American companies in Nazi Germany - Essay Example

? American companies in Nazi Germany Introduction; Organising a government democratic or dictatorial is a very tasking job. There is a lot of data to sift through in the process of governance including, birth records to trace ancestry, census documentation and other official planning documents. The need for automation of records plagued Hitler upon his ascent to power in early 1933. Hitler had a dream, to eliminate all Jews from Germany but he also needed to come up with a way to keep track of their deportation or their numbers in enslavement camps. International Business Machines (IBM)’s current technology had initially been produced for only one cause: to count. Whether it was people or company products, IBM had come up with a method to classify and enumerate (Black, Pp 23). It wasn’t long before IBM realized that the technology they had just given the world could do more than just count people or things. It could document data, process it, recover it and the most important part, it could analyze it. IBM had a subsidiary in Germany and the managers came up with an ingenious plan to customise these machines to tap into the furher’s needs; they had the Hollerith punch card technology and all they had to do was input the data that the third Reich wanted. In order to cash in on this opportunity they decided not to sell the machines but rather lease them to Hitler, making billions in the process. IBM knew that their products were being used for illegal purposes, and so to absolve themselves of any blame they would deny any collusion with the third Reich through structured denial of any oral agreements, contracts that were carefully crafted and using letters that had no dates on them (Black, Pp 35). It is important to note that Hitler persecuted and killed over 6 million Jews and that these numbers would not have been achieved had it not been for IBM’s technology. Upon achieving his dream of leading the Nazi, he made it his goal to identify and obliterate the country’s 6 million strong Jewish society. To everyone who followed Hitler, Jews were not just those who were practicing Judaism, but even those who had Jewish blood, in spite of their integration, whether it was due to them intermarrying, or even whether they had converted to Christianity. The first humane solution was to transport Jews out of the country’s ghettos using rail road lines. The next step was using the same to take them into death camps. They needed to do this with accurate timing such that the victims were able to be packed into a train and taken to execution facilities right on schedule. The coordination was such a multifaceted task, that it called for a computer Computers being nonexistent at that time, IBM had to use whatever technology they had at the time which happened to be the IBM punch card and card sorting system—a predecessor to the computer. IBM, primarily through its IBM’s subsidiary, made it their mission in life to make Hitler's program and dream of Jewish annihilation a technologic reality. The company knew people and companies the world over were in financial quagmires and with lots of profits in sight, they pursued this venture with unsettling success. IBM, using its own resources, designed, executed, and supplied this technology to Hitler's Third Reich. This was an under-taking that had never accomplished in the past the automation of human annihilation. IBM built more than 2,000 such machines that were sent off throughout Germany, and even more undocumented thousands throughout German-dominated Europe. At first the machines were used for subtle reasons of manipulation: food allocation for every location was organized in the order of databases, this allowed the Nazi to systematically starve the Jews. Where they required slaves for their factories such as ammunition companies, slave labour was easily identified, followed, and supervised largely through punch cards. Punch cards were so effective during that time that it is said that they even made the human ferrying trains run on time and kept all its cargo accounted for. Many questions have arisen as to the extent of IBM’s involvement. Just how much did IBM and its management know? Obviously, since they were in charge of maintenance and the machines technically belonged to them, the company knew what was happening in fact on a daily basis throughout the entire twelve-year Reich. Those who recount the events of that time say that the worst of it IBM chose not to know. In short, they adopted the "don't ask, don't tell" approach. Evidence from their machines punch outs and later printouts seem to tell a different story. Based on these cards, every prisoner in the country was listed using a personal code number. These were documents the managers of IBM were privy to. For continuing labour, the occurrence of natural death was coded 3, those in line for execution were given the code 4 while people who chose to commit suicide were coded 5. The unlucky code 6 was characterized "special handling," this was just another way of referring to execution, this happened in several methods like hanging, crucifixion, firing squads or in a gas chamber. International Business Machines (IBM)’s current technology had initially been produced for only one cause: to count. Whether it is people or company products, IBM had come up with a method to classify