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IBM's Dark Secret Past

posted 10 months ago by AmeriGirl26 (15100)
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As some of you computer nerds know, IBM played a huge role in creating some of the first major computers in the 20th century. They were the ones who first pioneered those room-sized machines that could do complex calculations, the very machines that put people on the moon, and were the ancestors of the computers we use now.

What many people don't know is that IBM secretly sold some of their earliest models to the Germans in the 1930s, I'm guessing because the Germans were paying a pretty penny for those things, and IBM wasn't aware of what their customers were actually doing with those machines.

That's why the Nazi govt. was able to get information on their citizens so fast, particularly when it came to Jewish ancestry and affiliation. They were essentially using American computers to crunch the data. And Germans are nothing if not meticulous when it comes to taking down records on things.

[–] strntz (12773) 10 months ago

I don't know if calling it a dark secret past is fair. As you said, IBM was most likely unaware of how Germany was using imported technology, and I'm sure there were plenty of other countries who sold tech to Germany during those years.

Nazi Germany, as odd as it is now to think of it, was often admired by many nations during the rebuilding in the 1930s. What they accomplished was impressive. It wasn't until the mid 30s and later when news of the Holocaust became known and perception changed. Germany's sudden ignoring of the Treaty of Versailles and rebuilding their military machine also signaled Germany's change of direction.

If I sell my baseball bat to someone and he uses it to bash in his wife's skull with it, I will take zero guilt for whatever that nut did with the bat I sold him.

[–] AmeriGirl26 (15100) 10 months ago

The point was, Germany's behavior was already sending up red flags to those who were smart enough to notice it. They wouldn't have been as efficient in their rounding up Jews and people they didn't like without those computers. Surely someone in IBM found something was off, though I doubt the people in charge paid attention at all and just saw dollar signs.

[–] EleazarHisSon (769) 10 months ago

The US had a lot of help from German scientists such as Wernher von Braun to get to the moon.

Americans didn't seem to have been that unsympathetic to Germany at the time.

A 1943 poll found that "90 percent of the American people stated that they would rather loose [sic] the war than give full equality to the American Negroes". Source: https://books.google.com/books?id=zswoV_EHaxoC&lpg=PA81&dq=while%20a%201944%20poll%20suggested%20that%2012%20percent%20of%20non-jews%20appear%20to%20be%20anti-semitic&pg=PA81#v=onepage&q=%2290%20percent%20of%20the%20american%20people%22&f=false

Although I have focused on Germany in this chapter because it was in fact the German government and its people who planned and implemented the Holocaust, the habits of thought that I have been describing were, with local variants, widespread throughout Europe and the United States. When, for example, English publicists wanted to criticize financial markets and economic structures in the period between 1873 and 1939, they used a rhetoric of Judaism very similar to that of the German commentators we have touched on. An observer of western European politics around 1900, asked to predict where mass political violence against the Jews was most likely to erupt, might well have nominated France. And American citizens, asked to name the greatest threat to the United States in a series of polls taken by the Opinion Research Corporation between 1939 and 1946, consistently chose “the Jews” over the Japanese or the Germans, with fear peaking in June of 1944, just as the Jewish population of Europe was close to fully exterminated. 43

https://archive.is/U1NWV#selection-18643.748-18649.0