Think Black

by Clyde W. Ford

  Divorce, remarriage, adoption, and children born out of wedlock were just a few of the messy human truths that render such racial classifications null and void. But these annoying facts did not dampen the Third Reich’s enthusiasm. Determining Aryan purity became something of a national German pastime, with companies, schools, associations, local police departments, and even churches compiling data and creating lists. As this data worked its way up through a proliferation of Nazi race agencies, it ultimately landed in bureaus like the Reich Statistical Office. There, German clerks entered population data onto IBM punch cards, which were later read, sorted, and tabulated by the office’s vast array of IBM Hollerith machines. And these machines were, of course, configured, leased, upgraded, and maintained by IBM’s German subsidiary, Dehomag.

  Hitler rebooted eugenics. Armed with statistical data courtesy of IBM equipment and engineers, Nazis went in pursuit of a master Aryan race: tall, strong, blond-haired, blue-eyed, intellectually and physically superior. Sterilization came first, to weed out Jews, the physically undesirable (those with mental or physical illnesses and infirmities deemed unacceptable), and the socially undesirable (homosexuals, pedophiles, Romanies, those who came into repeated conflict with the government). With data collected from medical offices, insurance companies, and employers, Dehomag created a punch card schema to record information about physical, mental, and social traits of German citizens in addition to the information already on file about who was, and who was not, a Jew. If an agency did not have access to punch card machines, Dehomag took their raw data and created punch cards for them. In 1934, Germany performed 62,400 forced sterilizations based on this punch card data. By 1935 that number rose to 71,700.

  Ultimately, Nazi race scientists decided that the information available from IBM punch cards should be the basis of a more permanent solution—not merely determining who should undergo sterilization, but who should live.25

  In one particularly gruesome method of achieving the endziel (final goal), Nazis organized Jews in occupied territories into councils responsible for their own extermination. Threatening summary execution, Nazis demanded these councils create census counts and punch card records of their own members, and these were used to identify which Jews would be sent to the gas chambers and ovens and which would be sent to labor camps and worked to death. In Poland, the councils were called jüdenrate (Jewish council); in Vichy France, the Union Generale des Israelites de France (the Union of French Jews, or UGIF). Through refusal to cooperate, hangings, and even mass poisonings, members of some jüdenraten willingly committed suicide instead of collaborating to ship others off to certain death.

  In Vichy France, the Nazis tasked IBM Hollerith expert René Carmille with the collection and punching of census data on French Jews. But Carmille, a dashing figure sporting horn-rimmed glasses and a bow tie, hacked his own punch card equipment so it would not punch anything in column 11, which captured religion. Then he turned his punch cards and Hollerith machines to the task of swiftly organizing French elements in Algeria into a fighting force under the command of Charles de Gaulle, surprising the Nazis and driving them from North Africa. Ultimately, German intelligence discovered that Carmille belonged not to Vichy France but to the Marco Polo Network, a famed French resistance group. Klaus Barbie, the infamous “Butcher of Lyon,” tried but failed to break Carmille in interrogation. Shortly after, René Carmille, the Hollerith hero, died upon being shipped to Dachau.26 Carmille may have been one of the first computer “white hat hackers,” an ethical hacker operating for the common good.

  For Watson, the ultimate capitalist, Nazi Germany posed no ethical or moral dilemma. Black writes:

  In 1935, while the world shook at a rearmed Germany speeding toward a war of European conquest and total Jewish destruction, one man saw not revulsion, but opportunity—not horror and devastation, but profit and dividends. Thomas Watson and IBM indeed accelerated their breakneck alliance with Nazism. Now Thomas Watson, through and because of IBM, would become the commercial syndic of Germany, committed as never before to global advocacy for the Third Reich, helping his utmost to counteract Hitler’s enemies and further der Fuhrer’s military, political, economic, and anti-Semitic goals. Even as he continued as a statesman of American capitalism and a bulwark of international commerce, Watson would become a hero in Nazi Germany—both to the common man and to Adolf Hitler himself.27

