IBM and the Holocaust Read Online Free PDF Page B

we look back and examine technology's wake. Unless we understand how the Nazis acquired the names, more lists will be compiled against more people.
    The story of IBM and the Holocaust is just a beginning. I could have written twenty books with the documents I uncovered, one for every country in Europe. I estimate there are 100,000 more documents scattered in base-ments and corporate archives around the United States and Europe. Corporate archivists should take note: these documents are related to a crime and must not be moved, tampered with, or destroyed. They must be transferred to those appropriate archival institutions that can assure immediate and undelayed access to scholars and war crimes prosecutors so the accountability process can continue (see Major Sources).
    Only through exposing and examining what really occurred can the world of technology finally adopt the well-worn motto: Never Again.
    EDWIN BLACK
    Washington, D.C.



I NUMBERED PEOPLE
    VEILS OF SMOKE HUNG ABOVE. MANY OF THE EXHAUSTED prisoners, insensate from torture and starvation, slumped lifelessly, waiting to fade into death. But most of the 60,000 human beings squeezed into this unimaginable clearing amongst the ever-greens were still running from place to place, performing assigned chores quickly, proving their strength and viability for yet an other day of existence. Surviving the moment was their quest. 1 This night mare was Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, a special Hell on Earth created by Nazi Germany.
    At the rear of the camp, just meters from its back fence, stood a solitary guard tower. Its cross-barred wooden frame rose some 25 feet in the air. Looking down from this commanding perch, one saw three orderly rows of wooden barracks down to the right. Along the left lay kitchens, workshops, storage areas, and latrines hap hazardly arrayed between curved, muddy lanes. This length of incarceration all terminated several hundred meters away at the gate leading to the camp commandant's office and the SS encampment. A barbed-wire perimeter gave the camp definition even as a series of internal fences straddling patrol aisles segmented the cruel confines into six sub-camps. 2
    Just below the rear watchtower, a round-topped furnace squatted atop the mud. Black and elongated, the furnace resembled a locomotive engine, but with two weighty kiln doors at the front. Its single, tall, sooty smokestack rose several meters into the air. A hand-made metal stretcher of sorts, used to slide emaciated corpses into the flames, was always nearby. Here was the crematorium. Not hidden out of sight, nor obscured by structures or berms, the crematorium was close enough to burn the eyes of any SS guard stationed in the watchtower. The ominous structure and its message were visible to all as the final way station should fate falter— or deliver. 3
    Situated between two rivers and the towns Bergen and Belsen, the site was originally established in spring 1943 as a prisoner transit camp for 10,000 Jews who might be ransomed or traded. But in the last months of 1944 and early 1945, as Nazi death camps, including Auschwitz, were liberated by the Allies, Belsen became a nightmare of human consolidation, receiving transports from other sites. By spring 1945, more than 40,000 were imprisoned under indescribable conditions. Starved, worked to death, and randomly tortured, the death toll rose to nearly 20,000 just for the month of March 1945. After liberation, horrified British medical teams were unable to save some 14,000 dying souls. Eventually bulldozers were deployed to gruesomely shovel bodies into trenches of twisted rigor mortis. 4
    Just meters from the Belsen crematorium, off to the left, near the kitchens and the cisterns, down a muddy path, stood the block leader's house. Inmates sometimes called this place "the lion's den." Within "the lion's den" was a room for the Arbeitsdienstfuhrer, the Labor Service Leader. That is where the Hollerith punch cards were processed. At