. When completely filled out, the card would be isolated in a separate envelope for processing by both the census authorities and security offices.
“The project, originally scheduled for May 1938, would be an enormous undertaking for IBM, requiring a huge expansion of manpower, machinery and processing space. Seventy sorters, some sixty tabulators, seventy-six multipliers, and 90 million punch cards would be needed for the RM 3.5 million contract. IBM supervisors in Geneva, Stockholm, and New York understood how difficult the challenge would be.”
(Black 2001, p. 139)
The book refers of that actually IBM had already done the same job in the not yet annexed Austria. In fact, “With stunning precision, the Nazis knew exactly who in Austria was Jewish.” (Black 2001, p. 141)
Actually, when, during WWII, American citizens were put in concentration camps because of enemy races, the crime [against humanity] should have had IBM cooperation. ...If it sold technology usable also for such purposes... Whatever technology may be used for good and bad goals at the same time.
After Kristallnacht the Watson and IBM attitude changed, for what concerns their public image. Businesses are businesses. They continued. Contracts are contracts. Only government/State interventions may stop and break, or even only suspend, them.
“On May 17, 1939, Germany was swept by 750,000 census takers, mainly volunteers. They missed virtually no one in the Greater Reich’s 22 million households, 3.5 million farmhouses, 5.5 million shops and factories. Teams of five to eight census takers fanned out through the big cities such as Berlin, Frankfurt, Hamburg, and Vienna. Towns and villages were divided into districts of thirty homes with one census taker assigned to each. Some 80 million citizens in the Greater Reich, including Germany, Austria, the Sudetenland, and the Saar, would be classed according to their ancestry.”
(Black 2001, p. 169)
“IBM” filing extended to whatever field, in Germany, actually also in Germany. Clearly, the German’s expansion, and later the war with further expansion and administrative duties, extended the IT needs also in Germany as elsewhere.
Not all the work was deployed using IT. Jewish elites were actively involved in the eradication of the Central- and East-European Jewry. In Poland, for example, “First, as instructed by Heydrich, Nazi forces created Judenräte, that is, Jewish Councils, across the country.” (Black 2001, p. 187). These collaborationist entities, first, as in Warsaw, had the duty of “Statistics, registration, and census” of all the Jews under their area of jurisdiction.
IBM was doing businesses, with the agreement of the U.S. government. Here, there was an active cooperation of Jewish elites, and other Jews (there were also Jewish [collaborationist] police etc), to the self-massacre. C’est la vie! It happened and it happens...
At the end of page 199 there is a wrong assertion. The Italian government did not participate to the Jews’ extermination.
See: Steinberg, K. W., All or Nothing. The Axis and the Holocaust 1941-43, Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002.
Jews were legally discriminated in Italy. However, there was an absolute aversion of the same Mussolini to cooperate with Germany in any assassination or deportation of Jews. Areas under Italian jurisdiction were safe areas for Jews. Mussolini always refused to cooperate with Germany on this matter. This is valid until 8 September 1943. Later, Italy was in part occupied from the Allied and in part from Germany. The RSI, the “Mussolini”’s Republic, was tightly dependent from Germany, so Germany could do what it wanted also relatively to Jews and also with cooperation of Italians of the RSI. After 8 September 1943, Germans were the real government, not the RSI government.
(Steinberg 2002) invents a “generals’ and diplomats’ conspiracy” for a case in which Mussolini formally agreed to very insistent German requests to have delivered a group of Jews in Croatia for extermination. What actually happened was easier. In the sole case Mussolini formally agreed to deliver a group a Jew, he agreed only in front of Germans. Written the order to deliver that group of Jews, Mussolini called the general responsible of delivering or not delivering that Jews and ordered him not to comply with his formal order to deliver such Jews. A more than reluctant Mussolini finally signed that order and called the general for informally ordering him to invent excuses for never delivering that group of Jews. There was no “generals’ and diplomats’ conspiracy”. Italians are not less barbaric, conformist, idiotic, racist, coward and anti-Semitic than Germans, Anglophones, Russians or others. Simply, there was NOT the “government”-Mussolini agreement with the extermination of Jews. Psychotics and criminals need to feel covered. Relatively to the Jews’ extermination, they were not covered from the Italian-“government”.