  Watson lavished praise on Nazi Germany. As president of the International Chamber of Commerce, Watson regularly voiced his support for an equitable redistribution of natural resources in Europe at a time when Germany threatened to invade neighboring countries to acquire the natural resources they possessed. Watson also spoke often in support of removing the crippling economic boycott against the Third Reich. “I have felt a deep personal concern over Germany’s fate,” Watson wrote to the Nazi economics minister Hjalmar Schacht in 1937, “and a growing attachment to the many Germans with whom I gained contact at home and abroad. This attitude has caused me to give public utterance to my impressions and convictions in favor of Germany at a time when public opinion in my country and elsewhere was predominantly unfavorable.”28

  Would the Holocaust have occurred without the punch cards and digital technology provided by IBM? Most likely. Would it have been as massive, as brutal, as deadly, and as efficient? Most likely not. IBM assisted Hitler and Nazi Germany in bringing genocide into the Information Age—collecting, storing, and processing massive amounts of data used to exterminate Jews and others deemed racially impure and not Aryan. It did not matter that an “Aryan race” never existed. Hitler believed one did; he believed he could identify non-Aryans like Jews; and he believed he could exterminate them. With assistance from IBM, Hitler acted on these beliefs.

  Looking back to that conversation with my father on a bench along the Hudson, I do not believe any knowledge of IBM’s sinister history with the Nazis lurked behind his sly smile. But I do believe he hid a pervasive sense that something was not right about the corporation to which he’d devoted the better part of his life. Looking even further back, I recall the surprising infusion of Jewish traditions in our household. We celebrated Passover. I attended my share of bar mitzvahs and bas mitzvahs. I looked forward to Fridays, when we had only challah bread with our dinner. Partially, this is explained by PS 102, the elementary school I attended, which was located in the heavily Jewish enclave of Parkchester in the Bronx. It is further explained by Community Church of New York, which celebrated the essential truths and holy days of many different faiths. But it is also explained, in part, by the IBM friends, mostly men and mostly Jewish, whom my father invited into our home.

  When my father joined the company, IBM was not much different from the company that had bolstered the Nazis. But in the years before and after my father’s hiring, more Jews also came to work for the firm—men and women hired into a company that had just spent years in support of Hitler’s Germany, which sought their extermination.

  Still, the company’s business was never really about Nazism or eugenics. It was never really about anti-Semitism or racism. It was always about money, as Edwin Black notes: “Before even one Jew was encased in a hard-coded Hollerith identity, it was only the money that mattered.”29

  Certainly, Thomas J. Watson did not hire my father out of the goodness of his heart. The Nazi project to exterminate Jews ended with the Allied conquest of Germany. Trials began at Nuremberg, and with them came a worldwide hunt for those culpable for the Holocaust. But many Nazis on trial could not understand why the United States considered their actions to be punishable offenses. After all, Hitler had seen America as a leader in promoting Nordic purity and cleansing its citizenry of undesirables.

  Otto Hofmann, head of the SS Race and Settlement Office, registered as evidence in his defense at Nuremberg a 1937 special report by the Nazi Party’s Race-Political Office, on America, which noted,

  Impassable lines are drawn between the individual races, especially in the Southern States. Thus
in certain States Japanese are excluded from the ownership of land or real estate and they are prevented from cultivating arable land. Marriages between colored persons and whites are forbidden in no less than thirty of the Federal States. Marriages contracted in spite of this ban are declared invalid. . . . Since 1907, sterilization laws have been passed in twenty-nine States of the United States of America.30

  While the Nuremberg trials made for front-page news, Watson could breathe a sigh of relief. Digital technology, still in its infancy, flew under the radar of prosecutors and the general public. Watson’s actions, and those of IBM, though they supported eugenics and Jewish extermination, remained largely unknown and unnoticed. Watson’s history suggests he would work hard to keep it that way.

