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The mass movement of Jews out of their homes and into ghettos was also a prodigious challenge. Transporting them out of the ghettos along railway lines and into death camps--with timing so precise that the victims were able to walk right out of the cattle truck and into a waiting gas chamber -- demanded complex co-ordination. All these tasks called for a computer. No computer existed, but IBM had its Hollerith punch card and card-sorting system. For the first time in history, an anti-Semite had automation on his side.

Sunday Times, Great Britain
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IBM and the Holocaust is very much worth reading. It reminds us that, where money is involved, pillars of the community may turn a blind eye, or worse. Business is business. It's government's job, not ours, some business folk feel, to set limits, draw boundaries, close loopholes. Our job is to make money, whoever the customer may be and whatever the consequences. Indeed, if we can keep government from setting those limits or closing those loopholes - or if we can find new loopholes - that's just smart business. Those who believe government regulation is all bad, government bureaucrats all dead weight, and an unfettered market the solution to all the world's problems, might read IBM and the Holocaust with this in mind.
Andrew Tobias
London Observer
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IBM and the Holocaust is a disturbing book and, if its allegations are true, then the company's complicit involvement in the extermination of millions of innocent people is clearly beyond doubt. … its overall assertion looks unlikely to be demolished whatever the final analysis: IBM's punch card machines were supplied to the Nazis who used them to help organize the extermination of Jews, socialists and homosexuals, among others. … Unfortunately, history cannot be rewritten; the best we can hope for is that we learn from our mistakes, although people have a collective capacity to forget, especially anything unpleasant. So if IBM and the Holocaust does nothing more than refresh our collective memory, then the book will have justified its writing.
Anthony Clark
Electronics Times,Great Britain
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Explosive. ...the alliance of two symbols of the magical and terrible twentieth century, of two worlds, one of light and progress, the other of darkness and abomination: IBM and the Shoah. These small machines, fruit of genius, symbols of modern technology, were knowingly placed at the service of the worst barbaric regression, of the greatest extermination process ... ever to be invented by the human mind. Ironically, Hitler's Third Reich ... did not survive the suicidal agony of its Führer. But the multinational company IBM, at the beginning of this Third Millennium, seems healthy as ever.
La Montagne, France


[Examine the "tea-time' photo showing Hitler and Watson face-to-face] ... June 1937 ... Dachau active for four years now ... this image triggers a tempest of alarming signals. The look of an old Watson, between fascination and pride. His neck bent, a dressed-up millionaire. The bourgeois comfort of the furniture, the atrocious peacefulness of the meal. Tea-time with Hitler. We know that Hitler couldn't speak English. We can suppose that Watson couldn't understand German. All the same, they got on well together. It was capitalism trafficking with the foul beast for some more profits. In that day of 1937, the expression 'economic horror' didn't exist yet. It could have been useful.
Gérard Lefort
Libération, France

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