An historical curiosity: elements of a post-8 September 1943 Italian “nazi-fascist” [actually they were nationalist who refused the monarchic betrayal of Germany] military, specifically, the X MAS [not specifically of the RSI because they, the X MAS, had a direct “contract” with the German military (signed in La Spezia, in the same days of the 8 September 1943 monarchist betrayal), although they were, later, in same way also inside the legal frame of the RSI], trained commandos of the Israeli military navy, so they helped the consolidation of the just created Israeli State. Other historical casual event, the same La Spezia will become, in 1946, the “door to Zion”. It was not the only one, probably. However, it was called in that way in Zionist milieus.
“In November 1939, the New York Times published reports from Paris declaring that 1.5 million Jews trapped in Poland were in danger of starving to death. On January 21, 1940, World Jewish Congress Chairman Nahum Goldman warned a Chicago crowd of 1,000 as well as wire service reporters, that if the war continued for another year 1 million Polish Jews would die of calculated starvation or outright murder.”
(Black 2001, p. 200)
Naturally, IBM worked for whatever side, not only and not overall for Germany. IBM worked for everybody, for whatever government/State needed its services and nearly everybody needed its services and if there was not the opposition of the U.S. government. At page 203, the book quotes an ever-escalating volume of punched card equipment’s orders, since summer 1939, from the War Ministries of Yugoslavia, Rumania, Hungary, Poland, Sweden, Holland and France.
A U.S. company, in the IT sector, also other ones, with worldwide extension is a complex and complete networks perfect for being used from intelligence_services-secret_police_services. IBM was certainly used, for this kind of purposes, from the U.S. ones. A network used in one direction may be used also in other ones. A business network is one of the best covers for espionage. The USA, also the British, used it against their enemies. Their enemies used or tried to use it against them.
Governments/States are always in communication, in touch, even during wars and even when they declare that they are fighting only until the complete destruction of their enemy or enemies. They communicate through frank lands, as Switzerland or other ones, as well as they communicate through businessmen and businesswomen appreciated from the various sides and who may freely travel even during wars. Who spies knows that is spied. Who spies does not worry being spied. Other ones play the game of fighting against spies. It is everything a game, a paranoid game, where the only really fucked are the common people paying the costs of wars, fighting, “politics” and other deliria. “Politicians” and “Statesmen” play and, occasionally, they are assassinated from somebody more perverted than them.
“At the end of May 1940, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover became interested in IBM’s Nazi connections. Suspecting the company of hosting a hotbed of Nazi agitation, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, in late May, launched wide-ranging investigations on at least four German nationals employed by IBM and suspected of espionage or other subversive conduct. Although no charges were ever brought, more probes would follow and they would continue for years. Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle became the State Department’s point man for espionage concerns at IBM. Berle and Hoover began to regularly trade information on the suspected spies at IBM. In short order, federal agents and local police intelligence officers were dispatched to IBM offices in Manhattan, Endicott, Albany, Cincinnati, and Milwaukee asking probative questions.”
(Black 2001, p. 214-215)
If “no charges were ever brought”, that means that they were operations for recruiting informers and spies and, evidently, all the contacted people accepted to be recruited.
On 6 June 1940, “Watson returned the medal Hitler had personally granted – and he chose to return it publicly via the media.” (Black 2001, p. 217)
“Watson’s monopoly could be replaced – but it would take years. Even if the Reich confiscated every IBM printing plant in Nazi-dominated Europe, and seized every machine, within months the cards and spare parts would run out. The whole data system would quickly grind to a halt. As it stood in summer 1941, the IBM enterprise in Nazi Germany was hardly a stand-alone operation; it depended upon the global financial, technical, and material support of IBM NY and its seventy worldwide subsidiaries. Watson controlled all of it.