  Watson handled IBM’s pre- and postwar business with the tactical skill of a chess grand master. He understood how to manipulate the press and public sentiment, as he had done so effectively during the Ohio floods of 1913. Why not hire Blacks at IBM, to misdirect the Justice Department’s investigation of IBM’s war profiteering and to deflect attention away from IBM’s more egregious past? And if he received kudos as a leader for integrating his workforce—much as the US Army had received for integrating the military or Branch Rickey had received for signing Jackie Robinson—so much the better for IBM’s public image. IBM thrived because of Watson’s cunning, shrewdness, and ruthlessness. There’s no reason to believe that his decision to hire my father stemmed from anything less.

  * * *

  My father was excited that evening.

  “Okay,” he said. “There’s hardware, and there’s . . . ?”

  “Software,” I said.

  He smiled. “So, there’s hardware, and software, and . . . ?”

  He paused. I didn’t know what to say. Eventually, I threw up my hands.

  “Peopleware,” he exclaimed. “Hardware, software, and peopleware. I came up with the term while sitting in class today. It covers all the ways that people interact with programs and machines.”

  While the term is generally attributed to Peter G. Neumann in 197731 and Meilir Page-Jones in 1980,32 I first heard of peopleware that evening in the late 1960s. One aspect of peopleware concerns how humans develop computer software. And one aspect of that development is called polymorphism, the use of similar segments of software to achieve different, but related, purposes. Polymorphism, it turns out, can be traced to the earliest days of computing, such as IBM’s use of a similar technology to achieve different but related purposes in eugenics, in Nazi Germany, and then in South Africa.

  * * *

  His mellifluous voice was unfettered by his twenty-seven years in prison.

  I stand here before you not as a prophet but as a humble servant of you, the people. Your tireless and heroic sacrifices have made it possible for me to be here today. I therefore place the remaining years of my life in your hands. On this day of my release, I extend my sincere and warmest gratitude to the millions of my compatriots and those in every corner of the globe who have campaigned tirelessly for my release.33

  Occasionally, it seems, humanity is gifted the presence of a real-life hero. I cried in a friend’s living room as I watched Nelson Mandela speak on February 11, 1990, immediately after his release from twenty-seven years in the notorious Victor Verster Prison on Robben Island. It brought back eerie memories of sitting in my grandparents’ living room twenty-seven years earlier, listening to Martin Luther King speak from high atop the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. I had long since left IBM, and my father had since retired.

  Yet even this exalted moment in South African history must be balanced against IBM’s nefarious business practices during the years of Mandela’s imprisonment. IBM’s insidious pursuit of profits before principles and people did not end with Nazi Germany. Why should it, when a regime arose in South Africa that also required digital technology’s dark arts? Besides, the needs of the apartheid regime were thoroughly known to IBM: use digital technology to racially categorize and identify the population in pursuit of the brutal oppression of some in favor of the advancement of others.

  Using Hollerith machines, IBM—under the leadership of Thomas J. Watson Sr.—had pursued such a strategy with punch cards, first in Jamaica in 1928 and then in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. Now, under a new Thomas J. Watson, the founder’s son, IBM pursued a remarkably similar strategy in support of apartheid, with an even more powerful arsenal of digital computers at the company’s disposal.

  Whether in Jamaica, Nazi Germany, South Africa, or even the American South, the problem became this: How does a government or agency identify those deemed undesirable, making it easier to single out these undesirables for special, often brutal if not genocidal, treatment? With a studied determination, the government of South Africa sought to answer this question by avoiding some of the pitfalls that Nazis encountered in handling their “Jewish problem” and that America encountered in developing and implementing its system of racial segregation.

