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."
more.......
http://gizmodo.com/5812025/how-ibm-technology-jump-started-the-holocaust
I am not calling POTUS Obama evil nor claiming we are committing genocide. One questionable justification in fact is to reduce deaths by targeting individuals.
Together with the NSA and other data gathering, we have built technology and institutions that would have been a WWII wet dream and that could create a 21st Century nightmare, if taken to an extreme for terror, war, or any sort of "social engineering".
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