Reply to post: Re: Not really someone to hire

Re: Not really someone to hire

Hypothetically, I wonder if the sales pitch went like this:

German bureaucrat: We'd like to by some tabulating and sorting systems.

IBM sales person: Great! We sell those. What will you be using them for?

German bureaucrat: Well. we want to start sorting out which of our people might be Jews.

IBM sales person: Oh. Why's that?

German bureaucrat: We were thinking about exterminating them.....

I don't think that it would have gone anything like this.

All the Germans has to do was say that they were carrying out a census, without expanding on the reason for doing it, and IBM would have been none the wiser. It's only after the fact that we can see that the IBM systems that were used to single out the Jews and other racial types.

And if you are flinging mud, maybe you ought to look at who financed Germany, a nearly bankrupt company in the early 1930's. Significant names such as Rockefeller, Morgan, DuPont, General Motors, and Ford were all involved through financing deals and share ownership of German companies such as Interessen-Gemeinschaft Farbenindustrie - the group that gave significant backing to Hitlers election campaign, Focke-Wulf, AEG, Siemens, ITT and Volkswagen.

So is IBM any worse than the rest of the American corporate system, merely because they supplied sorters that had multiple uses, but just happened to be used for a war crime after the machines were sold?