  Apartheid literally means “apartness” or “separateness,” and the system relied on the government’s ability to separate the population into four distinct, supposedly racial, groups: Whites, Indians/Asians, Coloreds, and Blacks. Apartheid then combined those four groups into two: on one hand, Whites, Indians, and Coloreds, all considered citizens though with varying degrees of rights (Whites had more rights and privileges than Indians or Coloreds), and on the other hand, Blacks (sometimes referred to as Natives).

  Apartheid forcibly removed Blacks from White areas and herded them into independent Bantustans—landlocked areas carved out of South Africa. Black residents were stripped of their South African citizenship, and their lives were tightly controlled. The government restricted their movements into and out of these enclaves and within the country. South Africa also limited their education, their employment, and their political activity. Bantustans were independent in name only. The South African police and military forcibly patrolled the borders between Bantustans and the rest of the country, brutalizing Blacks who violated any of the terms South Africa unilaterally imposed on Blacks living within these areas.

  A system of passbooks governed apartheid. Outside of the Bantustans, White, Indian, and Colored South Africans required a passbook known as the “book of life.” Inside Black areas, residents required a national identification pass, known colloquially as the “dompas” or “dumb pass,” to comply with government laws. In South Africa, with a majority of 10 million Black Africans and a minority of 6 million Whites, Indians, and Coloreds combined, this two-tiered system of passes and racial identification presented a complex administrative and bureaucratic nightmare for the government.

  Enter IBM, once again, with digital technology in the service of racial classification and racial domination.

  Beginning in 1952, IBM leased Hollerith machines to the South African government through its South African subsidiary, much as it had with the Third Reich, to tabulate results of the 1951 census.34 That census became the basis for determining the racial category to which a person belonged. In 1965, IBM bid unsuccessfully for the contract to create national identification passbooks for Blacks, but the company won the bid to produce the “book of life,” required of the non-Black population.35 However, by 1978, IBM had seized control of the business of creating and maintaining passbooks both inside and outside of the Bantustans.

  With no research or manufacturing facilities in South Africa, IBM, from its New York headquarters, designed the hardware and software that automated South Africa’s complex system of apartheid—writing the racial classification software, designing the database storage for racial classification, and constructing the equipment, such as printers, used to create the required passbooks. Through its South African subsidiary, IBM transferred this hardware and software to relevant South African governmental agencies, trained those agencies in the use of IBM equipment, consulted on and made fixes to apartheid software, and kept IBM equipment in good repair.36

  Separation of a country�
�s population by race is illegal under international law. In knowingly supporting South Africa’s system of apartheid, IBM directly contravened this and other international laws, many enacted after the Nuremberg trials and the defeat of Nazi Germany specifically for the protection of individual human rights.37

  IBM also apparently deceived its stockholders. At the company’s annual shareholder meeting in 1977, then president Frank Cary stated, “I have said time and again that we have investigated each instance brought to our attention where there was any reason to believe IBM computers might be used for repressive purposes, and we have found no such use.”38 Yet, bizarrely, at that very same meeting, IBM admitted that its machines stored the data of Colored, Asian, and White South Africans, which enabled South Africa’s system of apartheid through the unlawful separation of the races.39

  IBM worked assiduously around the sanctions that the United States imposed on South Africa. In fact, the company lobbied hard for a reduction of sanctions. IBM told the South African regime that it would work with it to “adjust to the threat posed by trade sanctions.”40 Much as it had with Nazi Germany, IBM switched to a non-US supply chain, thereby providing South Africa with continued access to IBM computers, communications, surveillance, and other electronic equipment, even in the face of sanctions. These activities certainly violated the spirit of the sanctions imposed on South Africa aimed at dismantling apartheid. In some instances, they may have also violated the law. Yet unlike their efforts to support Nazi Germany, IBM was at times remarkably forthcoming, if not brazen, about the extent to which they knew exactly how and why their technology was being used in South Africa. In a letter of February 18, 1982, to the State Department, IBM admitted that the South African Interior Department used IBM machines and technology for its national identity system, the basis of the infamous “book of life” and a key pillar of racial identification, separation, and apartheid.41