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[photo] Rick's bar in the 1942 movie Casablanca directed by Michael Curtiz, starring Humphrey Bogart as Rick, Ingrid Bergman as Ilsa and Arthur 'Dooley' Wilson as Sam
Play it again Sam?
American companies routinely stayed in contact with their German subsidiaries throughout the war. They deny it, of course, and many of the documents are … er … now missing. But the truth is that we know that it was not at all difficult to meet your German managers or their representatives.
Just think of Rick’s bar in the film Casablanca – set in the north African town, nominally under Vichy France rule, where Americans, Germans and French mixed while Sam played it again.
There were plenty of neutral places where meetings could be held. Portugal remained neutral, and smart Estoril, a short train ride from Lisbon, had for decades been a playground for the international rich and well-connected.
The Duke of Windsor – the abdicated Edward VIII - stayed at Cascais just next door, after quitting Paris when the Germans arrived (but staying very much in touch with them.)
[photo] Duke and Duchess of Windsor at Cascais, Portugal, 1940
If you wanted to keep tabs on your factory in Cologne or Russelheim, all you had to do was to stroll on the beach at Estoril or visit its casino, and there you could chat to managers from your German factory with complete impunity.
And there were plenty of other places, for example in neutral Switzerland or Sweden. Not to mention South America.
[photo] Les Trois Rois hotel, Basel, Switzerland where, in July 1941, the governor of the Bank of Sweden lunched with American and German members of the Bank of International Settlements
#91 Death Camp tattoos were IBM numbers - Ep 10 Trading with the Nazis
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[photo] More than 400,000 prisoners were forcibly tattooed at Auschwitz. The Hoberman Collection
Death Camp tattoos began as IBM-Dehomag punch card numbers
Author Edwin Black tells the story of Ethel "Edjya" Katz, a 12-year old Jewish girl, who was among the people locked in a freight truck on a train bound for the extermination camp at Treblinka. The men in the truck managed to force open the ceiling ventilator and pushed Edjya, the only one small enough, out and onto the roof.
[photo] The map shows the borders of the Second Polish Republic at the time of the Nazi-German-and-Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939 with demarcation line between the two invading armies marked in red. Internal boundaries show the administrative divisions of occupied territories imposed by Nazi Germany when the Final Solution was set in motion in 1941
Edjya survived, hid in a forest, met a German boy Herschel, and spent the rest of the war with him, fighting with the resistance. The rest of Edjya’s family were killed. Edjya and Herschel later married and emigrated to the States. They were Edwin Black’s parents.
Black has written a number of understandably angry, popular books and articles detailing IBM’s role during the war in Germany and its occupied territories. What is beyond doubt is that IBM business machines – punch card statistical tabulators originally developed for crunching American census data – were absolutely essential, not only for the German rearmament programme and wartime procurement, but also for organising the Holocaust.
It was an enormous statistical challenge. Notoriously each inmate of the concentration and death camps was identified by a five-figure number, tattooed on their arm. Those numbers began as IBM numbers.
[photo] Dehomag DII tabulator
An American legal case in 2001 argued that IBM in America stayed very much in touch with its German subsidiary Dehomag throughout the war. The case was discontinued when IBM agreed to pay into a compensation scheme on condition that all cases were dropped.
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What Ford and General Motors did, they did through choice
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