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The Dark Side of Great Historic Figures

Khalid Elhassan December 11, 2020 33 min

Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton & Susan B. Anthony - Elizabeth Cady Stanton — Susan B. Anthony, left, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. NJTV

29. This Great American Businessman Built a German IBM Subsidiary That Played a Key Role in Managing the Holocaust

Hitler and Thomas J. Watson. Elias Washington Report

The Final Solution – exterminating Europe’s Jews – was not only monstrously horrific but also monstrously complex from an administrative perspective. It required managing and cross-referencing huge databases of financial records, criminal files, and racial and religious backgrounds. Back then, that could only be done with a complicated punch card system, similar to that used in libraries until relatively recently.

IBM was the great leader in punch card and data management technology. Soon after the Nazis took power in 1933, Thomas J. Watson traveled to Germany. He built an IBM factory, and established a local subsidiary that was hired by the Nazis to conduct a detailed census. That census focused on identifying Jews, Gypsies, and other undesirables marked for future extermination. IBM supplied a punch card system that allowed the Nazis to easily sort through the gathered data.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.