“Without punch card technology, Nazi Germany would be completely incapable of even a fraction of the automation it had taken for granted. Returning to manual methods was unthinkable.”
(Black 2001, p. 224-225)
“Of course, IBM was not alone in its lucrative dealings with the Third Reich. Many American companies in the armament, financial, and service arena refused to walk away from the extraordinary profits obtainable from trading with a pariah state such as Nazi Germany.”
(Black 2001, p. 232)
“Watson understood that unless he came to an accommodation with Germany, Dehomag was only the beginning. IBM operated profitable Dehomag-dominated subsidiaries in Italy, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Holland, Belgium, Romania, France, Sweden, and indeed almost everywhere in Europe. All of them could be targeted. ”
(Black 2001, p. 233)
“(...) During any war, Germany expected its commercial enterprises in America to be safeguarded, managed properly by a trustee, and then returned intact when the conflict ended. In the same spirit, the Third Reich would in turn safeguard, manage diligently, and return American enterprises. Germany’s well developed alien custody laws were still in effect. So while Nazi Germany was voraciously plundering and pillaging the width and breadth of Europe, a profound different set of rules would apply to IBM and other “enemy property” seized in any of those occupied countries.”
(Black 2001, p. 234)
“For IBM, war would ironically be more advantageous than existing peace.
“Under the current state of affairs, IBM’s assets were blocked in Germany until the conflict was over. Under an enemy custodian, those same marks would still be blocked – again until any war was over.”
(Black 2001, p. 235)
At the same time, the IBM or para-IBM companies of the Nazis area would have been indirectly supported from the central IBM.
“The corporate haze would last for decades. With all the European intermediaries, ownerships nominees, corporate intrigues, belligerent German managers, and Nazi custodians, it would be impossible to reliably point a finger at the New York office.”
(Black 2001, p. )
“(...) Incriminating dealings with Nazis did surface from time to time as frustrated war-besieged subsidiary managers would invariably become too specific in the cables to New York. These communications were discarded, however, and if necessary disowned by IBM NY. By placing itself in the dark, IBM could truly forever truthfully declare it made millions during the war without knowing the specifics. .”
(Black 2001, p. 237)
September 1941:
“As America advanced toward the moment it would enter the war, the Roosevelt Administration had recently espoused General Ruling 11, an emergency regulation forbidding any financial transaction with Nazi Germany without a special Treasury Department license involving written justifications. Even certain corporate instructions of a financial nature were subject to the rule. This was something completely new to contend with in IBM’s Nazi alliance. IBM would now be required to seek a complicated, bureaucratic approval for each financial instruction it ordered for its overseas subsidiaries under Nazi control. General ruling 11 would not affect subsidiaries in neutral countries, such as Sweden or Switzerland. Even still, it would severely hamper all communications with Dehomag itself, and open a government window into many of IBM’s complex transactions.”
(Black 2001, p. 284)
Naturally, IBM acted in defence of its interests, in the German case, then, by some financial engineering.
“Four days later, Pearl Harbour was bombed. The U.S. finally joined the war against Germany. Dehomag and all Watson subsidiaries under Reich control would now be managed by Nazi-appointed trustees. IBM Europe was saved.”
(Black 2001, p. 291)
Where technology was used as in Holland, the identification of racial Jews proceeded efficiently. Where is could not be used, or rapidly used, as in France, human stupidity helped Germans.
May 1941.
“With Carmille’s tabulations not yet ready, the Germans, in essence, relied on the Jews to turn themselves in. The results yielded only half what the Nazis had hoped for. On the appointed day, May 14, 1941, an estimated 3,400 to 3,700 Jews, mainly of Polish origin, did report as requested. They were immediately sent to camps.”