and enumerate. It wasn’t long before IBM realized that the technology they had just given the world could do more than just count people or things. It could document data, process it, recover it and the most important part, it could analyze it. The now socially outcast Jews literally could not hide from the millions upon millions of punch cards passing through IBM’s machines. They were being used to compare surnames across ancestries, simple details such as change of address across any region controlled by Germany, tracing family ties and retrieve personal data for medical registries. All this was made possible due to IBM's precision technology. During the war, Germany was beating the technology mountain as IBM systems improved. Nazi started campaigning for total human and asset registration, and the noose on the Jews necks tightened. The third Reich was in the first phase of applying Dehomag solutions and by the end of the year 1934, medical, welfare, and insurance offices were merged in their punch card registrations by nursing homes and hospitals as well the ever-increasing number of German doctors. Even the planned German racial population census planned for May of 1938 was deferred for a year to allow Dehomag to put together new plans to include the counting of the population of Austria a stronghold Germany had recently acquired (Weisen, Pp 54). One of the plans they came up with was that Dehomag open several additional branches throughout the area controlled by the third Reich to accommodate and include the extra load. Within that year, more than twenty five offices opened up with one sole purpose. They would embark upon the task of profiling the new territory and new subjects in the expanded base of nearly 80 million Germans and Austrians. Data that was engendered by means of totalling and alphabetization programs supplied by IBM through its German neighbouring nations subsidiaries was influential in the determinations of the German administration to concentrate and ultimately extinguish ethnic Jewish populations across all of Europe. September 13, 1935, the “Law for the Protection of German Blood" was implemented by Hitler in which he dispossessed Jews of their German (Nicosia, Pp 45). IBM machines tabled the census data and estimated that the original number of Jews in Germany, which were placed at 400,000 to 600,000, were wrong and it now put it at 2 million Jews in a population of 67 million. Their finances offer even more depressing evidence: Watson the general manager is even said to have boasted to share holders that December of1933 was the largest December in the company's history. He added that February 1934 had brought conceded profits of a whopping $103,000 above the year before. This was a very large amount of money at the time. Watson also envisaged that this upward trend would remain constant throughout 1934. Since they knew where these profits had come from, they declared them as income and wove them into intricate, un-taxable inter-company shenanigans (Huang, Pp 14). Net profits for the year 1933 were so huge that even the German government identified it in their records. This is because it was reported at $5.73 million. The other financial records were as follows, $55.4 million in total company assets, $16.2 million was attributed to surplus cash IBM was holding that year. The total net income accounted for in just the first six months of 1934 was $3.4 million way above the $2.9 million recorded in 1933. Watson himself admitted that IBM's trade abroad was improving owing to the fact that for the first nine months of 1934 their exports had increased due to the constant cooperation among the political class, industrial sector heads and financial institution leaders. These insane million-dollar profits were attained and increased in subsequent years. Conclusion It is because of IBM’s early computer technology that life for the Jews became unbearable. The ease of access cut across all essential services. The police completely brainwashed by propaganda abandoned their duties and began protecting the bad guys and maltreat those they were to protect. Law men distorted concepts of justice system to create anti-Jewish laws (Jennings, 98). Doctors too adulterated science of medicine to commit evil experiments on the Jewish patients. They even went as far as to choose for the concentration camps officials those who were healthy enough to be over worked and the weaklings who were sent to the gas chamber. Being a scientific and engineering nation, scientists started devising the instruments of torture and destruction. Statisticians from both IBM and the Nazi used their skills to categorize the victims, project and make sense of the benefits of their destruction, organize their systematic persecution, and even audit the efficiency of mass murder (Jennings, 98) . Works Cited Black, Edwin. Ibm and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2001. Print. Huang, Mike. Third Reich to Fortune 500: Five Popular Brands the Nazis Gave Us. 2008. Web 9 November 2013. Nicosia, Francis R. Business and Industry in Nazi Germany. New York: Berghahn Books, 2004. Print. Weisen, Jonathan. German Industry and the Third Reich: Fifty Years of Forgetting and Remembering. 2000. Web 9 November 2013. Jennings, Marianne. Business Ethics: Case Studies and Selected Readings. Mason: South Western Cengage Learning. 2011 Read More