In his book IBM and the Holocaust, Edwin Black writes of the strategic alliance between Nazi Germany and the American computer company IBM at a time of economic and social collapse in Germany.
Beginning in 1933 in the first weeks after Hitler came to power, and continuing well into World War II, IBM and its subsidiaries helped create enabling technologies from the identification and cataloguing programmes of the 1930s to the selection programmes of the 1940s, using the punch card technology developed by Herman Hollerith, the son of middle class German parents who had settled in Buffalo, New York.
Germany was most willing to accept the punch card systems. Of some 70 subsidiaries and foreign branches worldwide, more than half of IBM’s technology was used to organise almost everything in Germany on the industrial and construction front, including the building of the infamous Dachau concentration camp.
Many of the victims of genocide, as listed in records provided by IBM punch cards, would end their days in this infamous centre. These would be Jews primarily, but also communists, gypsies, members of trade unions, alcoholics, drug addicts, homosexuals, those who were seriously disabled physically or mentally, and also many artists and intellectuals who had opposed the Nazi policies.
Solely through the deployment of IBM technology was Hitler enabled to compile records of a staggering number of men, women, and children who were to be murdered by his heartless regime.
Edwin Black’s book also reveals how the Nazis obtained the names and details of the lives of those he would target for extermination – through census records.
In a letter to The Irish Times (26 March 2011), Bernard Byrne discusses the Irish Census, describing how the Central Statistics office is assisted with its data “capturing” by a UK subsidiary of CACI International, which supplied “interrogators” for the US in Abu Ghraib.
Byrne also notes that “the Statistics Act makes no mention of morals or ethics, nor indeed does the tendering process”.
The link between the current census being undertaken by Irish authorities to the notorious torture and abuse of inmates in an Iraqi prison by way the lack of any legal requirement to uphold the most basic ethical and moral considerations reminds me of the brutal and authoritarian society depicted in George Orwell’s 1984.
Privacy in this voyeuristic society no longer exists when individuals are subject to surveillance and intrusion at every level, and where it is decreed – by Big Brother or whoever is in charge – to be illegal to keep to yourself the details of your life, which must be provided for and recorded into the Government’s data banks. For what use?
This is, at least, one of the preeminent questions of our troubled times.
John Kelly
Mullingar, Co Westmeath