(Black 2001, p. 324-324)
Chaotic raids permitted to arrest other Jews in France, but the system was not very efficient, neither efficacious. Collaborationism helped Germans, while first rank Gaullist agents sabotaged the identification of Jews. Actually, as usually in history, the best collaborationists were the same Judaic official organisations, de facto the Jewish aristocracy, Rabbis and their ruffians.
“German officials began turning to the French Jewish Council for names. The Union Générale des Israélites en France, the so-called UGIF, became a prime source for the Gestapo. The UGIF was vested with the sole authority for all Jewish welfare and any other communication between the Jews in Occupied France and the German authorities. Therefore, Jews invariably came to the UGIF offices to sign up for welfare services and submit inquires about interned loved ones. French Jews even paid special communal assessments to the UGIF. The Germans granted the UGIF unprecedented access to all Vichy census lists and allowed the organization to manually update them. There were then turned over to the Nazis by the UGIF. In fact, the UGIF maintained a whole department for providing lists to the authorities. They called it Service 14.”
[...]
“(...) The UGIF’s efforts to comply with German demands for continually updated names could only be described as relentless.”
(Black 2001, p. 326)
The UGIF tried to identify and localise displaced Jewish children for passing the information to the Nazis charged of the anti-Jewish ethnic cleansing. It even imposed a special tax for making the Jews paying for their same liquidation.
“Later, when the UGIF tried to impose a special head tax to finance a new UGIF census, the underground press condemned it in no uncertain words.”
(Black 2001, p. 326)
“NOTICE FROM THE JEWISH UNDERGROUND
“(...)
“Boycott the new census! Do not give a penny to the UGIF!
“Not a penny to the Germans!”
(Black 2001, p. 326)
René Carmille was comptroller general of the French Army. He had been working for the French counter-intelligence since 1911. Under German occupation he had centralised in his hands also the card files of Jews. The lists of Jews in his hand were never tabulated and never given to Germans. He was finally arrested on 3 February 1944. On 25 January 1945, he died in Dachau.
“The documents also support Robert Carmille’s chronology that his father’s service took pains not to extend the professional census to the occupied zone, thereby denying the Reich information it needed to complete its plan to organize slave labor in France. This instruction was reversed once the elder Carmille was discovered and taken to Dachau. But by then it was too late to materially undo Carmille’s sabotage.”
(Black 2001, p. 433-434)
At page 331, one may find another confirmation that British agents sent detailed reports also about the deportation of Jews to “death camps”. (Black 2001, p. 331)
“Holland had Lentz. France had Carmille. Holland had a well-entrenched Hollerith infrastructure. France’s punch card infrastructure was in complete disarray.
“The final numbers:
“Of the estimated 140,000 Dutch Jews, more than 107,000 were deported, and of those 102,000 were murdered – a death ratio of approximately 73 percent.
“Of an estimated 300,000 to 350,000 Jews living in France, both zones, about 85,000 were deported – of these barely 3,000 survived. The death ratio in France was approximately 25 percent.”
(Black 2001, p. 332)
Here, the author forgets that the Jews in the Italian-controlled area of France were safe until 8 September 1943. After 8 September 1943, the German armies were not so strong than at the times of the initial occupation of France, so they could deploy less energy also to the identification and deportation of French Jews.
Anyway, IBM cooperated with racial discrimination programs everywhere in the world included inside the USA. During WWII, the U.S. government put in concentration camps the Americans of Japanese origins. (Black 2001) refers, in same way, about that.
“Germany had forced Jews to help to organize their own annihilation by establishing Judenräte, that is, Jewish councils. These councils were generally comprised not of communal leaders, but of arbitrary elected Jewish personalities, frequently engineers.”
(Black 2001, p. 372)
They could successfully go on in their destructive para-Nazi work because they had the support of the communal ruling classes.
