IBM
IBM had a global mindset since the company changed its name in 1924 from the Computing – Tabulating – Recording Company to International Business Machines Corporation. The purpose of the company is to invent and sell computer products, everything from hardware to software to research. IBM holds the record for holding more patents than any other business in the world. It is true this year and has been true for the past 24 years in a row.
During the 1930s when the company’s focus was creating tabulating equipment that enabled massive amounts of data to be processed, the U.S. Government was eager to absorb the company’s inventions into it sphere. The tabulating devices made organizing names, birth dates, and other data manageable at a time when the Social Security Act required storing information on 26 million citizens.
It is widely known that the Nazis had a propensity for methodically recording and storing vast amounts of information. Naturally, the Nazis discovered that IBM’s tabulating devices made their work easier. IBM’s German subsidiary, Dehomag, functioned as a mass producer of punch card devices that were very useful during the Industrial Revolution. Factory workers arriving in large groups to start and end work only had to punch a sheet of paper to account for their shifts and hours worked.
Dehomag’s later inventions enabled the Third Reich to conduct two official population censuses.
This and other Dehomag inventions gave the Nazis an ability to organize the movement of prisoners from war camps to trains. Like GM, IBM says the Dehomag branch came under Nazi control, in this case before the onset of World War II. It has been argued that because IBM acted in the same way other American companies did during the 1930s and 1940s, they cannot be uniquely culpable of anything immoral or criminal. IBM has been painted at times as more complicit in the Holocaust because their devices were used specifically in concentration camps.