29. This Great American Businessman Built a German IBM Subsidiary That Played a Key Role in Managing the Holocaust
The Final Solution – exterminating Europe’s Jews – was not only monstrously horrific but also monstrously complex from an administrative perspective. It required managing and cross-referencing huge databases of financial records, criminal files, and racial and religious backgrounds. Back then, that could only be done with a complicated punch card system, similar to that used in libraries until relatively recently.
IBM was the great leader in punch card and data management technology. Soon after the Nazis took power in 1933, Thomas J. Watson traveled to Germany. He built an IBM factory, and established a local subsidiary that was hired by the Nazis to conduct a detailed census. That census focused on identifying Jews, Gypsies, and other undesirables marked for future extermination. IBM supplied a punch card system that allowed the Nazis to easily sort through the gathered data.