Let’s give the Progressives a rest today. Judging by the 700+ comments on yesterday’s Big Government thread: Media Matters Attacks Beck – Ignores Progressive Roots Of The Klan And Holocaust, it looks like they could use a breather.
Today, we would like to focus on Hitler’s other little helpers: IBM and GM/Opel.
Edwin Black, who authored War Against The Weak, a forensic examination of the Progressive-Eugenic movement, also has written extensively on the role IBM played prior to and during the Nazi Holocaust. From the introduction of War Against The Weak.
From the IBM and the Holocaust website:
IBM and the Holocaust is the stunning story of IBM’s strategic alliance with Nazi Germany — beginning in 1933 in the first weeks that Hitler came to power and continuing well into World War II. As the Third Reich embarked upon its plan of conquest and genocide, IBM and its subsidiaries helped create enabling technologies, step-by-step, from the identification and cataloging programs of the 1930s to the selections of the 1940s.Only after Jews were identified — a massive and complex task that Hitler wanted done immediately — could they be targeted for efficient asset confiscation, ghettoization, deportation, enslaved labor, and, ultimately, annihilation. It was a cross-tabulation and organizational challenge so monumental, it called for a computer. Of course, in the 1930s no computer existed.
But IBM’s Hollerith punch card technology did exist. Aided by the company’s custom-designed and constantly updated Hollerith systems, Hitler was able to automate his persecution of the Jews. Historians have always been amazed at the speed and accuracy with which the Nazis were able to identify and locate European Jewry. Until now, the pieces of this puzzle have never been fully assembled. The fact is, IBM technology was used to organize nearly everything in Germany and then Nazi Europe, from the identification of the Jews in censuses, registrations, and ancestral tracing programs to the running of railroads and organizing of concentration camp slave labor.
IBM and its German subsidiary custom-designed complex solutions, one by one, anticipating the Reich’s needs. They did not merely sell the machines and walk away. Instead, IBM leased these machines for high fees and became the sole source of the billions of punch cards Hitler needed.
Mr. Black has also documented the role GM/Opel played in arming Hitler’s military. Below is a description of a series of articles he authored on the subject entitled GM and the Nazis:
In a four-part, 10,000 word, special investigative series, Edwin Black chronicles General Motors extensive relationship with Nazi Germany. GM’s Opel was the largest car and truck maker in the Third Reich. When Hitler came to power, his nation was still primarily a horse-drawn country. From the outset, GM consciously mass produced cars and truck for the German military, becoming a major and indispensable spear of Nazi rearmament. This included the Blitz truck which became the mainstay of the Blitzkrieg that conquered Europe. GM concealed its American control of Opel through special executives committees and board directorates. After the War, GM took all the profit, including that gained from slave labor. After a Congressional investigation, GM tried to obscure the facts and pressured Washington about a special report on the company’s activities. To this day, the company frustrates research efforts into its protracted and profitable involvement in Nazi genocide. The series, published in various sizes and edited formats, was based on Chapter 10 of Internal Combustion and additional new research.
In many ways, Hitler and his Reich reflected the very worst traits of humanity from across the spectrum of society.
For those of us that support free markets and capitalism, these cases of American corporate partnership with the Nazi regime represent the very worst of unchecked corporatism, interested only in profit, void of any moral boundary. It’s a disgrace.
These crimes should be acknowledged, and studied as examples of the worst case scenarios possible under Corporate Statism.
They should also stand as a testament to the horrors that can be inflicted when corporations are in bed with fascist-socialist states, void of any free market to speak of.
Every human enterprise is corruptible. Free market capitalism is obviously no exception. If, moving forward, we wish to avoid sacrificing our humanity again at the altar of profit, we would do well to learn from our past failures. It is not possible to learn without an honest examination of the facts.
Can we count on the Progressive movement to acknowledged their skeletons in this horrifying chapter of history? Perhaps they, too, could learn from their mistakes, no?
At the risk of sounding redundant…Every human enterprise is corruptible. Progressive-Socialism is obviously no exception. If, moving forward, we wish to avoid sacrificing our humanity again at the altar of Progressive-Socialism, we would do well to learn from our past failures. It is not possible to learn without an honest examination of the facts.
Given that all human enterprise is corruptible, just ask yourself with which system you would prefer to take your chances: Free Market Capitalism, or Progressive-Socialism?