The Nazis' persecution of Jews was brutal, methodical, and horrifyingly efficient. However, their perverse efforts were only realized with the assistance of a Hollerith Machine - IBM's custom-built tabulation system. IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black explains.
When Hitler rose to power, German intellect descended into madness. The Nazi movement was not merely a throng of hooligans pelting windows and screaming slogans. Guiding the Brown Shirts and exhorting the masses was an elite coterie of pseudo-scientists, corrupted professionals, and profit-blinded industrialists. Nazi jurists, medical doctors, and a clique of scientists — each with their prestigious academic credentials — found ways to pervert their science and higher calling to advance the cause of Aryan domination and racial persecution.
At the vanguard of Hitler's intellectual shock troops were the statisticians. Naturally, statistical offices and census departments were Dehomag's [IBM's German subsidiary] number one clients. In their journals, Nazi statistical experts boasted of what they expected their evolving science to deliver. All of their high expectations depended on the continuing innovation of IBM punch cards and tabulator technology. Only Dehomag could design and execute systems to identify, sort, and quantify the population to separate Jews from Aryans.
Friedrich Zahn, president of the Bavarian Statistical Office, phrased it best in recalling the role of Nazi statisticians. "The government of our Führer and Reichschancellor Adolf Hitler is statistics-friendly," wrote Zahn in Allgemeines Statistisches Archiv (ASA), the official journal of the German Statistical Society. Zahn emphasized that Hitler's "government not only demands physical fitness and people strong in character and discipline, but useful knowledge as well. It demands not only political and economic soldiers, but also scientific soldiers."
Zahn was a giant of statistics. Chairman of the German Statistical Society and president from 1931 to 1936 of the International Statistical Institute, Zahn was by virtue of his prestigious international standing also an honorary member of the American Statistical Association. He was also a contributing member to the SS since the first days of the Hitler regime. Zahn was among those chiefly responsible for the immediate ouster of Jews from the German Statistical Society.
The ASA, and technical journals like it, were closely followed at Dehomag since the publication was a virtual roadmap to the desires of Nazi statistical hierarchy. Anyone active in the statistics world read it. No IBM office, even in the United States, could afford to overlook a subscription. Within the pages of the ASA and similar statistical technical journals, Dehomag management and engineers could review proven statistical meth odology that sought to step-by-step identify the Jews as undesirables. In many cases, ASA articles were written in conjunction with Dehomag experts, describing the tedious technical workings of specific IBM equipment, but more importantly how they were applied or could be applied to Reich policy and programs.
From the very onset, the scientific soldiers of Hitler's statistical shock troops openly published their mission statement. "Above all," wrote Prof. Dr. Johannes Müller, in a 1934 edition ofASA, "remember that several very important problems are being tackled currently, problems of an ideological nature. One of those problems is race politics, and this problem must be viewed in a statistical light." Müller, president of the Thuringen Statistical Office, made his comments in a revealing 1934 ASA article entitled "The Position of Statistics in the New Reich."
CloudTags: IBM Technology, Jump, Started, Holocaust, Wholesale Electronics News, Touch Screen LCD Monitors, laptop battery
Other Business News:
没有评论:
发表评论