“Quickly it became apparent to the men of the Judenräte that they were not conducing census and other statistical duties for the purpose of survival under a brutish occupation, or evacuation to less crowded settlements – but for organized extermination. In essence, these men were metering their own deaths in cadence to the overall Nazi timetable.”
(Black 2001, p. 373)
(Black 2001) tries to minimise the Jewish aristocracy’s and rabbis’ involvement in the anti-Jewish ethnic cleansing and extermination during WWII. Their cooperation with oppressive powers, at expense of the Jews’ mass, is usual in history. Only when their same lives were irreversibly threatened, they simulated “resistance”. First they fucked the Jews’ mass for saving themselves. When themselves were on the way of extermination, they reacted hysterically and suicidally. Jewish aristocracies and rabbis in the Anglophone world, while collaborating with Allies, did not pretend they really acted against the extermination of the European Jewry.
Allies, while perfectly informed, minimised what was happening in Germanic Europe.
End 1942:
“A New York Times article had headlined “Allies Describe Outrages on Jews,” and sub-headlined “Extermination Is Feared.” It led: “What is happening to the 5,000,000 Jews of German-held Europe, all of whom face extermination.” The Allied report emphasized calculated starvation, group gassing, mass shooting, ghetto street scenes “beyond imagination,” and intense deportation campaigns by railroad.”
(Black 2001, p. 377)
Extermination was going on. The Allies were evidently happy.
“Watson himself set the stage for IBM Europe’s wartime conduct. In October 1941, he circulated instructions to all subsidiaries: “In view of world conditions we cannot participate in the affairs of our companies in various countries as we did in normal times. Therefore you are advised that you will have to make your own decisions and not call on us for any advice or assistance until further notice.” That instruction never asked IBM executives to stop trading with the Hitler regime, or place a halt on sales to the camps, the war machine, or any German occupying authority. Watson only asked his companies to stop informing the New York office about their activities.
“Despite the illusion of non-involvement, IBM NY continued to play a central role in the day-to-day operations of its subsidiaries. Company subsidiaries regularly traded with Axis-linked blacklisted companies in neutral countries, and even directly with Germany and Italy. It was business as usual throughout the war.
“As a Swiss national, Lier freely travelled to and from Germany, occupied territories, and neutral countries micro-managing company affairs for Watson.”
(Black 2001, p. 394-395)
The same technology had served ethnic cleansing, extermination and German occupation, served Allied occupation too.
“As early as December 1943, the United States government concluded that Hitler’s Holleriths were strategic machines to save, not destroy. Dehomag’s equipment held the keys to a smooth military occupation of Germany and the other Axis territories.”
(Black 2001, p. 398)
“British intelligence was also keen to maintain German Holleriths intact to facilitate the occupation.”
(Black 2001, p. 399)
In practice, bombardments affected what Allies wanted to destroy but avoided what they wanted to preserve. That is naturally normal and it evidences what Allies wanted to destroy and wanted to preserve. Not only the “final solution” had to be preserved. Also the part of IBM working for “the enemy” had to be preserved.
“German forces were just as eager to safeguard their IBM equipment, albeit for their own reasons.”
(Black 2001, p. 399)
The U.S.-Allied connections with Nazi-Germany were really tight.
“(..) The Heidingers also insisted my book conservatively understated Watson’s true sympathies for Hitler and his true knowledge of the events n Germany.” (Black 2001, p. 432)
States/“governments” happy cooperate in their crimes. Wars are just formal interruptions of this cooperation (actually during war, de facto, the criminal cooperation among “government” is even more intensive although with asynchronies since the war status), with relative construction of partisan truths against the defeated side, partisan truths which become “the history”. Winners are saints. The defeated are demons. Actually, all were and are demons, just louses ready to be launched in whatever pogrom and extermination when they receive the order and they fell covered.
Black, E., IBM and the Holocaust. The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation, Three Rivers Press, New York, NY, U.S.A., 2001.
